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Lost In Paris Analysis

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Andres Sackmann Ms. Katherine Muniz World Literature 5/14/2015 Lost in Paris Non-comprehended, lost young men and women thrown into a world that is no longer relevant to them; a generation of disappointed expatriates that were trying to live a normal life (according to social standards), when all their values had been clouded and their certainties were gone. “You are all a lost generation,” Hemingway quotes Gertrude Stein in the epigraph of one of his most famous novels The Sun Also Rises. When you hear his name, and those of other authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and John Dos Passos, lost wouldn’t be the first term you’d use to describe him, (considering his huge success) but he certainly was; they all were. After World War I, this group of young American authors disillusioned with society, horrified with what they’d seen and experienced, rose. Living in Paris, rejecting all sorts of American materialism, and creating some of the most significant …show more content…

The need to find some sort of significance to life, to regain their values, earn hope, was what drove them, resulting in some of the most admired and influential pieces of writing. “Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog,” wrote Hemingway for one of his characters, again in The Sun Also Rises, purposely giving the word values a double meaning (78). Values, morals, those were just words to these people; empty ones. Ineffective matters that meant nothing. But how could they mean something to them? Coming from a war, is it possible to observe things in the same way? After experiencing death, destruction, pain, will your moral compass remain untouched and equal to how it was before? Hard to judge if you haven’t lived through such a situation on your

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