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Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises

 

            The novel opens with an epigraph by Gertrude Stein: "You are all a lost generation." This refers both to those who lost their lives in the First World War, and also to those who lost their moral and spiritual compass. However, one hundred years ago, the First World War brought the people not just grief, death and suffering, but, as paradoxical it may sound, gifted to civilization such phenomenon in literature as "Lost Generation".
             "Lost Generation" - the term that emerged in the period between the two Wars (the First and the Second World Wars) and referring/ed to young soldiers who fought between 1914 and 1918 , and who returned home mentally or physically disabled" (Sarason, 1972: 3).
             The brightest representative of the "Lost Generation" the great Ernest Hemingway popularized this term in his autobiographical novel "The Sun also Rises". According to this novel, I'm/we going to analyze the main issues of this phenomenon; relying on the characters of the novel, I will describe the problems, the motives, the moral, the psychological and the social aspects of the fate of the "Lost Generation". .
             The theme of the World War and its reflection on consciousness and perception of the world in human's life, on its relations with the world, is found in the image of the tragedy featured Hemingway's protagonists – representatives of the postwar years, people seeing no hope, no clear purpose, who are bearing the experience of the front until the end of the days. The characters of the novel alienated themselves from their family and home, where they can not return to a stereotypical former life. The War damaged their health, deprived from their mental balance, instead of the previous ideals it gave them spiritual and moral injuries, disturbed by economical inflation and post-war crisis life, excruciating painful emptiness and brokenness.
             The main obstacle which the representatives of the "Lost Generation" faces that in fact they are constantly in a state of a warfare against a hostile and indifferent world where the main issues and attributes are the politics and the bureaucracy.


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