Tuesday, July 4, 2017

In Hemingway's short story "In Another Country," does the narrator seem to belong to the lost generation?

The term "lost generation" comes from an epigraph at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway lived in Paris at the time he was writing Sunand was close friends with Gertrude Stein. Although she gave him some advice on the novel (it was his first) her biggest contribution was the remark, "You are all a lost generation," referring to Hemingway and his contemporaries: writers and artists who expatriated themselves...

The term "lost generation" comes from an epigraph at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway lived in Paris at the time he was writing Sun and was close friends with Gertrude Stein. Although she gave him some advice on the novel (it was his first) her biggest contribution was the remark, "You are all a lost generation," referring to Hemingway and his contemporaries: writers and artists who expatriated themselves to Europe in the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century. The term could also be applied to the main characters of several of Hemingway's fictional works. 


The narrator of "In Another Country" has been wounded in World War I and is convalescing in a hospital in Italy. He is almost identical to other Hemingway characters such as Jake Barnes, Fredrick Henry, Nick Adams and Harold Krebs. They were all veterans of the war and had to deal with the psychological damage done by the horrors of combat. They have not only been literally wounded in the war but also symbolically and figuratively. These characters suffer from the effects of the first modern war which left millions of men dead and millions more badly wounded. The dead, an entire generation of young men from Europe and America, could truly be termed a "lost generation."

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