Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is considered a masterpiece for its characterization of the Lost Generation.
The novel opens in post-World War I Paris. The characters are a group of disillusioned British and American ex-patriots. They drift aimlessly from one bar to another, from one coffee shop to another, from one restaurant to another. They drink, talk, drink, argue, drink, flirt, drink, fight, drink, whine, and drink. They engage in meaningless conversations and relate inept anecdotes. And then they’re off to Spain to fish and to watch the bullfights.
The first-person narrator, Jake Barnes, survived the war but did not do so unscathed. He received a wound in his groin that has rendered him impotent. He narrates the events and conversations in between bouts of profuse drinking. He seems as bored with his narrative as we are with reading it. To add tension to this wholesome gathering, the men are in love with Lady Brett Ashley who, for her part, engages in casual sex with virtual strangers. Her promiscuity seems to be more a result of apparent boredom than anything else. She is quick to cast her lovers aside once she loses interest in them, indifferent to the pain she may have caused. And why all these men are in love with her is a mystery since there is nothing remotely attractive about her other than she just happens to be the only female in their circle.
For the most part, the sentences are short, simple, and pile on the details, one after the other, with little variation in sentence structure, as in “first this happens, then this, then this,” etc. etc. The sentences are almost as monotonous as the endless bouts of drinking and staggering back to hotel rooms in a drunken stupor.
If the point of the novel is to depict a generation aimlessly adrift, drinking themselves to death, failing to connect with one another in a meaningful way, substituting sex for love, suffering from ennui, spouting ineptitudes, etc. etc. then it has succeeded. The trouble is that in capturing the qualities of this Lost Generation, Hemingway may have lost some of his readers by frustrating them with the monotony, the repetition, and the lackluster characters.