The “Lost Generation” and the Generation of Loss: Ernest Hemingway’s Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises

Abstract

This article discusses how Hemingway's depiction of the sexually mutilated WWI veteran and his inverted generic analogue, the cowboy hero, grows out of modernism's vexed enthrallment with material things. The Sun Also Rises explores the impotence of the post-war American, a figure whose lost capacity for generation Hemingway likens to that of the pioneer filled with longing for a frontier he has outlasted. In this novel, Hemingway rewrites the pioneer as a sexually wounded veteran whose desire to transcend loss finds its material correspondent in objects that commemorate losses, not victories, and that embody and perpetuate national myth.

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