After a busy year of papers, lectures and exams, I decided to take advantage of my summer break to catch up on books I’ve procrastinated to read.
Some of these books included Voltaire’s Candide, Kafka’s The Trial, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, just to name a few.
Yet despite being enfolded in these incredible pieces of literary art, there was one novel that stuck out to me.
I fell in love with the eloquent prose of Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
Impressively his first novel, which instantly propelled him into international stardom, it chronicles the lives of several drifting expatriates in Paris and their summer trip to Spain to watch the annual bullfights.
In the novel’s epigraph, Hemingway quotes novelist Gertrude Stein saying, “You are all a lost generation.” Though it is easy to overlook this quote at first, it rings true by the end, by not only leaving the characters sterile of any revelation, unvalued and unreceptive, but also projecting those feelings onto the reader.
Hence many remember the post World War I generation for its bootleg liquor, grandeur living and bright yellow Fords. Hemingway shines the green light onto the overlooked reality of the time.
During the short time of prosperity after WWI, dewy-eyed young’uns were left disillusioned and hopelessly lost. The Great War shattered the values left by the Victorian age, infusing cynicism and desolation. As a result, they subjected themselves to wild lifestyles and hard drinking, as portrayed in the novel, and to walking ghostly along the Parisian streets, materialistically and emotionally barren.
Nearly 100 years later, the millennial generation emerged. Young Americans born from 1980 to 2000 have been defined by a time of MacBook’s, monstrous corporations and Facebook.
Despite the incredible technological advances, I found an incredibly striking truth that links our own generation to the romanticized 1920s generation.
As they were dissolute from war, we have become dissolute from the digital age. Technological influence has left us disconnected from others, unable to critically comprehend other viewpoints, confined to certain ideologies and comfortable in social slump.
We are a lost generation, inheritors of the emptiness passed down from the 1920s. We constantly brand ourselves through materialism and technology to quench our thirst for fame and glory and retorting stale American life, and we are unable to differentiate between reality and the virtual world.
Despite the preconceived notions of our “self-absorbed, over confident” generation, we, like many before us and many after, are trying to navigate our way through a new terrain.
In a way no generation can truly be lost, because as time goes by we will discover what defines us and what is essential to keep moving us forward. Only then will the sun rise.
