Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American poet at the
center of a group of painters and expatriate writers living in Paris
after World War I. Among those in her circle were the artist Pablo
Picasso and the writers Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway.
Stein named the generation that came of age during World War I the
“lost generation.” The world quickly adopted the phrase as the most accurate
description of the generation that passed through the threshold
of adulthood at this time—working, fighting, or dying in the war.
The horrific conflict shattered this generation’s faith in traditional
values such as love, bravery, manhood, and womanhood. Without these
values, the members of this generation found their existence aimless,
meaningless, and unfulfilling. It is these men and women that Hemingway
portrays in The Sun Also Rises.
Before the novel opens, Hemingway quotes Stein and a
biblical passage from Ecclesiastes. The passage contrasts the transient nature
of human generations with the eternal survival of nature: the world
endures, and the sun continues to rise and set despite the inevitable
passage of each human generation into death. Hemingway’s juxtaposition
of the two epigraphs produces an ambivalent tone. On the one hand,
there is hope, because there will be a new generation after the
aimless generation that populates The Sun Also Rises. On
the other hand, there is bitter irony, since every generation is lost,
in the sense that each generation will eventually die.
