Going back to the beginning...
"You are all a lost generation."
-Gertrude Stein in Conversation
After finishing The Sun Also Rises, I thought it would be interesting to explore how the opening of the book relates to the book itself and the characters and the plot. Before, I took it as the generation of the post-war are lost in the sense that they have no direction to their lives -- no movement or ideology to follow. After reading the book, I felt that the lost generation are the people of "one of us." "One of us" to me meant those people that are sort of done with life. They are finished with their purpose and they are just playing around until death. For Jake, he has no more purpose because to him their isn't a chance of love for him or a family. He works to past the time. Brett is also wasting her time. She already got married and that didn't work out (twice) and she served in the war for her country so she's "retired" so now she's taken life as a game. Mike has accepted bankruptcy as his life and stopped caring. The Count has also had his fair share of life. And so on.
So the lost generation are "one of us." Then I thought about Cohn. Where does that put him? Is Cohn part of Hemingway's lost generation or is he the exception. Cohn -- to me -- has no purpose in his life either. But he is a "one of us" wannabe. He has 2 characteristics that differentiates him from the rest of the people:
1. He doesn't drink
2. He (apparently) has not gone through anything really scarring/damaging in his life, specifically the war.
Cohn does not seem affected by the war. It looks like he was in Harvard during the war and if he did fight, it did not affect him physically or physiologically. Because he is so innocent and pure (I guess until Brett), he cannot relate to Brett and Jake and their friends.
So maybe he isn't part of the lost generation until Brett.
Oh wait, maybe Brett is the factor that defines the lost generation.
I don;t know, what do you think?
-Gertrude Stein in Conversation
After finishing The Sun Also Rises, I thought it would be interesting to explore how the opening of the book relates to the book itself and the characters and the plot. Before, I took it as the generation of the post-war are lost in the sense that they have no direction to their lives -- no movement or ideology to follow. After reading the book, I felt that the lost generation are the people of "one of us." "One of us" to me meant those people that are sort of done with life. They are finished with their purpose and they are just playing around until death. For Jake, he has no more purpose because to him their isn't a chance of love for him or a family. He works to past the time. Brett is also wasting her time. She already got married and that didn't work out (twice) and she served in the war for her country so she's "retired" so now she's taken life as a game. Mike has accepted bankruptcy as his life and stopped caring. The Count has also had his fair share of life. And so on.
So the lost generation are "one of us." Then I thought about Cohn. Where does that put him? Is Cohn part of Hemingway's lost generation or is he the exception. Cohn -- to me -- has no purpose in his life either. But he is a "one of us" wannabe. He has 2 characteristics that differentiates him from the rest of the people:
1. He doesn't drink
2. He (apparently) has not gone through anything really scarring/damaging in his life, specifically the war.
Cohn does not seem affected by the war. It looks like he was in Harvard during the war and if he did fight, it did not affect him physically or physiologically. Because he is so innocent and pure (I guess until Brett), he cannot relate to Brett and Jake and their friends.
So maybe he isn't part of the lost generation until Brett.
Oh wait, maybe Brett is the factor that defines the lost generation.
I don;t know, what do you think?
I hadn't thought of Cohn's story arc in this way before--as Brett basically destroying that naivete and prewar innocence that set him apart from the rest of the ironic, valueless expats in Paris. We don't see enough of the ending of his story to fully gauge--he takes off the morning after his fight with Jake, after weepingly begging to apologize, and he's never heard from again. We don't see an emergence of an ironic sensibility in Cohn--the defining feature of Paris culture in the novel. He remains "romantic" to the end, demanding that those who would besmirch the honor of his Lady Love stand and fight him. And when we last see him, he's wearing his old Princeton polo shirt, which Jake remarks makes him look like he's in college.
ReplyDeleteBut Cohn does seem pretty "lost" by the end, and it might make sense to look at his loss of innocence as analogous to Jake's sacrificing his whole Pamplona scene for Brett's desires. When Brett comes through town, there will be damage.