Essay Comparing The Sun Also Rises And The Great Gatsby

The First World War not only destroyed the traditional value of American society, but also created many young writers who were called “The Lost Generation”. Among them, some had experienced the First World War and felt tired of it; some became aware of the war indirectly and might have the illusion of the postwar society with disappointed and pessimistic emotions. The sameness of their work was to reflect the lost feeling and emotion in the postwar society of America. Among them, the most attractive are Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I will introduce the background at that time and compare the difference between these two novels. After World War I, the idea that good things would happen if one acted virtuously was

They were “lost”(Chang 296). People began to bolter the idea that we should cherish the lifetime we still owned and had fun. It is a time of high-energy night clubs, wild Prohibition and an “America first” attitude. It is known as “the Jazz Age” between the end of World War I and the crash of 1929 that forced people to get disillusioned. The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby are both based on the novelists’ own experiences. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald have different individualities and living environments. Although their life experiences were not the same, and their observing angles were different, they shared the same historical background and both reflected the living situation and the spiritual world in that age, especially the spiritual world of the young people. The Sun Also Rises talks about the hero, Jake Barnes. Through this figure, we can see Hemingway’s shadow all the time. Jake is heavily wounded in the war and loses his sexual ability. This makes him grieve to the extent of wishing to die. He falls in love with an English woman, Brett Ashley, but because of his physical defect, their love is regretful from beginning to the end. Jake is harassed heavily