The Great Gatsby And The Lost Generation

The ever so romantic and noble victorian writings of the late 1800’s abruptly changed to modern interpretive writings. The event that changed everything was the World War I, the war that ended all wars … and ended the age of victorian literature. Before the war, all writing followed strict rules where all meaning was exposed to the reader with clear structure and aesthetic content. For example, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling has an anthropomorphic jungle setting with a clear protagonist and antagonist. Excerpts such as “Father Wolf listened, and in the dark valley that ran down to… ” (Kipling 4) show that the writing describes everything and the reader just has to comprehend the plot. However, the war had resonated that there are no rules

In essence, the Lost Generation was a crux where literature took form to reflect the present interpretive modern writing in aspects of grammar, symbolism, and antithetical content.

First off, grammar and structure took a sharp turn to fragmented sentences and ellipses. For example, the author of The Great Gatsby, uses ellipses to force readers to interpret and think as the characters. This contrasts authors who elucidate the theme with clear structure and grammar in the Victorian age. For example, the text states: “We all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny…” (Fitzgerald 134). This text has context clues hiding in every corner. Readers can interpret that Fitzgerald was trying to describe this awkward situation and describe how drunk they were as they baffled

Symbolism is embedded deep into a story and plays a role toward this implied meaning. For instance, in “The Old Man at the Bridge” by Ernest Hemingway, the story of the old man is so specific that it makes readers think how does this connect to the real world? Hemingway wrote, “It was my business to cross the bridge, explore the bridgehead beyond and find out to what point the enemy had advanced” (Hemingway 1). Other than the narrator’s identity as soldier, readers can also see that Hemingway revealed that each character and object in this story symbolizes something important in the real world. Readers at the time can relate to war experiences, and readers of later generation can relate and symbolize the enemy as lost of hope. A critic named Lambadariou quoted Hemingway: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part it shows” (Lambadaridou 1). The quote illustrates that Hemingway’s writing style reflected the confused environment around him. The world was heading toward the foggy and obscure modern age. The only way to describe the feeling is to relate something to one and another; symbolize objects to the feeling. This writing style is so common in our era due to writers like Hemingway in the Lost