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Literary characteristics of the lost generation
The novel The Lost Generation is an important part of American modernist literature in the 1920s. Hemingway's novels, Fitzgerald's novels and Pazos' novels are not completely innovative in form and technique like Joyce's stream-of-consciousness novels, but they do not blindly sneak into people's consciousness like their works. Spare no effort to describe endless emotional life, but their novels reflect the basic characteristics of modernism in at least the following two aspects. First of all, the "lost generation" novels fully reflect the modernity of the creative theme. Like stream-of-consciousness novels, it aims to reveal the modern experience, that is, the sense of alienation, loneliness and despair that pervaded the western world after the war, and profoundly reflect the moral dilemma and "personality identity crisis" of modern people. This is completely different from the concerns and themes of Bennett and John Galsworthy's realistic novels in the early 20th century. Secondly, the "lost generation" novels also show the artistic characteristics of modernism in the form of works and creative skills. Just as there are obvious differences between Lawrence's novels and Joyce's works, the novels of the "lost generation" also have their own unique artistic style. However, it also embodies some similarities of American modernist novels. In the narrative form of works, omniscient narrative is often abandoned, and limited, unreliable and even contradictory narrative characters like Nick in The Great Gatsby are often adopted. Many works break the chronological order in structure, skillfully use metaphors, images and symbols to express the theme, and usually end in a vague and "open" way, which is strikingly similar to other modernist novels. Obviously, the writers of the "lost generation" and other contemporary modernist writers are linked by some kind of artistic affinity, which makes them show completely different artistic tendencies from realistic novelists at that time.
In terms of writing techniques, the "Lost Generation" novels abandoned the structural framework of realistic novels, which mainly portrayed characters and plots, and the traditional routine of beginning-development-climax-ending. It is characterized by discontinuous structure, fragmented description and highly experimental language expression, which symbolizes a break with tradition, breaks through the normal space-time structure of traditional realistic novels, and fundamentally denies the continuity and linear causality of event development. Discontinuous and illogical time series can show the effect that continuous storytelling can't. In the trilogy of America, the 12 characters described by the author Pazos are not protagonists from beginning to end, but they are separated. The story is independent, and sometimes there are some cross-links in the plot. Another feature of the novel writing technique of the "lost generation" is that there is no usual explanation, comment and summary, and some are piled up with images and details that can mobilize readers' vision, hearing and touch. It often leaves many gaps for readers to fill, thus making reading more challenging and fresh.
From the "Lost Generation" novels, we can see that there is a more direct connection between the writer and his works. Hemingway and Fitzgerald's works directly or indirectly reflect the writer's own life and thoughts, with obvious autobiographical tendency. Different from the realistic novels of the19th century, the novels of the "lost generation" no longer take reflecting and imitating the reality of the external world as their responsibility, but turn to exploring and excavating people's subjective world or mental state. However, although they embody subjectivity, they try to show it in an objective form. The narrator of the novel is no longer omniscient, but often the protagonist of the story, such as Nick Kellaway in The Great Gatsby and Jack Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
The challenge of "Lost Generation" novels to traditional novels is also manifested in the interpretation of "people". The novel focuses on revealing the ugly side of human nature, expounding the "non-hero" nature of characters and the humbleness, confusion, boredom and absurdity of people's inner world. Show the life picture of a person with morbid psychology in a deformed material world, or a person who is about to move towards morbid psychology. Almost all the characters in The Great Gatsby are morbid. They are confused and at a loss. Although they are still alive, they are still dead. The author's purpose in shaping these characters is to fundamentally break the traditional order and overthrow traditional beliefs. The Sun Also Rises profoundly reveals the extreme sense of alienation and disillusionment of American youth who emigrated to Europe after the war, which makes readers witness the anti-hero model like Jack in American modernist novels for the first time and marks a major turning point in American novel creation.
The creation of the "lost generation" still tends to be minimalist and colloquial in language. During the war, the "lost generation" was deceived by war propaganda and abandoned all lofty words like a lost coat: "What vague words are sacred, glorious and sacrificial? I am ashamed to hear them ... I can't see anything sacred, and there is no glory in what is glorious. As for sacrifice, it is like a slaughterhouse in Chicago, except that the meat is buried. " Therefore, in their literary creation, they advocate literary minimalism. Hemingway pushed this simple style to the extreme. He uses telegraph language, hints and indirect means to hint at the dramatic changes in the characters' hearts through simple dialogues and details, instead of describing the characters' hearts as traditional practices do. The ending often comes to an abrupt end, never dragging its feet or putting on a show. The so-called "zero ending" gives the work greater shock. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his mastery of narrative art, and his "iceberg principle" is the concentrated expression of his modern narrative art. The writer only writes one-eighth above the water, and the other seven-eighths are left for readers to fill in the blanks only by hints. This creative principle greatly influenced the creative tendency of his contemporaries and later writers. Colloquialism has become a common feature of a generation's prose style. Even in his literary criticism, edmund wilson abandoned pedantic words and chose colloquial words. In the Tropic of Cancer (1934), henry miller pushed this tendency to the extreme, which became a confusing feature of expressing moral indifference and subtle feelings in vulgar language. As a result, Bernard Shaw called it "dirt for dirt", which was difficult to be elegant.
Another feature of the "lost generation" creation is the courage to innovate in form. The American literary world at the beginning of the twentieth century was a period when realism, naturalism and modernism met. These young writers combined the spirit of resisting tradition after the war, absorbed the artistic achievements of various schools, and created their own style characteristics: Fitzgerald was romantic and delicate, Hemingway was simple and vigorous, and Dospazos was macro-atmospheric. Their exile in France fully developed their interest in formal experiments and Flaubert. They learn from Flaubert's objective, calm and indifferent narrative attitude, the author's reclusive narrative skills, concise style and repeatedly revised writing spirit. They feel that traditional literary narrative techniques can no longer express the characteristics of modern industrial society, so they turn to creative techniques such as stream of consciousness, symbol, "montage" of movies, limited characters' perspectives and multiple perspectives. Dos Pazos is a master of formal experiments, and his pioneering skill experiments in the field of novels may be more significant than his novels. His first unforgettable experimental novel, Manhattan Transit Station (1925), used impressionism, expressionism, montage and news reports. Various social scenes and life pictures are intertwined, and the metaphor of water and fire expresses the wasteland consciousness of the postwar western world, which fully embodies Dospazos' experimental spirit. Since then, Dos Pazos, in his magnificent American trilogy (1937), has interspersed "news clips", "camera eyes" and "biographies" in addition to the conventional narrative of the novel to reveal the turmoil and changes of American society in the first 30 years of the 20th century. This documentary news technique, which takes American society as the protagonist instead of individual characters as the protagonist, has left a unique mark in the history of American literature, and has a far-reaching influence on later writers such as norman mailer and Doug Doro, providing historical sources and reference for the rise of news reports in the1960s. At the same time, postmodern nonfiction novels can also be inspired by his experiment of integrating nonfiction into novels. Although it seems that Dos Pazos' literary experiment is a bit mechanical, the language of "lens eye" is obscure, and "news short film" has become a forgotten history, which makes it difficult for modern readers to understand, but he tries to use realistic news materials to be parallel to the narrative part of the novel, thus creating an atmosphere of the times for the novel, which is his success. In contrast, Hemingway retains more realistic factors, and his novels can often clearly distinguish the beginning, climax and end. However, the formal experiment is still obvious. In addition to the originality of telegraph dialogue, he broke through the limitation that Flaubert's internal focus of characters is often the third person, and switched to the internal focus of the first person, further shortening the psychological distance between characters and readers. In his main works, he also tried various narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness, inner monologue and flashback. Faulkner is a radical stream of consciousness, far more thorough than Hemingway. In many of his works, he tried multi-angle narrative methods and stream of consciousness, as well as the "myth model", that is, consciously making his stories parallel to fairy tales, thus creating a kind of York Napatafa lineage that makes people linger. Cummings, a poet, broke through the shackles of traditional punctuation, capitalization and syntax, and created a lowercase first-person singular "I" which became Cummings' mark, showing the more essential vitality of language. In addition, he is unconventional in the composition of his poems, such as arranging A Leaves/Loneliness vertically in the shape of a number 1, which highlights the image of loneliness and makes his poems have picturesque visual impact. West is known as the last genius of the "lost generation". He is famous for his formal experiments and is very avant-garde and radical in narrative techniques. In Balzo snell's Dream Life (193 1) and Miss Lonely Heart (1933), he tells the fable of existence and the absurd image full of real dreams in the way of rational control of dreams, which directly influenced the later American writers carson mccullers, O 'Connor, Hawkes and his writing skills.
In addition, American literature after World War I often uses symbolic techniques to express disillusionment. For example, the rain in A Farewell to Arms represents bad luck, often accompanied by death. When Catherine told Henry, "I'm afraid of rain, because sometimes I see myself dying in the rain." We can feel the shadow of bad luck. Therefore, when the last novel ends in rain, readers have realized Catherine's death. For another example, Robert Cohen in The Sun Also Rises went to find someone to fight for his life after falling in love. Cohen represents the demise of ideals and the breaking of traditional moral beliefs.
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