Why is Hemingway a lost generation after the war?

The lost generation is a literary school in the United States after the First World War.

In the early 1920s, Gerhard Stein, an American woman writer living in Paris, said to Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation." Hemingway used this sentence as the inscription of his first novel The Sun Also Rises, and the "lost generation" has since become the title of these writers who have the same creative tendency although they have no program and organization. The so-called "confusion" means their hesitation and disappointment. Although the "lost generation" is a short-lived trend, its position in the history of American literature is certain.

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, film montage, limited character perspective 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 has interspersed Newsreel, Eye of the Camera and Biography in his magnificent trilogy America (1937), revealing the social turmoil and changes in the United States in the first 30 years of the 20th century. This documentary news technique, which focuses on American society instead of individual characters, left a unique mark in the history of American literature, which had a far-reaching influence on later writers such as norman mailer and Doug Doro, and provided historical sources and reference for the rise of new journalism in the 1960s. At the same time, postmodern nonfiction 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 an unforgettable world of York Napatafa. Cummings, a poet, broke through the shackles of traditional punctuation, capitalization and syntax, and created the 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 used dreams controlled by reason to tell fables of existence and absurd images full of realistic dreams, which directly influenced the creative consciousness of later American writers such as carson mccullers, O 'Connor, Hawkes and Salinger.

In addition, the "lost generation" has far-reaching influence. Besides their creative achievements, the unprecedented prosperity of biographical literature and memoirs is also one of the reasons. In 1930s and 1940s, works summarizing and reflecting the "lost generation" came out one after another, such as Yesterday by Frederick Allen (193 1), The Return of Exiles by Cowley (1934) and Genius by Robert mccall (/kloc). In the 1950s and 1960s, we witnessed another climax of memories: the representative writers or witnesses of the "Lost Generation" published their memoirs or autobiographies, including crosby's The Age of Enthusiasm (1953), Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare's Bookstore (1956) and Harold Loeb's. Matthews Joseph's Surrealist Life (1962), man ray's Self-Portrait (1963), morley callaghan's Summer in Paris (1963), Hemingway's Unfixed Holy Day (1963). Talented Man was also revised by Kay Boyle and reprinted in 1968. These biographies are not only conducive to understanding the thought, life and creative principles of the "lost generation" from the inside, but also their centralized publication further deepened the literary legend of the "lost generation", which made its influence exceed the short time in the 1920s and had a lasting impact on later literature until the "beat generation" rose in the American literary world with a more rebellious and radical attitude in the 1960s. Mark Dolan believes that the "lost generation" can become a cultural symbol in the 1920s, not only because it is a rare example of a group of writers representing an era in American cultural history, but also because it is a unique example of a group of autobiographers representing an era in American cultural history.