Ernest Hemingway: "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Moveable Feast"

"Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?"

Ernest Hemingway

This quotation take from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is one of the most meaningful for me as I think that represent much of the author thoughts as well as the common feeling spread trough Paris in the 1920’s.

Regarding Hemingway’s thoughts, as a personal opinion, this quote illustrates much more of Hemingway’s idea of following your principles as the main character and, as we have been studying, living in a modernist time but not follow those typical characteristics at all (such as going to parties, drink as much as you can handle and so on). Also it is related with the ‘Tell it the way it was’ as the context of The Sun Also Rises is pretty similar to Hemingway’s experiences while he was living in Paris. Hemingway wrote about what he knew, without lying, a very important point in his view, as his aesthetic vision is related with truth. The fact is that the feeling of life going by and do not react against it is just what describes a tourist, but this question leads you to take control of your life and follow your principles in order to make the agony of life worth living and became an aficionado.

Analyzing Hemingway style and stream would be just half of the whole context of the quotation as it is impossible to leave Paris in the 1920s aside, but is there a way to mix Hemingway, Paris and 1920 in a few words? Well, the answer is just “A Moveable Feast”.

A Moveable Feast is a book written by Ernest Hemingway which has his memoirs when he lived at Paris in the 1920s. The book was edited by Mary Hemingway and published after Hemingway’s dead. In the book some author such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are mentioned in Hemingway’s personal experiences which, in a way, illustrates the close relationship between them; all those authors lived in Paris in the 1920s and belong to what is called "the Lost Generation".

The Lost Generation is a term used to describe the generation that came of age during the World War I, the term is used by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises but it is acknowledged to Gertrude Stein. If you want to discover its origin, then you should think of reading A Moveable Feast as Hemingway explains a little bit deeper the whole concept and its origin.

Although it is not a novel, I think that the book helps us to understand why those authors where so important and influence Hemingway’s writing. Moreover, highlights the importance of Paris in the development of the modernist art. As background, between 1920 and 1929 Paris become one of the most important cultural cities all over Europe. The post-war period was characterized by the high-demand of personal freedom because they wanted to get rid of all the post-war values. As a consequence, the Parisians were open to new mentality which ended in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash, also known as Black Tuesday, as it trigger an economic crisis all over the industrialized countries.

Hemingway’s masterpiece The Sun Also Rises is one of the most characteristics works as not only illustrates the Parisian’s post-war values, but also the Lost Generation and Hemingway’s creation of beauty.

Here you can download the book, just in case you want to read it.