The Sun Also Rises and The Avant-Garde

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is representative of the Avant Garde movement in American Literature, which took place in the early 1900’s and is known as the Lost Generation. Robert Cohn says to Jake, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” Near the beginning of World War I, many young adults felt their lives had no purpose or significance. Here, Cohn worries that he is unimportant and wasting his life away. This shows the discontent of the Lost Generation and how it is all in the way they perceive their world.

Avant-Garde means new and unusual or experimental ideas. Avant-garde artists wanted to go outside the normal way of looking at things. The new style was meant to bring out creativity and imagination by creating a whole new era of art in culture. The avant-garde reconstituted the accepted cultural order, valued fragments and unexpected juxtapositions, erotic, exotic, incongruous, the unconscious, the spontaneous, the primitive, and the irrational were prized (“Seacoast”). The settings in this novel take place all over beautiful, exotic locations in Europe, such as Paris and Pamplona, showing part of its Avant-Garde features. Most essentially, the avant-garde explores through aesthetic disruption and innovation the possibilities of creating new art forms and languages, which will bring forth new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting (McNeill). In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway says, “The end of the line. All trains finish there. They don't go on anywhere," this quote shows the style of the Avant-garde completely. It’s abstract and makes you try to imagine what Hemingway is trying to achieve.

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés." Most Avant-Garde artists were expatriates, Americans living overseas in foreign countries and this reflects Hemingway’s life overseas in Paris. The avant-garde wishes to transform society and develops a critical attitude toward the dominant values of the given culture. They are determined to create new roles and values in a traditional society in order to give way to their new generation. (“Seacoast”)

"Isn't it pretty to think so? This is the last sentence in The Sun Also Rises and is a perfect ending to an Avant-Garde novel. It gives you only the surface of the story, leaving the rest up to your imagination or what you believe to be going on. The story gives you a new way to see this sort of life and keep you wondering in the end about the unfolding events. The book is about the characters and their relationship with each other and how they are defined as a person in different views or how they define themselves.

Works Citied

"The Avant-Garde." Seacost. University of Sunderland, Web. 20 Oct 2009. .

McNeill, Tony. "Avant Garde and Modernism," Seacost. 26/04/2001. University of Sunderland, Web. 17 Sept 2009. .