简要分析《太阳照样升起》中迷惘的一代--毕业论文.doc

【标题】简要分析太阳照样升起中迷惘的一代 【作者】贾小毅 【关键词】迷惘的一代；一战；人物分析；题材 【指导老师】余烈全 王艳蓉 【专业】英语 【正文】I. IntroductionA. The Lost GenerationThe First World War not only destroyed the old value of America, but also created many young writers who were called The Lost Generation. The term The Lost Generation was made by Gertrude Stein. She heard her automechanic boss blame his young workers“une generation perdue” while in France. This referred to the young workers poor repair skills. Gertrude Stein took this phrase and used it to describe the people of the 1920s who rejected American post World War I values. The three bestknown writers among The Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Ernest Hemingway used Steins phrase as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises and then became the spokesman of The Lost Generation. Because of this novels popularity, the term The Lost Generation became the eternal term that best described the young writers of the 1920s.The Lost Generation is a sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s.1 World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if one acted virtuously, good things would happen. Many good, young men went to war and died, or returned home either physically or mentally wounded, and for most both, and their faith in the moral that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid. They were“lost”. After the soldiers came back from the battlefield they found everything had changed. They contributed their life to the country, but gained nothing. For the soldiers who came back from the war, they got the thanks of a grateful country, a suit of civilian clothes and small cash payment. The money did not last long and it seemed that the gratitude of the country ran out fairly quickly. The men who hadnt gone to the battlefield were much better. They were settled in jobs, and had lived a peace life. It is mostly ironical that those who got best of all out of the war of the last five years were those who had proved their patriotism by making massive profits out of war industries. They got the money, but for the soldiers just nothing. The war left them with the hurt and a nightmare memory.BErnest Hemingway 1. Ernest Hemingways LifeErnest Hemingway, American short story writer, novelist nonfiction writer, journalist, is regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, on July 21, 1899. His father, a highly respected physician, initiated him into the rituals of hunting and fishing. His parents were conservative and deeply concerned about the attitudes and behavior of their sons. So Hemingway spent a greater part of his life trying to escape the repressive code of behavior set by his strict disciplinarian parents and their society. His first break from home was in 1918, when the United States entered the World War I, and he tried to enlist but was rejected because of extremely poor vision in one eye. Later he was accepted by the American Red Cross as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Italian army. Hemingway was seriously wounded from fragments of an exploding mortar shell on the Italian front. Though most of the fragments were taken out, those left in his body made him feel pain all through his life. And his war experience influenced his composition a lot.In his final years, Hemingway suffered from physical and mental diseases, on the early morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway killed himself by his favorite gun.2. Spokesman for the Lost GenerationWhen the nineteenyearold Hemingway returned home in 1919, his parents did not understand the psychological trauma he had suffered during the war, and they required him to get a job or go to college.Eventually, he began working for the Toronto Star and went to Paris as a foreign reporter. In Paris, he got to know Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Anderson and James Joyce, and began to write short stories. Gradually he accomplished revolution in literary style and language.In 1926, Hemingway published his first important novel The Sun Also Rises, which attracted a good deal of attention from the critical world. Three years later Hemingway became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called“a lost generation”, the term referring to the postworld war I generation, specifically a group of American writers who experienced war and established their literary reputation in the 1920s. This generation included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. It means this generation had lost the beautiful sense of the nice past. Steins comment suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of those expatriates.The experience of war provided Hemingway with rich materials for his novels. In 1928, another important novel A Farewell to Arms was published.“It can be read as a footnote to The Sun Also Rises in that it explains how people like John Barons come to behave the way they do.”2 Another work about war For Whom the Bell Tolls is based on Ernest Hemingways experience in the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his success of The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize in literature for his“mastery of the art of modern narration” in 1954. In this year, Hemingways literary career culminated.II. The Sun Also Rises, the Voice of the Lost GenerationA. World War I and Its AftermathWhen war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the vast majority of Americans were glad to have an ocean between them and the hostilities. There were, to be sure, heated feelings caused by the war. Millions of recent immigrants were deeply worried about the fate of their fellow countrymen in Turkey, Russia, Germany, and Italy. While many middleclass, professional people immediately supported England and the Allies as a matter of class and cultural loyalty, others argued that there was right on both sides and that the U.S. should stay strictly neutral. But many Americans began to lean more decidedly in a proallied direction. The climate of national opinion was daily growing more patriotic, more fevered, and less tolerant.After many military and diplomatic incidents, the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917 and joined the Allied. But just as quickly as the U.S. went into the war, it was over.The world after World War I was quite different. All the old certainties were gone, and everything was new. The disillusionment with the war, the loss of respect for the law under these situation, and social life going through very odd changes, all indicated that the old world was dying.As written by American novelist Henry James:“The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and horror so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”3A contemporary literary critic puts the effect of the war this way:The war destroyed body and annihilated the patterned grace of Europes cities. It destroyed the dignity of death and undermined the confidence of those who pictured history as a steady and logical process. Whether on the front or not, members of this warshaped generation were deeply affected by the appalling butchery, the way in which the war seemed to be a kind of universal deathwish. And because death was so omnipresent, Malcolm Cowley observes, the survivors were determined to live the rest of their lives for the moment, or savor life in the hereandnow.4B. A Short Summary of The Sun Also RisesRobert Cohn is plagued by feelings of inferiority because he is Jewish. He starts boxing to feel better about himself. He marries the first girl he dates after college. But she leaves him. He moves out to California and meets a new woman. They travel to Europe, where he writes a novel. After he goes to America to get it published, he loses his shyness but becomes mean and egotistic. Undirected, he tries to get his friend Jake Barnes to go to South America with him. But Jake is not interested.Jake meets a girl at a cafe, and he brings her with him to a dance club. At the dance club he runs into Brett. During World War I Jake was injured and is now impotent; Brett loves sex, and she cannot give it up, even to be with a man she loves. Cohn is there and can barely take his eyes off Brett, but she and Jake leave the club together.They ride around Paris and talk about why they cant be together. They kiss, but cannot go beyond that. Jake goes home alone. He falls asleep, and awakened by Brett. She comes up, but soon leaves. She makes a date with Jake for tomorrow, but another man, a count, is waiting for her now.The next day Cohn comes by and he and Jake go out for lunch. Cohn asks Jake about Brett, and Jake tells him shes engaged. Cohn thinks hes in love with her. Brett doesnt show up to meet Jake. Jake runs into his friend Harvey Stone, a broke gambler. When Cohn comes by he and Stone nearly have a fight. Cohn, who has writers block, is not happy. He doesnt want to marry his girl, Frances, and she is not very happy about this.Brett and the count come to Jakes home that night for drinks. Brett and Jake talk more about how they love each other. For his sake she says shes going away to San Sebastian for awhile. The three go out to a club and Jake and Brett dance together.Brett asks if Cohn will be on the trip. She was with him in San Sebastian. Jake is jealous and angry with Cohn. But Cohn still wants to come on the trip. Bill and Jake will meet Cohn in Bayonne, and then travel to Pamplona to meet the rest of the group.Cohn arrives, and the three of them head for Pamplona. Brett and Mike are supposed to arrive that night, but do not. They have stayed over in San Sebastian, and Cohn, uninvited, goes to see them. Jake and Bill continue on to Burguete, and spend a few days fishing. It is very pleasant, and they make a new friend. They receive a note from Mike, who will be in Pamplona that day. Bill and Jake leave for Pamplona.Jake and Bill find Mike, Brett, and Cohn at a cafe. Mike and Brett seem annoyed with Cohn. Mike is especially angry with Cohn, he and Cohn almost have a fight.The fiesta starts. The group drinks and parties all night. Jake meets Pedro Romero, a bullfighters, Romero is wonderful. Brett becomes infatuated with the attractive young bullfighter.One day during the festival it rains, so there are no bullfights. Jake and his friends have a drink with Romero. Brett talks to Romero, and Mike is very obnoxious. Mike and Cohn almost have another fight. Jake and Brett go for a walk, Brett confesses shes in love with Romero. Jake finds Romero, and arranges it so Romero and Brett can go off together.Cohn finds Jake, and demands to know where Brett is. He calls Jake a pimp, he beats Jack up. Jake goes back to the hotel, Cohn is crying, and begs Jake for forgiveness. Jake reluctantly forgives him. Cohn plans to leave in the morning.Cohn beat up Romero last night. Romero demanded Cohn leave in the morning. Romero was badly hurt in the fight, but he still fights in the last bullfight. He is much better than the other two fighters. That night, Brett leaves with Romero. She does not say goodbye to Jake.The festival is over and Jake heads north with Bill and Mike. They then go their separate ways, Jake traveling alone to San Sebastian. He is only there a few days when he receives a telegram from Brett, who is in Madrid. She needs his help. Jake, cuts his trip short and heads for Madrid.Jake finds Brett broke in a fleabag hotel. She tells him that she made Romero go because she didnt want to hurt him. Brett and Jake leave the hotel. They drink a little, and then take a ride around Madrid. They talk again about their frustrated romance.C. The Sun Also Rises Reflecting the Attitude of the Lost Generation The Sun Also Rises is an impressive document of the people who came to be known, in Gertrude Steins words, as the Lost Generation, the young generation she speaks of had their dreams and innocence smashed by World War I, emerged from the war bitter and aimless, and spent much of the prosperous 1920s drinking and partying away their frustrations. Jake epitomizes the Lost Generation; physically and emotionally wounded from the war, he is disillusioned, cares little about conventional sources of hopefamily, friends, religion, workand apathetically drinks his way through his expatriate life. Even travel, a rich source of potential experience, mostly becomes an excuse to drink in exotic locales. Irresponsibility also marks the Lost Generation; Jake rarely intervenes in others affairs, even when he could help(as with Cohn), and Brett carelessly hurts men and considers herself powerless to stop doing so. While Hemingway critiques the superficial, empty attitudes of the Lost Generation, the other quote in the epigraph from Ecclesiastes expresses the hope that future generations may rediscover themselves.III. Analysis of Major Characters in The Sun Also RisesA. Jake BarnesThe key events in the formation of Jakes character occur long before the novels action begins. As a soldier in World War I, Jake is wounded. Although he does not say so directly, there are numerous moments in the novel when he implies that, as a result of his injury, he has lost the ability to have sex. Jakes narration is characterized by subtlety and implication. He prefers to hint at things rather than state them outright, especially when they concern the war or his injury. Early in the novel, for example one must read the text very closely to grasp the true nature of Jakes wound; it is only later, when Jake goes fishing with Bill that he speaks more openly about his impotence.Jakes physical malady has profound psychological consequences. He seems quite insecure about his masculinity. The fact that Brett, the love of his life, refuses to enter into a relationship with him compounds this problem. Jake, with typical subtlety, suggests that she does not want to because it would mean giving up sexual intercourse. Jakes hostility toward Robert Cohn is perhaps rooted in his own feelings of inadequacy. In many ways, Jake is a typical member of what poet Gertrude Stein called the lost generation, the generation of men and women whose experiences in World War I undermined their belief in justice, morality, manhood, and love. Without these ideals to rely on, the Lost Generation lived an aimless, immoral existence, devoid of true emotion and characterized by casual interpersonal cruelty. Part of Jakes character represents the Lost Generation and its unfortunate position: he wanders through Paris, going from bar to bar and drinking heavily at each, his life filled with purposeless debauchery. He demonstrates the capacity to be extremely cruel, especially toward Cohn. His insecurities about his masculinity are typical of the anxieties that many members of the Lost Generation felt.Yet, in some important ways, Jake differs from those around him. He seems aware of the fruitlessness of the Lost Generations way of life. He tells Cohn in Chapter II:“You cant get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” Moreover, he recognizes the frequent cruelty of the behavior in which he and his friends engage. Most important, perhaps, he acknowledges, if only indirectly, the pain that his war injury and his unrequited love for Brett cause him. However, though Jake does perceive the problems in his life, he seems either unwilling or unable to remedy them. Though he understands the dilemma of the Lost Generation, he remains trapped within it.B. Lady Brett AshleyBrett is a strong, largely independent woman. She exerts great power over the men around her, as her beauty and charisma seem to charm everyone she meets. Moreover, she refuses to commit to any one man, preferring ultimate independence. However, her independence does not make her happy. She frequently complains to Jake about how miserable she isher life, she claims, is aimless and unsatisfying. Her wandering from relationship to relationship parallels Jake and his friends wandering from bar to bar. Although she will not commit to any one man, she seems uncomfortable being by herself. As Jake remarks,“She cant go anywhere alone.”Indeed, there are several misogynist strains in Hemingways representation of Brett. For instance, she disrupts relationships between men with her very presence. It seems that, in Hemingways view, a liberated woman is necessarily a corrupting, dangerous force for men. Brett represents a threat to Pedro Romero and his careershe believes that her own strength and independence will eventually spoil Romeros strength and independence. Because she does not conform to traditional feminine behavior, she is a danger to him.As with Jake and his male friends, World War I seems to have played an essential part in the formation of Bretts character. During the war, Bretts true love died of dysentery. Her subsequent aimlessness, especially with regard to men, can be interpreted as a futile, subconscious search for this original love. Bretts personal search is perhaps symbolic of the entire Lost Generations search for the shattered prewar values of love and romance.C. Robert CohnCohn has spent his entire life feeling like an outsider because he is Jewish. While at Princeton, he took up boxing to combat his feelings of shyness and inferiority. Although his confidence has grown with his literary success, his anxiety about being different or considered not good enough persists. These feelings of otherness and inadequacy may explain his irrational attachment to Bretthe is so terrified of r