My review of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

The Sun also Rises is a disagreeable book about the gloomy human conditions after WWI. I disliked the writing style, but nonetheless could feel its powerful tug on my emotions with its straight-to-the-point account. I don’t know whether Hemingway was satirical or not; whether he was making fun of the “lost generation,” as Gertrude Stein describes the post war expatriates or if he was recounting many of his own experiences as an expatriate in France and Spain. The Characters were definitely a lost generation in morals, in purpose, in relationships, in vision of the future. Nothing I have read has ever presented dialogue so shallow and meaningless.

The reader follows the characters from café to café and bar to bar in Paris all the way to Spain. The dialogue consists of such degrading topics such as adultery to prostitution, financial irresponsibility and bankruptcy to immorality and irreligion. Within the center of the plot the reader is introduced to men fighting men and women being the cause of it and women degrading men—leaving them for lack of a marital commitment.

I think what Hemingway was trying to show the world was a new existence of immorality and the easiness of life without a strict moral code. No commitments, no laws, no morals, no values had to be enforced, only a life of fun and entertainment, including plenty of wine, women and profanity. He may have hoped that by reading his novel, individuals and communities would see the pointless and empty lives fabricated by a false moral code. If that is the case, then I agree with his purpose for writing.
However much I hated this story, I see the advantage of having read about and learned lessons from “the lost generation.” It is an eye-opener to the evils that lurk in the lives of lazy, materialistic and drunken people.