Danyael Rodriguez

11/18/16
Literary Analysis Essay

Lost Love. A common theme amongst many stories in Ernest Hemingway's works.

Hemingway himself was very popular amongst women having many lovers and marriages

throughout his lifetime so he naturally felt this way. The Lost Generation was a group of writers

who came of age during World War One. Naturally, Ernest Hemingway was one of the more

known writers within the Lost Generation who talked about this more frequently in his works.

He had a main occurrence within his writing which was Lost Love and you could say that this

overall was a prime trait of the Lost Generation in its entirety.

In A Very Short Story written by Ernest Hemingway the story does not begin with the

traditional description of all the characters and even the setting. Overall the story is about a nurse

named Luz who is taking care of a man in Italy, they had romantic relations but the unnamed

man moves to America while Luz stayed in Italy and meets an Italian guy. Ernest abruptly ends

the story with this paragraph, The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz

never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after, he contracted gonorrhea

from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxi cab through Lincoln Park.

Why did he even choose to end the story this way? Well being a part of the Lost Generation,

he in A Very Short Story was actually Ernest Hemingway himself. The whole time this was a

personal story about Ernest which is why he kept the identity of the man unknown. The reason

why he ended the story this way was to give the reader an idea that the love that the characters

had was never really there. Post war, Ernest had hoped he would eventually marry Agnes which
is the actual name of his lover. He met her during the war and this had a lasting impact on him

but he never got to be with her and she declared their love as but it is more as a mother than a

sweetheart in one of the letters she wrote him. He was devastated and this made him write A

Very Short Story because he at the time had lost hope for all love.

A Very Short Story was not the only example in where lost love was shown to be a

main trait of the Lost Generation but also in The End of Something by Ernest Hemingway. In

the text it says

He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him.

He looked at her back. It isn't fun anymore. Not any of it.

She didn't say anything. He went on. I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside

of me comma Marge. I don't know what to say.

He looked on at her back.

Isn't love any fun? Marjorie said.

No, Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there, his head in his hands.
 I'm going to take the boat, Marjorie called to him. You can walk back around the

point.

All right, Nick said. I'll push the boat off for you.

You don't need to, she said. She was afloat in the boat on the water with the moonlight

on it. Nick went back and lay down with his face in the blanket by the fire. He could hear

Marjorie rowing on the water.

This here is a blatant example of Ernest reflecting his idea of not having love or yearning

for love that in this case, left him. Eventually Marjorie left by herself on the boat symbolising his

love going away. This was possibly a reflection of Hemingway's own personal life with one of

his own prior lovers. He clearly has this ongoing feeling of his hopelessness for finding and keep

a lover. He was a fundamental part of the Lost Generation and this is just another example of lost

love in the aftermath of World War One.

The final example of lost love being portrayed by the Lost Generation is in another text

called The Killers by Ernest Hemingway. The overall takeaway from this story is about a man

named Nick Adams confrontation with oppressive evil, represented by the two gangsters, Al and

Max. There really is no way to relate this to lost love itself but it can be related within the

hopelessness of lost love. Ernest Hemingway, as said before, was very popular amongst many

women. This story is just another way of him showing his feeling of lost love within himself. He

used the ironic name of The Killers when in actuality there really were no murders that took

place in the suicide.

 In conclusion, overall the Lost Generation had many traits to them. But in the end there

really was no other trait better than the idea of lost love to describe them and how they felt. The

aftermath of the war really affected all of these influential writers in many ways and Ernest

Hemingway's works really portrays this. Lost love is something that everyone feels at some point

during their lifetime which is relatable especially if people such as the Lost Generation felt this.