Feelings And Outlooks Of An Entire Generation example essay topic

THE SUN ALSO RISES - Alienation What I would like to show you by writing this essay is that for many individuals in many different generations, for some less for others more explicit, the time they live in does not fit their outlook on life. Because of this they live different lives than their generation and the cultural setting and standards of their era would expect them to live. They feel alienated and left out, or they are strange in the eyes of others, eccentric even, they do not fit in their time and the set of moral and aesthetic standards they live in. These are the individuals, of whom I could give you many examples. However, what is more interesting to me, sometimes an entire generation in a certain cultural setting, environment and time, can experience a feeling of alienation, estrangement, of having no ties with the past and no ties with the present or the future too. Not an individual who feels stranded in the wrong time, in the wrong place and perhaps even on the wrong planet.

No, an entire generation living in a vacuum, feeling completely alienated of their time, waiting for the future, waiting for their lives to start. The cultural settings of an era are due to many factors. The period I would like to describe is called the roaring twenties, its generation The Lost Generation. The early years of the Twentieth century were dominated by the First World War which dragged the United States in a war it did not want.

The Communist uprising in Russia that had as a consequence a completely new map of the world and which wiped out the last of the autocratic nobility. The new inventions like cars, airplanes, radio, electric light, which in the twenties resorted into house-hold appliances like washing-machines and vacuum-cleaners. There was hope but it was false hope. The hope was based on old values and thoughts and on unstable economical and political forces. The years immediately following World War I were besides hope also characterized by anger, discontent, and disillusionment. Society had been devastated by a global conflict that resulted in unprecedented death, destruction and resentment.

The survivors who came of age during this era just after WW I, were termed the Lost Generation, they were left disjointed and alienated from both the world before and the new world that emerged after. Many of the generation left their homes to roam the world, to look for better morals and better lives unable to identify with either pre- or post war values, both of which, after the war, seemed deceptive and perverted. They became social exiles and were abandoned by their country and left to rediscover and redefine themselves in a world that had stifled their hopes, dreams and beliefs, in a world that after the war looked superficial and was based on economical values. It was during this time that literature in an attempt to capture the attitudes, emotions and opinions of the generation took a different tone and view. Because of the stream of consciousness, started by James Joyce and further developed by other authors like Virginia Woolf, literature had the tools and could therefore describe the feelings and outlooks of an entire generation. The works of the most successful writers of this generation literally became bibles to those who thought they had lost their identity but had rediscovered themselves in these books.

To such people, these novels became their defining elements, and by resurrecting their individualism, they had found a point of departure from which they could finally rebuild their lives. In the period following the First World War, one novel emerged as the dominant literary work that best captured the disorder felt by the common man. It is semi-autobiographical, written by an individual who felt as disillusioned and abandoned by society as the rest of the generation did.