We can see in both Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Sun Also Rises that we are given each author’s perspective and commentary on the postwar generation, and more broadly, on the human condition. However, despite there always being a price to pay for love, wisdom and knowledge, both demonstrate that there is some hope for the human condition.
All of the characters in The Sun Also Rises are members of the lost generation. Filled with disillusion and lacking in direction, they stumble around and bang into one another in the face of nada. Jake Barnes is our apprentice hero this time out, and Lady Brett Ashley, a war victim, is the love interest of more than one man in the story. Excessive drinking is the medication most of the characters in this novel use to dull the pain and terror of the nothingness (nada). Jake Barnes befriends Brett, a woman with multiple ex-husbands and current affairs. Promiscuity is another means by which the characters in this novel attempt to escape the nada, but they end up paying a price for it. Lady Brett tells Jake that the struggles in her life are the payment she owes for the hell she has put men through. Jake has broken shards of Christianity throughout his soul, but in his worldview you have to earn your way and nature exacts a price for all lessons, money, love, etc. The struggles one endures do have an inherent value. Jake Barnes decides that the pain and suffering of life do bring wisdom and knowledge, though there is always a price to pay for that wisdom.
In the face of nada, the wisdom and knowledge gained through not surrendering the will to live are the only things attainable by a man that he can hold onto as he passes through the temporal realm of human existence. This is important to the novel because Robert Cohn and Mike Campbell, who are companions of Jake, have been stunted in their development by inheriting money. Jake works for his. However, the young bullfighter Romero...