The Sun Also Rises In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes is a lost man who wastes his life on drinking. Towards the beginning of the book Robert Cohn asks Jake, “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize that you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?” Jake weakly answers, “…showed first 75 words of 517 total…

…showed last 75 words of 517 total…and Jake responds by nonchalantly saying, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” And since he is still as lost in the world as he was at the beginning of the book as he is at the end, this only furthers the proof of how disillusioned the lost generation was. If the book was, in fact, somewhat autobiographical to Hemingway’s life, it’s surprising that Hemingway waited until his sixties to kill himself.