“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”(Alain de Botton). Almost every love story includes relationships with flaws which usually leads to emotional and physical pain. One of the most popular types of novels are romance novels because most everyone can relate to them. For Hemingway this is one of the main reasons his books are so popular. In the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway composes a love story by incorporating concepts of conflict, sacrifice, relatable characters, and emotion.
One of the key concepts to any story is conflict, especially in a romance novel. In romance novels this conflict must be emotional to have an impact on the reader. In The Sun Also Rises the main conflict is that Jake wants to be with Brett, but Brett doesn’t want to be with Jake because of a wound he got during WWI, even though she loves him. During the war Jake sustained an injury that didn’t allow him to be sexually active anymore which was the main turn off to Brett. For Brett she couldn’t overlook that factor, so instead …show more content…
Hemingway does this by creating characters that are as realistic as possible and in this novel he uses the lost generation or Gen X to achieve this. The lost generation was the generation of people who suffered during and after WWI. In The Sun Also Rises Jake is part of this generation because of his injury and the way he acts after the war. After the war Jake just seems to be in an endless path of wandering and looking for an escape. Many readers were part of this generation or can relate to the way Jakes feel which is why this love story is understandable. While drinking in a cafe Cohn and Jake say, “This is a good place, he said. There’s a lot of liquor, I agreed”(Hemingway 19). Jake and Cohn are lost in life so all they have to look forward to is drinking and