Bulls And Steers: The Lost Generation

Bulls and steers are the two components that make up bull-fighting, which plays a massive role in the group’s time in Spain. Bulls are aggressive, dangerous, exciting, beautiful, and inherently self-destructive. They receive all the glory, because they are the stars of the show. Steers are passive, safe, impotent, and emasculate. No one in the audience cares or even pays attention to them, but they are necessary in the show. Ultimately, the bulls’ short-lived glory is met by death, which is what the members of the Lost Generation are awaiting. Bulls can represent the entirety of the Lost Generation, because they are dangerous and self-destructive when alone or unsupervised by a person qualified to control them. The same can be said about steers. Steers, like the Lost Generation, are ignored by the majority of the people and are …show more content…
Steers are essential to bull-fighting because it is their job to calm the bulls, but they don’t contribute anything significant to the excitement of the show. The Lost Generation played a major role in society through their war efforts, yet they find themselves useless to society. In fact, impotent is the word used to describe expatriates and the Lost Generation, by Bill in the in the previous chapter. Hemingway portrays all of the characters as having traits of both steers and bulls, but each individual identifies with one over the other. Jake can be identified as a steer, because he was physically emasculated and he is seen as the ringleader of the group. He seems to be the only one in the group that rationally thinks things through, and longs for a healthy way to cope with his PTSD, but this has a lot to do with the fact that he is the narrator. He can be described in the novel as the lead steer, because he is the only character shown repeatedly keeping the group in check.