Both F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" center on characters who have been
made, in different ways, impotent by their lives and have been left stranded in a social world in which there is no compelling sense of past, present, or future. This paper shows how the leading characters in these two
novels are, in some ways, uniquely American, but in other ways, are also more
representative of Modernism and of an international "lost generation" than representative of a distinctively American character. Both Jay Gatsby and Jake Barnes, the narrator of "The Sun Also Rises", are deeply flawed, and yet, by the end of the novels, we feel a great deal of sympathy with both of the characters. Both authors allow us to understand the tremendously difficult balancing act undertaken by these characters and by the other characters in the novels, and so we are sympathetic rather than scornful when they fail.