According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in order to survive, human beings require the need for love, intimacy, and friendship before advancing on to the subsequent stages in life. The sense of love and belonging has become a necessity in human interactions for affection and acceptance to emerge. An American social psychologist, Zick Rubin suggests that romantic love can be classified into three separate elements: “attachment, caring, and intimacy.” However, post-World War I surfaced to become like any other decade. The Lost-Generation of the era soon emerged, lacking the traditional emotion of love, causing disillusionment amongst various groups of people. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, the characters deploy an accurate image of the death of love during the post-World War I generation and the significant amount of impact it had it on the people of the Lost Generation, including numerous expatriates.
By becoming one of the most reoccurring themes during the 1920’s, the death of love was used by writers throughout the United States and Europe. Hemingway, too, used this ideology and was easily able to apply it into this novel. Setting itself largely in Paris, Hemingway makes it clear that there is no irony that he places his characters into the well-known “City of Love.” Jake Barnes, the centralized protagonist of the novel, allows for a fine example of the theme. Barnes is seen to “cut off from love” when he is claimed to be impotent due to shell wound injury during the war. His impotency makes him incapable of performing masculine duties, thus pushing him further away in being fit to love. . As Mark Spilka states in his essay, “The Death of Love,” Barnes