Harlam and the family move to Arizona and leaves Grampa in Mississippi alone with all of the racism. Dad really has a hard time letting Hiram go back to Greenwood and getting a head full of grampa’s Southern nonsence. Hiram Hillburn is the main character and is the narrator. Hiram at first didn’t know what the fight between his dad and his grampa was until he returned back to Mississippi from Arizona. Hiram did not remember much from Mississippi when he returned.
The world was always puzzling, but after the war people didn’t even bother to find any significance in life. After the war, people resided to sex and drunkenness for the fulfillment of their hopelessness. The characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises struggle with these problems. Hemingway tries to portray how the lives of the Lost Generation were simply disintegrating into the dark abyss. Through the characters of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway tries to depict the aimless lives of people and how they became “lost”.
One example of this was the simple that no able bodied man was able to live in these projects along with their families. They were forced to struggle on their own to look for low-end jobs. This idea of the American family that consisted of a working father and a working mother clearly weren’t in affect here. It proved hurtful to the lifestyle of many African American families. As a women stated in the film, “The strong and tightly knit families I had grew up around had begun to shatter and it was one of the most tragic things I had seen”(Pruitt-Igoe).
At one point, Andy looked into his eyes and became overwhelmed with his feelings of isolation. "The loneliness-the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn't anybody at all in the world and he was left." From this glimpse into the Chinaman's world a person realizes how alone the old man is actually. The old Chinaman is known around the town as “Death,” because his eyes are one colored and abnormal. Although, if one were to truly gaze into his eyes, he/she would not find death but longing for a friend.
Crook works on a farm, he is quite intelligent and he can read. He also owns lots of books, and because he has his own room becomes very lonely. The other men won’t enter his room because he is black. Crook has a very distinctive crippled back which is where he gets his nick name Crook from referring to his crooked back and his character is seen as a lonely, crippled, black man. During the story his loneliness becomes obvious and he wants a close friend and is jealous of the relationship between George and Lennie and says to Lennie when George is out “S’pose he (George) gets hurt so he can’t come back”, maybe hoping if this is true he could be Lennie’s close friend.
Him having books suggests to us that he may have been well educated as a child. When he was young boy he lived on a smallholding with his father, so he was probably treated with a bit of respect, however, now he is just a black man working on a ranch with a lot of white men, and now he is treated with no respect at all, he is an outcast which nobody wants to know, 'If I say something it's just a nigger talking'. So from having people liking him to no-one liking him at all is quite a big jump. The other ranch workers see him as entertainment, as you can easily win a fight against him if you were put up to it, when the boss comes along
These texts suggest that it is often after experiencing different barriers in life that an individual can come to value and seek a true sense of belonging. Billy in “the simple gift” is the leading character, whose father is violent, careless and an alcoholic and has an absent mother, was never given the acceptance and love of how it felt to belong to someone. Instead using vulgar language was his way to describe how he felt; “...deadbeat no-hoper/shithole lonely downtrodden house/in Longlands Rd, Nowheresville”. This quote shows how billy was isolated from school and at home. With these impacts on his life the library and Westfield creek became his only places of happiness and belonging.
It was very obvious that Holden was feeling lonely throughout the book and even with all the people around him, he just felt like nothing was worth living because the one thing he loved was gone. It hurt so badly that Holden considered the possibility of suicide, but even that made him even more depressed. As stated in the book “What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would’ve done it, too, if I’d been sure somebody’d cover me up as soon as I landed” (Salinger 104).
Lying alone on the beach and facing away from others betraying that he’s not accepted by the society. Being different in this society is not the only thing on his mind right now. After the war, recession starts to bite in America with 5.2 million people unemployed, especially for African-Americans (The people history blog). He works so hard to support his family, but he still cannot climb up the status ladder.
Gaffney highlights John’s alienation because of the new world’s discouragement for Shakespeare. The awkward situation leaves him embarrassed, beginning his isolation from modern society. John’s entire life has been spent in solitude reading Shakespeare. Suddenly immersed in a society in which his behavior is completely taboo, John finds himself even further separated from the community than he was on the reservation. Bernard observes that John may never be able to completely assimilate into this environment, “partly on his interest, being focused on what he calls ‘the soul’ which he persists in regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment” (158).