World War I and its repercussions revealed to a global audience the hidden savagery inherent to even the most supposedly civilized societies. In the wake of the most devastating war the world had ever seen, the brutalities of industrialism, conformity, and nationalism were laid bare upon millions of marked and unmarked graves. Philosophers, scientists, and artists alike began to reevaluate what could truly be known about reality and the unpredictable belligerent nature of man. The philosophical movement that arose in part from this world-wide despair and transformative view of Western culture was called Modernism. Modernism was a pivotal rejection of the form, religion, and tradition that had shaped the previous century; faith and optimism were replaced with doubt and nihilism. Perhaps most importantly, Modernism was about the losing, the stealing, and the suffocation of identity. The horrors and moral destitution of the war left many Americans feeling betrayed by romantic ideas of heroism and honor. People began to question everything about themselves and the world they once knew. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited,” Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River,” and Zitkála-ša’s  “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” we are presented with three pieces from Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation” that portray the difficulty of finding the self in a scarred world of uncertainty and change.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales is forced to come to terms not only with the loss of his wife and inability to regain custody of his daughter, but also the fact that the world he had once known intimately had now all but disappeared: “He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more... It had gone back into France” (Fitzgerald). After the end of the jazz age at the hand of the Great Depression, most of the wealthy American expatriates living around Europe were forced to return home to look for work. Charlie, of course, does his best to cover up his disappointment at Paris’ return to its native culture. He is, he points out frequently to himself and to others, a changed man who finds debauchery disinteresting, if not distasteful.

Despite his vehemence that he is done with his past, however, he still glorifies his memories of it and actively seeks out some of the places that were once familiar to him: “He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity... A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside…” (Fitzgerald).  Charlie consciously sought out his old haunts and was well aware of his mistake, especially when he mentioned visiting the bar to Mary. He says of himself and his fellow swingers: "We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us” (Fitzgerald). Mary, who still holds great contempt for him, is easily able to pick up on his remaining fondness for his youth. Her skepticism of his behavior is immediately validated by the tumultuous arrival of “Charlie’s old friends-- the intrusion of the past in the present” and she is sure “that Charlie is not weaned from his old life” (Nettles).

Nevertheless, much like his youth, Charlie’s problems stem from his self-destructive actions. He “‘sold himself short’ by having fallen into dissolute habits through earning and spending vast sums of money during the boom years” (Eby). His carelessness cost him his youth, his wife, and his daughter: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone” (Fitzgerald). As for Honoria, the last remaining piece of himself, Charlie exhibits a kind of desperation. Since he had already missed a few years of her life, “She was already an individual with a code of her own, and Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly.” Charlie hopes that somehow gaining Honoria back and making her just a little more like himself will allow him to have a safe, living connection to the past.

Charlie had lost part of himself when the once never-ending party came to a grinding halt, another when he lost Helen, and another when he loses Honoria again. With the world changed around him and he still largely the same, Charlie just didn’t know how to fit in. He was never sober enough to know who he was or what he had, and now, he seems too sober to deal with what he has lost. Just like Charlie and Fitzgerald, many of the men and women who faced the abrupt shift from the wealthy and frivolous culture of the jazz age to the Great depression were forced to live in “a world in which nothing compensated them for the loss of youth and fortune...  leaving them alone with the ghosts of a past irrecoverable and inescapable” (Nettles).

Rather than having the world around him change, Nick Adams from Hemingway's “Big, Two-Hearted River” was forced to deal with a world that stayed largely the same while he himself had been forever altered by a traumatic experience. Nick’s decision to go fishing hints that he is trying to return to some undamaged part of himself through nature, or at least to recover something that he feels he has lost: “Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling” (Hemingway). There was something about fishing and being out in nature by himself that reminded him of the time before he was damaged.

Nick appeared to be entirely at ease hiking to the river: “The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy” (Hemingway). He also finds a strange sort of solace when he climbs into his tent for the night: “He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it” (Hemingway). Of course, the ease with which he travels and sets up camp so efficiently also alludes to a strong familiarity of routine.

While the trauma Nick might have suffered is never explicitly described in the story, there are dozens of subtle hints throughout the story that suggest Nick’s past as a soldier and of his suffering from Shell Shock. There are “acts of potential brutality inherent to fishing” that “echo events beyond the setting of the story and In Our Time as a whole” (O’Brien), such as his detached anatomical precision when hooking the grasshopper and gutting the fish. When he hooks the trout and begins to panic, there are many parallels between his behaviors and those of someone suffering from a panic attack.

Nevertheless, Nick “rigorously blocks out any memory of his war experience in his determination to find solace in nature and fishing” throughout the story (O’Brien). However, Nick does remember Hopkins, and the day he “gave him his “22 caliber Colt automatic pistol” and “his camera to Bill... to remember him always by” (Hemingway). This heavily suggests that Hopkins had never really planned on returning, and likely never will: “They never saw Hopkins again. That was a long time ago on the Black River” (Hemingway).

Nick “continues to struggle with the identity not only of the man he has become but also the man he will never be again” (Quick). He remembers the man he once was, happy and carefree, and the friends who used to have, and now is forced to remember them and the things he once loved with the impervious stains of war, sorrow, and regret.

For Zitkála-ša, identity was always more than something personal. As a Sioux Native-American, her personal identity was inextricably tied to her culture. The name Zitkála-ša, which means Red Bird in her native language, is her birth name and a conscious choice over using her missionary-given name Gertrude Bonnin. For her and her mother, the Sioux culture was an inseparable part of who they were.

The language, history, religion and land of her mother and her ancestors were always, naturally, an integral part of her. Everything that her mother was, that her people were, she did all she could to absorb and adopt: “We delighted in impersonating our own mothers. We talked of things we had heard them say in their conversations. We imitated their various manners, even to the inflection of their voices... and bent forward as old women were most accustomed to do” (Zitkála-ša). As Martha Cutter writes in her study of Zitkála-ša’s autobiographies: “Zitkála-ša describes the Sioux as speaking a language which is participatory, empathetic, and communal… it functions to enhance and build a sense of dignity and worth in both the speaker and the listener.”

Zitkála-ša’s pride as a person is the same as her pride in her people, and especially in her mother, who she frequently emulated. She was angry for her mother, vengeful for her tears, and valued whatever she valued. “We were once very happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither. Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us away” (Zitkála-ša). In her subsequent anger for her mother’s frustrations, she “expresses the value of land to her own mother and, by extension, to herself” (Newmark).

    Nevertheless, Zitkála-ša writes that even her Mother changed her ways over time. She adopted the white man’s clothes, his logs, and even allowed for her and Dawa to get an education from the missionaries. At a time when Native Americans were left heavily impoverished by forceful laws that drove them further west and gave them little to no resources or aid, many were left with no other choice but to further assimilate into white culture in order to survive. Zitkála-ša’s culture, and therefore her identity, was slowly taken from her and her people and  scattered by prejudiced laws.

For the generation that survived the great war and the generations that came just after, the world seemed at times to be nothing but bleak and harsh. For Fitzgerald, the culture of wealth and lavishness that had sustained the jazz age was both a form of liberation and poison. The self was something that couldn’t be changed and would, eventually, drive itself to destruction seeking the past. For Hemingway, the monumental destruction of the inner self was something irreversible and painful. No matter how hard one tried, they could not recapture the person they used to be; experience was permanent, and innocence was fleeting. For Zitkála-ša, the self was a part of a much larger social construction. She saw herself as only another Sioux could, which would be something that her suppressors might never understand. For Modernists, the self was something muddled by society and nature that, once bound by the sticky webs of modern life, could never again be untangled.

Works Cited

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Hemingway, Ernest. "Big, Two-Hearted River." XRoads. University of Virginia. 27 April 2016

Nettels, Elsa. "Howell's 'A Circle In The Water' And Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited'." Studies In

Short Fiction 19.3 (1982): 261. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.

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Washington, DC." The American Indian Quarterly 36.3 (2012): 318-347. Project MUSE.

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