"You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafés."
– Chapter 12, The Sun Also Rises
Hemingway led the “Lost Generation”, a famous group of literary expatriates who colonized Paris and Spain between the wars.
What does it mean to be an expatriate in Hemingway’s style? Simply to drink the experience in great gulps? Or is it just a search for meaning, away from an empty world with "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (FS Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)?
Is that excess even possible any more?
