Jake and Bill wait for quite a while for a seat at a restaurant that’s become popular with Americans. As they leave, Jake says “Too many compatriots,” immediately prior to his observation that a neighborhood is being razed to accommodate those “compatriots,” American tourists and expatriates. Jake and others like him are disrupting life in the old world, spurring progress that’s destroying the past.
The Sun Also Rises – 5
The Sun Also Rises – 7
Bill says, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you.” This commentary is interesting not just as it applies to Jake, but also, as a description of the entire generation Hemingway is describing.
To the Lighthouse – 2
Mrs. Ramsay feels protective towards men because of the boyish reverence “something trustful, childlike” they offer her and other women. In reflection, she contrasts this with what she thinks her daughters feel, the “infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other.” This association between Paris, the mecca for Western expatriates, and the rejection of traditional gender roles goes to the very heart of modernism.