Hemmingway’s characters all are trying to fill in a void within them. Cohn is in search of companionship and comrades within his setting. He sees himself as inferior to his peers and desperately tries to prove himself with his writings. Still feeling inadequate after his success, he entreats Jake to go to South America trying to escape these internal feelings of loneliness.

Jake, psychologically as well as physically is scarred by the Great War. It has been implied that Jake has lost his masculinity from one of the battles. He too, is tired of his lonely solace and seeks an evening with a prostitute to fill the void of his afternoons. Jake resents the fact that Cohn considers him his best friend; due to the fact that Cohn is strong, intelligent, ‘complete’, and now is rich due to his own success.

Though Lady Brett Ashley comes off as a charismatic lady, she too suffers from the displacement of war. Her experience of the War was through the V.A.D. program, where she met Jake. We, the reader, are unsure of what her character was like before the war, but it is has undoubtedly changed after. She is seen as going from one man to another, probably unsure of her value in society. She wants very much to be loved and happy- maybe a traditional dream she had before the war- but now she is seen as wandering from man to man like she does from bar to bar.

They are all part of the ‘Lost Generation’ because none of them are able to grasp what they want in life. They fill their days squandering their money on booze to help fill their individual voids. All of them suffer from depression, which was not considered a medical disease at the time, so they even lacked the medical means to help them.