A Strong Justification for a Nomadic Behavior

When one first encounters the characters in the The Sun Also Rises one immediately wonders about their mental and emotional state. The characters all have extremely self-destructive and irradical behaviors, they all engage in extreme drinking and emotional and physcical dissatachement as well; they all travel together with absolutely no aspirations or goals, and they easily get bored. However, once the book is read with the background and historical information provided by Malcom Cowley in his book Exile's Return, Hemingway's book reads as extremely logic, and his characters read as realistic and expected of the time. One becomes more sympathetic and understanding of their culture ("The Lost Generation").
Cowley makes a great point when he points out that most of the culture that was to be created was an immediate result of what one may call a war culture. "We were fed, lodged, clothed by strangers[...]we had learned that problems could be left behind by us merely moving elsewhere" (Cowley 46). This quote is particularly striking because it explains much of the bohemian behavior that was to arrive as soon as the war would be over, many of the people that went through this process would come home and not find what they had for so long illusioned or pictured, or what they remember to be home. They found responsabilities and worries and a home that was not their "ideal" home. So they went out and looked for it, and Europe was the talked about "ideal", but as Cowley points out they could not find it there either. Spite their findings they still had something that drove them elsewhere to move from place to place, to find the "ideal" home, one can not clearly assume that it was hope that drove them, because it seems as if hope is lost until this point.
Also, Cowley justifies much of the irradical behavior to what may have been the constant looking for following the right path, or the desired behavior, Cowley clearly states that they needed "guidance" and happened to look in the wrong place, or found the unforeseen (Cowley 107-108).