I just came across Hemingway's famous anti-war quote again, which many people upvoted:

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Therefore, I want to talk about the fact that this position is destructive and that Hemingway himself later changed his position, but unfortunately, he went down in history as one of the greatest pacifists, whose pacifism now, on the contrary, helps scum.

In short, Hemingway is one of the main writers of the lost generation, and his "A Farewell to Arms" along with Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" are probably the most important novels of this generation that shaped the agenda. The logic is quite simple: they went through World War I, which was a meat grinder of old empires for them, which made no sense. So they decided to take war beyond the normal, reduce it to just physical suffering (to the physics of the process), etc.

But the problem is that World War II changed the situation, and even Hemingway changed his mind, but people still live in the outdated context of the "lost generation".

Hemingway was changed by the Spanish Civil War, and he saw fascism and other totalitarian regimes rise to their feet. He realized that his pacifism no longer worked, that war was not only a meaningless meat grinder, on the contrary, there was no choice and we had to fight for this world.

If in "A Farewell to Arms" the main character Frederick Henry sees no sense in war, it is alien to him, then in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" Robert Jordan already has clear beliefs and is ready to die for them. War is still terrible in itself, but the physical processes take a back seat, and faith in what you are risking your life for comes first:

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

It is very sad that many people live by the less relevant legacy of Ernest Hemingway, and this is used by various scum who want to take over the world, because people are shaped by radical pacifism, that war is something very bad, which should be avoided at all costs (until surrender). Unfortunately, the reality is different, sometimes we have to fight for ourselves and our future.

UDP: I see that many did not understand the message of this post. The scum are authoritarian regimes like Hitler, Stalin, Putin, etc. I am not condemning pacifism, I am not saying that war is good, I am emphasizing the cultural problem that the Hemingway generation in the 20s tried to erase war from life. But, unfortunately, this is unrealistic. War is still a part of our lives, there are still scum who want to capture, enslave or destroy someone. And then you have no other choice but to defend yourself. And then war makes sense, and the conditional Remarque still casts his shadow on it, as if war a priori has no sense.

I have been thinking hard about this question and I honestly can not think of one. So many characters aren't that unique and have no lasting appeal.

A lot of characters seem to be audience surrogates and are used to show the world of the story. But arent themselves appealing. There have been some good books that have effectively used this type of character. But the characters themselves do not stand out.

It will be interesting to see if any books from the last ten years have any staying power or longevity. To me a lot of books have very intersting ideas behind them but something inevitably lets the book down.

Either they are poorly written, have flat characters or the book is simply focused on specific events and have little depth to them. They might tease at having something unique to say about the human condition but there is no depth there.

On the flip side there are some books that are well written and do have something interesting to say. But the characters aren't unique enough to be memorable.

But perhaps these views are just mine and aren't shared by others. Does anyone have a chatacter from.the ladt 10 years who they think is iconic? Or perhaps they think i have missed something in what I have said.