By becoming one of the most reoccurring themes during the 1920’s, the death of love was used by writers throughout the United States and Europe. Hemingway, too, used this ideology and was easily able to apply it into this novel. Setting itself largely in Paris, Hemingway makes it clear that there is no irony that he places his characters into the well-known “City of Love.” Jake Barnes, the centralized protagonist of the novel, allows for a fine example of the theme. Barnes is seen to “cut off from love” when he is claimed to be impotent due to shell wound injury during the war. His impotency makes him incapable of performing masculine duties, thus pushing him further away in being fit to love. . As Mark Spilka states in his essay, “The Death of Love,” Barnes