Ernest Hemingway: Before reading his first novel

My past posts on Hemingway mainly concerned his posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden, which, I found, clearly involves multiple personality of both the main female character and the main male character, a novelist.

Now, in planning to read Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, I am somewhat taken aback by the fact that its male protagonist, Jake, is said to be impotent (from war injuries). I can see how this might be symbolic of WWI’s “lost generation,” but it still seems rather odd for a male novelist’s first novel, especially a novelist later known for his macho public persona.