The stories contain themes Hemingway was to revisit over the course of his career. He wrote about initiation rites, early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life and the importance of male comradeship. The collection conjures a world of violence and war, suffering, executions; it is a world stripped of romance, where even "the hero of the bullfight chapter pukes". Hemingway's early-20th century is a time "out of season", where war, death, and tangled, unfulfilling relationships reign. Alienation in the modern world is particularly evident in "Out of Season", which bears similarities to Eliot's "The Waste Land". Eliot's "Waste Land" motif exists throughout much of Hemingway's early fiction, but is most notable in this collection, "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929). He borrowed Eliot's device of using imagery to evoke feeling. Benson attributes similarities between Hemingway and Eliot to Pound, who edited both.