robert cohn

The Sun Also Rises has to begin with Robert.  To start with Robert is to redeem him.  He’s constantly and aggressively shat upon.  Michael gives him the same hard time many times.  And although Bill, Brett, and Jake feel badly about Michael’s meanness, and wish he wasn’t so mean, all three of them acknowledge their disliking of Robert.  In fact, each of them in their own way make it clear to Robert that he isn’t wanted.  It’s a pleasant and surprising thing when Robert isn’t overbearingly pathetic and clingy and blind to his own social ineptitude.  So that The Sun Also Rises begins with Robert in many ways confirms his existence and the weight of his existence.  We ought not to write Robert away like Michael, Bill, Brett, and Jake do.  (And perhaps Jake, as narrator, doesn’t write him away.  But in the moment, in scene, all four of them do.)

Jake must feel the weight of Robert’s existence the most.  It’s reflective of Jake’s psychology that Robert, as a suitor and self-identified lover of Brett’s, is a threat.  Jake as narrator pays an almost undue amount of attention to Robert’s character at the start of the novel.  It’s almost as if Jake’s struggling to see in Robert what Brett might see in him, to validate Brett’s albeit temporary choice to be with him, to give Brett the benefit of the doubt because he loves her so much.  Part of Jake’s intense analysis of Robert must relate to Jake’s impotency.  Jake fails where Robert succeeds.  And even if Robert was an awful, terrible, disgusting person, Robert would still be able to be intimate with Brett, and could therefore be with Brett in a more permanent and sexually satisfying way than Jake could.  This has to tear Jake apart.  Even if he’s resigned himself to being alone, to not having Brett, to watching her go off with other men, to helping her go off with them, it must sting him that Robert – blind, burdensome Robert – is more of a romantic option than he is.  Robert even beats him up.  And so Robert’s boxing history comes full circle. 

There’s a complex set of thoughts hovering around Robert and Jake’s portrayal of Robert, which is less tinged with jealousy and bitterness than one might expect, coming from Jake.  I’m going so far as to say that Jake’s narration redeems Robert by putting him first because if Jake didn’t, and Robert were a small insignificant pest of a character, Robert simply wouldn’t obtain reality.  He’d be a cardboard cutout.  Jake pays him respect by starting with Robert, and cardboard cutouts can’t demand respect – only people can.  Jake establishes Robert as a person first and foremost, flaws and all, because Robert’s realness forces Jake to confront his own worldview, his own moral system, his own self.  Jake’s ability to identify with Robert, or at the very least to see him far more clearly than many of the other characters have the patience or will to, is absolutely psychologically necessary for him to be able to relate the events of the novel and their significance.