Turnt.

Robert Cohn missed the war. The most serious fighting he ever encountered was in the boxing ring and the first real challenge he faced permanently flattened his nose. He is fragile, blindly led by the women in his life and alone in the company of the three other men. If he can’t sleep at night it’s not because the war is replaying on the back of his eyelids, it’s because he is ‘talking.’ He doesn’t have to constantly drink to deal with life postwar and he lacks the jaded suave of Jake, Bill and Mike. The novel opens with him because he represents what has been lost.

We can see this in everything that the others hate about him. Most obviously they despise his dogged affection for Brett. He can’t believe their brief romance meant little more than nothing to her. He does whatever he can to be around her, waiting for some Shakespearian confession, hoping that for the moment her feelings just don’t show. What he doesn’t understand is that the same romantic notions he held throughout his college years in Princeton don’t apply in postwar Europe. There is a Disney optimism that surrounds his character and for that he is despised. Jake knows that love does not necessarily add up to a successful relationship. At least twice in the course of this novel he openly admits his love for Brett. We see him first accept that she will marry Mike, then silently bear the details of her fling with Cohn, then personally deliver her to the young bullfighter, and all in the face of the open admission of his affections. There is no simple, ideal resolution that remains for Jake.

The Sun Also Rises is a drunken novel and a novel of drunks. On practically every page there is the mention of some sort of drink and if not, Hemingway is setting the scene in which something will be drunk. The character’s tolerance is impressive but if anything they seem to drink in order to avoid having to face any genuine emotional experiences. Robert, on the other hand, avoids excessive drinking and because of this he is ridiculed. The war did not leave him with the same deep well to fill as it did those more intimately involved. For the others he is a reminder of an innocence that was lost to them and they hate him for it. His childish lack of understanding, perhaps a reminder of the isolation of veterans from those who stayed home, only adds fuel to their fire.

Hemingway is not self-pitying. As a reader we grow to admire and respect Jake. He was knocked out but he was not hurt. There is a callous strength to these characters. Things could have been turned out for more optimistically if the war had been avoided. ‘Oh Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ He has accepted the way things are now.

He is not getting drunk,

He likes to drink wine.