Why bother with Cohn?

Why does Hemingway open the novel with Robert Cohn?

The Sun Also Rises begins with a wry biographical sketch of Jake Barnes’ somewhat-friend, Robert Cohn. What is clear from the first few chapters is that Cohn is a significant foil to our narrator and protagonist, and it brings us to the murky moral ground that the novel trudges through. The values Hemingway is contrasting with these characters are both social and narrative, pitting pre-war sentimentality against cold, drunken cynicism. The effect of this beginning focusing on Cohn, for me, made me read Jake Barnes as trying to be everything this resentful, reluctant outcast isn’t.

What better way for Jacob Barnes to assert this new ex-pat identity than by ridiculing an old American identity first? He experience friendship with in Europe, away from American values (“I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot.”) Barnes aims to reject a national identity, while Cohn has always felt an outcast and struggles to be valued by an in-group. In his introduction, Barnes mocks Cohn bitterly, inferring that his status as an outcast led him to boxing and a hasty first marriage.  The comparison with the steer who is outcast after being gored in the bullfight is clear to the reader before Mike drunkenly announces it. Hemingway’s narrator wants a critical reader for his novel, not a passive one who accepts the text as literal truth. We shouldn’t look to someone’s novel for a system of values to give meaning to the world—then we’d just be like the steer begging to rejoin the herd. Barnes’ “accident” also contrasts him with the steer, in a way. Though wounded in the same place, Barnes seeks acceptance in Europe rather than return to his American “herd”.

Barnes’ perspective is narrated with blunt normative statements (“____ was good”, “the best-looking boy”) and a clear implication of the details he conveniently leaves out, with the exposition seldom departing the time and place of his travels for long. It reads as an almost dialectical response to a reader or writer as vain as Cohn, who cares only about belonging to the dominant classes in America. By beginning with Cohn, and keeping this character interesting enough to keep around but annoying enough to dislike, Hemingway satirizes the kind of old-fashioned reader he doesn’t want. Cohn finds self-serving meaning in anything—he can’t believe that his fling with Brett meant nothing to her. The kind of reader Barnes wants is not interested in learning accurate facts from a moral authority, as Cohn does with The Purple Land; such a reader may end up worrying of boredom at a bullfight. If one reads books to learn how to value the world, Hemingway cautions against that by showing us the kind of narrow-minded person we could become.