Why Would Anyone Pick Cohn First?

Why does Hemingway open his novel with Robert Cohn?

            My first premise is that Hemingway’s most plausible alternative opening would have been to introduce his narrator and protagonist, Jake Barnes, first.  The novel is, arguably, more so about Jake Barnes than any other character, which is why the Robert Cohn intro could be deemed misleading.  Moreover, the novel focuses on character study and relationships.  Therefore, an action scene or a setting description would have been even more misleading, not to mention that the latter might easily have bored the reader into closing The Sun Also Rises before giving it a proper chance.  In the reading response that follows, I have explained why it would have been a bad move for Hemingway to introduce Jake first.    

Jake’s summation of Robert Cohn immediately establishes his credibility in a way that a self-description could not have done.  Jake conveys an impression of objectivity by granting Cohn credit for his more admirable traits—his ferocious work ethic; his gentle, honest personality—while also disparaging Cohn’s vulnerabilities, such as his social ineptness and desperation when it comes to women.  Jake also demonstrates a perceptiveness bordering on omniscience in his ruthless dissection of Cohn’s psyche, e.g. “He cared nothing for boxing…but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”  The intimacy and specificity of observations like these suggests that Jake is basically inside Cohn’s head, which makes readers feel that they are in competent hands with him behind the wheel as narrator.

Had Barnes applied a similar level of psychoanalysis to himself instead, the reader would have been instinctively wary of his motives and reliability.  Positive claims would come across as bragging and be automatically suspect as exaggeration or outright falsehood; slurs might seem self-pitying or just render the narrator pitiful in general.  Prolonged introspection in itself, no matter what conclusions Jake came to, would probably come across as narcissistic and be off-putting to a reader who had only just opened the book and met him a page ago.  In the case of a first-person narrative, the narrator’s personality traits are best revealed mainly through his actions and dialogue.

Furthermore, it would have been incompatible with Jake’s character for him to have the forthrightness to bare his soul to the reader on the first page.  His crucial weakness—his hinted-at war injury, which seems to have left him some kind of eunuch—is such a sensitive topic for him that he actually never explicitly states what it was.  One can only deduce, from the fact that it prevents him from being with Brett, from the fact that it can be made a cruel joke of, and from the Italian liaison colonel’s remark that Jake had sacrificed more than his life—that it concerns his manhood.  Had Hemingway opened his novel with this crucial bit of information, before the reader had a chance to get a better look at Jake as a person, he would have risked reducing Jake to a punch line.