Essay on Robert Cohns Struggle for Respect in The Sun...

Robert Cohns Struggle for Respect in The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes: Youre not an aficionado? Spanish waiter: Me? What are bulls? Animals. Brute animals... A cornada right through the back. For fun-you understand. (Hemingway, 67) Why does everybody hate Robert Cohn? At the beginning of Hemingways novel, The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes, the storys point-of-view character, wants us to believe that he has at least some appreciation for Cohn. He relates some of Cohns life for us, how at Princeton he was a middle weight boxing champ, how despite his physical prowess he had feelings of shyness and inferiority...being treated as a Jew, (Hemingway, 11) his turbulent career as a magazine editor and his failed marriage. Its†¦show more content†¦This much is clear in Mikes drunken diatribes to Cohn: I would have thought youd loved being a steer, Robert...They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and there always hanging about so...Is Robert going to follow Brett around like a steer all the time? (146) And even then, rather tha n knocking Mike out, which he certainly is capable of doing, Cohn takes the abuse and sulks, perhaps in the interest of preserving his interactions with Lady Brett. But Cohn is continuously bad-mouthed. The other characters make several anti-Semitic comments, scoffing his Jewish superiority. (166) And all through this, Brett Ashley doesnt give him the time of day! How can this man be held so contemptuously by the others? Maybe because Cohn is the bull, not the steer. Hemingway hides this reference in one brief line. As Jake and Lady Brett are watching the bulls come out, Jake remarks: Look how he knows how to use his horns...Hes got a left and a right, just like a boxer. (144) The only other boxer in the novel is Cohn, and at one point in the book he reveals that he, too, knows how to use his horns: fed up with taking insults, he punches both Jake and Bill and knocks them out. Compare this to Jake: sexually dysfunctional, he is a steer, unable to consummate his affair with Brett Ash ley. This at