Jake And Cohn example essay topic

... now called Jake. He ran through several more revisions, often with F. Scott Fitzgerald's help, and changed the novel to its current title just before printing in October 1926. The book was a success and established Hemingway as an internationally known author. 3.1. The Main Characters Jake Barnes: The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Jake is a young American expatriate working in a Paris newspaper office.

He is a veteran of WWI and has an injury from it which, it appears, has left him impotent. He desires Brett, with whom he developed a relationship while in the war hospital, but cannot have her because of his physical condition. His submissive pursuit of her often undermines his values and sense of self-worth. His other passion besides Brett is bull-fighting; he is considered a true aficionado of the sport.

He spends his days and nights living irresponsibly and drinking heavily with his friends, none of whom he seems to care about too deeply, such as Robert Cohn. Overall, Jake represents the worst of the Lost Generation - irresponsible, aimless, and bitter; his life seems over before it has begun. Brett (Lady Ashley): Although the true antagonist in the novel is the lack of values and direction of the Lost Generation, Brett comes closest to personifying this malaise and provoking it in others as she consistently manipulates Jake and makes him undermine his sense of self. She met Jake as a volunteer nurse when he was in the hospital during the war, but she is now engaged to Mike Campbell.

Brett is the strongest, most conventionally 'masculine' character in the novel, dominating her lovers and manipulating them like a bull-fighter; she even has a short haircut and refers to herself as a 'chap. ' However, in her carelessly dominating relationships with Jake, Mike, Cohn, and Romero, she appears to be dependent on them as well; she needs men to let her be dominant. 3.2. Characters of Minor Importance Robert Cohn: A Jewish novelist from Princeton, Cohn the only central male character not a war veteran, and perhaps because of this he is the only one whose values have not been fully compromised. He represents American pre-war romanticism and idealism, and it is often painful to watch him pitted against a world that has lost these beliefs.

He is romantically involved with Frances at the start of the novel, dominated by her as he was by his former wife. Quiet and willing to take abuse, he is disliked by everyone in Jake's circle, especially Mike, who resents him for his fling with Brett and the way he follows her around pathetically. Jake, who shares certain feelings of inferiority with Cohn, sometimes sympathizes with his plight, but frequently Jake enjoys it and does not intervene when Cohn is humiliated. Cohn's one strength is that he is an excellent boxer, a skill developed to compensate for his inferiority complex. Pedro Romero: Although Romero appears only briefly in the novel, his presence is crucial, as he is the only man who seems capable of manipulating Brett. His appeal to her, beyond his beautiful appearance, is clear through the parallels Hemingway draws between bull-fighting and sexuality.

Like Brett with her submissive men, Romero is highly skilled at a somewhat 'feminine' manipulation of the bulls; moreover, he penetrates them in a 'masculine' way at the end of fights with his sword. These tactics carry through to his relationship with the audience, as well. Jake admires him because he is a great bull-fighter and because he fulfills the code of the hero, as Hemingway defined it: a man of action who exhibits 'grace under pressure. ' While Jake fought in the war, he never controls his destiny in the face of death as Romero does, and with such command.

Mike Campbell: Brett's fianc'e, Mike has gone bankrupt through business associations with 'false friends'. He often gets drunk and grows possessive of Brett. Though he supposedly doesn't mind that she has affairs openly, he hates Cohn for his fling with her. He humiliates Cohn to his face and tosses off anti-Semitic comments at him behind his back. Bill Gorton: Jake's writer-friend, Bill seems to waste his literary talent on witty, ironic quips and drunken socializing; he may represent Hemingway's fellow Lost Generation writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Hemingway's own worst tendencies. Still, he bonds with Jake while they go fishing, opening up to an intimacy unavailable in the city, and at times he seems like Jake's only real friend. 3.3.

Major Themes The Lost Generation: 'The Sun Also Rises' is an impressive document of the people who came to be known, in Gertrude Stein's words, as the 'Lost Generation. ' The young generation she speaks of had their dreams and innocence smashed by World War I, emerged from the war bitter and aimless, and spent much of the prosperous 1920's drinking and partying away their frustrations. Jake epitomizes the Lost Generation; physically and emotionally wounded from the war, he is disillusioned, cares little about conventional sources of hope - family, friends, religion and work - and apathetically drinks his way through his expatriate life. Even travel, a rich source of potential experience, mostly becomes an excuse to drink in exotic locales.

Irresponsibility also marks the Lost Generation; Jake rarely intervenes in other's affairs, even when he could help, and Brett carelessly hurts men and considers herself powerless to stop doing so. While Hemingway critiques the superficial, empty attitudes of the Lost Generation, the other quote in the epigraph from Ecclesiastes expresses the hope that future generations may rediscover themselves. Emasculation and impotence: One of the key changes Hemingway observes in the Lost Generation is that of the new male psyche, battered by the war and newly domesticated. Jake embodies this new emasculation; most likely physically impotent, he cannot have sex and, therefore, can never have the insatiable Brett. Instead, he is dominated by her, as is Cohn, who is also abused by the other women in his life.

Jake is even threatened by the homosexual men who dance with Brett in Paris; while not sexually interested in her, they have more 'manhood' than Jake, physically speaking. Though a veteran, Jake now works in an office and fritters away his time with superficial socializing; he admires bull-fighters so much, and Romero in particular, because they are far more heroic than he is or ever was. Though Romero's appearance is more feminine than Jake's, he fulfills the code of the Hemingway hero, commandingly confronting death as a man of action with what Hemingway has called 'grace under pressure. ' Jake, on the other hand, has returned from his confrontation with death feeling like less of a man, physically and emotionally.

Sexuality and bull-fighting: Hemingway draws numerous parallels between bull-fighting and Brett's sexuality. Early in the novel, Brett tells Jake she cannot commit to him, as she will 't romper' him; while this means 'to be unfaithful to,' it also means 'to elude,' and it makes sense why she is attracted to Romero: as a great bull-fighter, he is the consummate eluder, deceiving the bulls into thinking they are close to him, then pulling away, much as Brett does with men. Romero also penetrates with his phallic sword both the bull and, as Jake metaphorically describes it, the audience; he begins as the coy, elusive female, then metamorphoses into the violent, dominant male. In one episode, Jake and Cohn also resemble steers, young oxen castrated before sexual maturity. Jake resembles the steer that joins the herd of bulls, while Cohn is like the steer excluded from the group, the pariah who follows around Brett. Nature and regeneration: Hemingway depicts nature as a pastoral paradise uncorrupted by the city or women.

Each time Jake ventures into nature, especially on his fishing trip, he is rejuvenated. While fishing with Bill, they bond and are unafraid to be intimate with each other; Jake does not mind that the fish he has caught are smaller than Bill's, in what sounds like an admission of lesser sexual virility, while Bill tells Jake he is fond of him and says that he would be called a 'faggot' in the city for saying that. They also enjoy camaraderie with the Englishman Harris there, in a departure from the competitive relationships with women that develop when women - especially Brett - are present. In San Sebastian, Jake undergoes a symbolic baptism while diving in the water.

Even the characters' excessive drinking is given greater significance during the fiesta; they return to a spiritual sense of ritual and generosity while partying, a distinct comparison to the spiritually bankrupt, competitive rituals of city life. Hemingway's journalistic style: Hemingway's spare, laconic prose was influenced by his early work as a journalist, and he has probably had the greatest stylistic influence over 20th-century American writers of anyone. The key to Hemingway's style is omission; we usually learn less about Jake through his direct interior narration, but more through what he leaves out and how he reacts to others. For instance, we understand him much better through his thoughts on Cohn, who shares many of Jake's traits. As an example of how much Hemingway omits, Jake never even fully describes his war injury, leaving it somewhat open to interpretation.

Hemingway provides a good outline of his own style when Jake describes Romero's bull-fighting style: 'There were no tricks and no mystification's. ' Like Romero, Hemingway moves close to his subject, but eschews flashiness in favor of honest, authentic writing. 4. Hemingway's Near-Death Experience Though Hemingway seems to have seen himself and life in general reflected in war, he himself never became reconciled to it. His mind was in a state of civil war, fighting demons inwardly as well as outwardly. In the long run defeat is as revealing and fundamental as victory: we are all losers, defeated by death.

To live is the only way to face the ordeal, and the ultimate ordeal in our lives is the opposite of life. Deep sea fishing, bull-fighting, boxing, big-game hunting, war - all are means of ritualizing the death struggle in his mind - it is very explicit in books such as A Farewell to Arms and Death in the Afternoon, which were based on his own experience. Modern investigations into so-called Near-Death Experiences (NDE) such as those by Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and many others, have focused on a pattern of empirical knowledge gained on the threshold of death; a dream-like encounter with unknown border regions. There is a parallel in Hemingway's life, connected with the occasion when he was seriously wounded at midnight on July 8, 1918, in Italy and nearly died.

He was the first American to be wounded in Italy during World War I. Here is a case of NDE in Hemingway, and I think that is of basic importance, pertinent to the understanding of all Hemingway's work. In A Farewell to Arms, an experience of this sort occurs to the ambulance driver Frederic Henry, Hemingway's alter ego, wounded in the leg by shellfire in Italy. Hemingway touched on that crucial experience in his life - what he had felt and thought - in the short story 'Now I Lay Me' (1927): 'my soul would go out of my body... I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back'.