Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Individual
Group Discount
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews December 10, 2023 December 3, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount
Qty: 00
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
[Cohn] learned [boxing] painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.
See Important Quotations Explained
The novel begins with Jake Barnes, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, describing Robert Cohn. Cohn was born to a wealthy Jewish family in New York. At Princeton, Cohn faced rampant anti-Semitism. To minimize his feelings of inferiority and to combat his shyness, he threw himself into boxing, becoming the university’s middleweight champion. He married very soon after his graduation, on the rebound from his unhappy college experience. He and his wife had three children. Cohn lost most of his fifty-thousand-dollar inheritance, and, after five years, his wife left him, just when he had made up his mind to walk out on her. After the divorce, Cohn moved to California. There, he began spending time with a literary crowd, and he soon began backing a magazine. While in California, Cohn became involved with Frances Clyne, a manipulative status-seeker. When Cohn’s magazine failed, Frances persuaded Cohn to take her to Paris to join the postwar crowd of expatriates.
During his time in Paris, Cohn has few friends, one of whom is Jake. Cohn takes up writing while in Paris, and finishes a novel. As Frances begins to age and starts to lose her beauty, her attitude toward Cohn changes from one of careless manipulation to fierce determination to make him marry her. Jake first becomes aware of Frances’s attitude while he dines one night with her and Cohn. Cohn suggests that he and Jake take a weekend trip. Jake suggests that they go to Strasbourg, in northeastern France, because he knows a girl there who can show them around. Cohn kicks him under the table several times before Jake gets the hint and notices Frances’s look of displeasure. After dinner, Cohn follows Jake to ask why he mentioned the girl and explains that Frances will not permit him to take any trip that involves seeing a girl.
[Cohn:] “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
See Important Quotations Explained
That winter, Cohn travels to New York to find a publisher for his novel. There he gains new confidence. The publishers praise the novel, and several women are “nice” to him. He also wins several hundred dollars playing bridge. This success, combined with reading a romantic chronicle of an English gentlemen traveling abroad, infects Cohn with wanderlust. Upon returning to Paris, he comes to Jake’s office to persuade him to travel to South America with him, offering to pay for the entire trip. He worries that he is not living life to the fullest. Jake responds that only bullfighters live their lives “all the way up.”
Tired of Cohn pestering him in the office, Jake invites Cohn downstairs to have a drink. Jake knows that once they finish the drink it will be easier to get rid of Cohn. At the bar, Cohn continues to harangue Jake about traveling outside of Paris. He complains that he is tired of Paris and the Latin Quarter. Jake asserts that Cohn’s discontent has nothing to do with geography, saying, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” After the drink, Jake says he needs to return to the office to work. Cohn asks if he can sit outside in the waiting room. Jake allows him to, and, after he is finished at work, he and Cohn have a drink and watch the evening Parisian crowd.
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
See Important Quotations Explained
That Jake begins his story by talking about someone else—Robert Cohn—reveals his observer mentality. Jake frequently chooses to speak about other people rather than himself. Often the only means of gaining insight into his character is to read his reactions to other characters. In typical fashion, his portrait of Cohn indirectly reveals aspects of Jake’s personality that he does not mention straight out. He states that he likes Cohn, but his description of Cohn has a patronizing tone. He describes Cohn’s confrontation with the anti-Semitic atmosphere at Princeton, but his sympathy is tainted with a trivializing attitude, perhaps pointing to a latent anti-Semitism of his own. Hence, we learn that Jake does not respect Cohn. He regards him as a somewhat pathetic, ignorant, and inexperienced man. Jake’s disdainful attitude toward Cohn may stem from the fact that Cohn never fought in World War I. Jake also characterizes Cohn as shy and insecure and subject to the control and manipulation of women. This characterization of Cohn as weak reveals Jake’s unspoken anxiety regarding his own masculinity.
Cohn worries that he is not living his life the way he ought, but he cannot figure out what is lacking in his life. Like many characters in the novel, he fixates on travel as a solution to his feelings of discontent. Jake, however, realizes that Cohn’s unhappiness stems from his personality and lifestyle, and that these will hound him wherever he goes. Cohn’s travels, Jake understands, would be as aimless and unfulfilling as his life in Paris. Typically, however, Jake offers no alternative solution to Cohn’s dissatisfaction. Instead, he asserts that only bullfighters live their lives to the fullest. He implies that nearly everyone suffers from Cohn’s feeling of discontentment, and that Cohn must learn to live with it. Throughout the novel, Jake demonstrates an ability to identify problems but an inability to solve them.
Jake’s dinner with Cohn and Frances establishes the novel’s recurrent motif of a controlling female overpowering a weak male. Although Cohn may want to go to Strasbourg, he refuses Jake’s offer because it would make Frances uncomfortable if he spent time with another woman. Frances controls Cohn and his movements, and he does not, or cannot, stand up to her. This pattern of a strong woman dominating a weak man appears as part of the novel’s broad theme of weakened masculinity, which Hemingway explores throughout The Sun Also Rises.
Finally, these chapters offer the first introduction to Hemingway’s sparse and unadorned prose style. Hemingway rarely uses metaphors or similes to communicate the action of the novel. Instead, he relies on direct, short, simple sentences. His dialogue is brief as well. Characters seldom speak more than a sentence or two at a time. Yet this seemingly minimalist style expresses much through implication and suggestion. We can infer much about Jake, for example, through his descriptions of other people. The details Hemingway chooses to include, although few, are invariably quite revealing.
Please wait while we process your payment