Summary: Chapter XIII
Jake receives a letter from Mike telling him that Brett
fainted on the train and that they stayed in San Sebastian for three
days and won’t arrive in Pamplona until Wednesday. Cohn sends a
telegram announcing that he will arrive on Thursday. Bill and Jake
reply to Cohn’s telegram, stating that they are returning to Pamplona
that night (Wednesday). Before leaving Burguete, Bill and Jake bid
a fond farewell to Wilson-Harris, a British war veteran whom they call
Harris. The three men had bonded quickly, and Harris is unhappy
to part with them. Although Jake invites Harris to come to Spain,
Harris refuses the offer. The three men share drinks in a pub. Harris
gives them both his address, along with a dozen flies, saying, “I
only thought if you fished them some time it might remind you of what
a good time we had.”
When Jake and Bill arrive in Pamplona, the innkeeper,
Montoya, informs Jake that his friends have arrived. Montoya regards
Jake as a real lover and aficionado of bullfighting, in part because
Jake stays in Montoya’s hotel every year during the fiesta. Jake
and Bill find Brett, Mike, and Cohn in a café. Mike regales them
with a war story, relating how he gave away another man’s medals,
since he had none of his own. Everyone watches the unloading of
the bulls. When the shining, muscular beasts charge out of the cages,
steers (castrated male bovines) work at calming them so that they
do not kill one another. The steers are often gored in the process.
Jake tells Brett not to look, but she watches anyway, fascinated.
Afterward, they go to a café and get drunk. Mike makes a few cutting
remarks about Cohn following Brett around like a steer, referring
to the fact that Cohn went to San Sebastian after Bill and Jake
left Pamplona. Mike berates Cohn for not knowing when he isn’t wanted.
Bill leads Cohn away, and things calm down. Mike remarks that Brett
has had affairs before, but not with Jews or with men who kept hanging around.
The group shares a supper in which copious amounts of wine mask
the shared feeling of apprehension.
Summary: Chapter XIV
Jake returns to his room that night very drunk. He hears
Brett and Mike laughing as they go to bed. Lying in bed, Jake reflects
that women make “swell friends” because a man has to be in love
with a woman to be friends with her. He feels as if he has been
getting something for nothing in his friendship with Brett but that
eventually he will have to suffer for the friendship. He decides
that people have to pay for everything that is good in life. “Enjoying
living was learning to get your money’s worth,” he concludes. However,
he also thinks that in five years this philosophy will seem as silly
and useless as all the other philosophies he has constructed. He
struggles too with the question of morality. Though he wishes Mike
would not insult Cohn, he admits to himself that he enjoys watching
Mike do it. The next few days are quiet, as preparations are made
for the fiesta.
Analysis: Chapters XIII–XIV
Jake’s departure from Burguete to meet Brett and the others
at Pamplona despite his love of fishing demonstrates how his desire
for Brett disrupts his normal system of values. His departure also
indicates the relative strength of male-female bonds compared to
male-male bonds in The Sun Also Rises. Although
Jake enjoys fishing very much, he does not hesitate to abandon it
for Brett—indeed, Jake almost always puts Brett ahead of his own
plans and his other relationships. Brett’s disruptive influence
extends to Mike, whose jealousy easily shatters whatever bonds of
friendship—or even mere civility—he might share with Cohn.
Mike’s war story demonstrates the need to inject the
war with humor. Doing so makes the war experience smaller and more
manageable. It distances him from the war’s horrors. Mike’s war
story contains no details of actual combat; it is a silly, peaceful
anecdote. The story is indicative of the way he and his friends
skirt the edges of their war experience. Mike does not discuss his
time in the trenches or the effects of the war on his life. Instead,
he tries to contain the war within a funny story that begins and
ends in the past.
Competition begins to brew between Mike and Cohn over
who has proprietary rights to Brett’s body, while hostility between
Jake and Mike is strangely absent. As a Jewish nonveteran, Cohn
functions as a scapegoat. He becomes the convenient target of everyone’s resentment,
displacing the threat of resentment among the other characters.
No one is willing to be held accountable for his cruelty toward
Cohn. Mike, for example, explains and tacitly justifies his boorish
behavior without accepting responsibility for it by saying simply,
“I was drunk.”
