The Sun Also Rises Quotes

The Sun Also Rises opens with an account of Robert Cohn’s boxing career at Princeton. The novel’s narrator, Jake Barnes, seems intent on belittling Cohn’s middleweight title: he suggests that Cohn’s “simple” story is not to be trusted, and wonders whether Cohn’s “flattened nose” was really a boxing-related injury.

Though Jake goes on to dismiss these doubts (citing reports from Cohn’s coach at Princeton, Spider Kelly, who corroborates Cohn’s story) he remains unimpressed by Cohn’s purported title. By targeting Cohn’s successes as a boxer, Jake calls into question Cohn’s masculinity. Competitive sports seem to Jake to be a proxy for strength and honor: the lesser fighter, in Jake’s mind, is perhaps the lesser man.

Though Cohn’s collegiate fighting career is the subject of these lines, Hemingway here reveals as much about Jake as he does about the man Jake describes. Jake is deeply cynical. He claims to be skeptical of anyone who appears honest, believing that stories which “hold together” best are the least likely to have actually happened. Perhaps it is Jake’s own history – rarely mentioned but hardly forgotten – that has left him suspicious of any simple truths or straightforward answers. While Cohn was fighting in the controlled environment of a boxing ring, Jake was in the trenches of World War I. Cohn’s most severe injury is a broken nose; Jake’s is lifelong impotence from a war injury. Though such comparisons are rarely drawn by the narrator himself, they are never too far beneath the surface of Jake's competitive, and often disdainful, accounts of his "friend."