This chapter’s main purpose is characterization. We discover here that Jake is generous, as he offers a hundred francs to the alcoholic writer Harvey Stone. Also, by virtue of Frances’s desire to speak with him in private about her troubles with Cohn, we learn that Jake is the sort of person in whom others, particularly women, feel comfortable confiding. As the novel proceeds, Brett will continue to confide in Jake, even at the expense of his feelings.
In Chapter VI, Hemingway characterizes Cohn himself by using all four of the means available to a writer:
* What a character does: We observe Cohn taking abuse from Frances, though he overreacted to the subtlest of perceived slights made earlier by Jake. Apparently, Cohn is cowed by women.
* What a character says about himself: If Cohn had his life to live over, he tells Jake and Stone, the one thing he’d change would be the way he played football—an almost unbelievably immature remark for a man in his thirties to make.
* What others say about the character: According to Frances, Cohn is obsessed with the idea that he hasn’t yet “lived enough.” (He seems to be experiencing a very early sort of midlife crisis.) If Frances is to be believed, he abandoned a young woman (his secretary when he edited the arts journal) after encouraging her to cross the country with him, and Frances is convinced that she is about to be jilted as well. Another very different character, Stone, reacts to Cohn with distaste, calling him a moron before amending that judgment to “a case of arrested development.”
* What the narrator says about the character: Despite everything, Jake admires Cohn’s “nice, boyish sort of cheerfulness that had never been trained out of him.”
Via the use of these four methods of characterization, Hemingway offers us a three-dimensional, textured, believably contradictory portrait of one of his main characters. About a fifth of the way through The Sun Also Rises, the reader “gets” Robert Cohn, and this is no accident. Notice, as you read on, how Hemingway uses these methods to characterize Jake himself, Brett, Mike Campbell, Jake’s friend Bill, and Pedro Romero—the ensemble cast of this short yet complex novel. For all the talk of Hemingway’s revolutionary prose style, we love books like this one, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls for their brilliantly drawn and, therefore, unforgettable characters.
Though the statement is debatable, Hemingway gives The Sun Also Rises an improvisatory feel when he has Jake tell us, “Somehow I feel as if I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly.” It is as if we are reading the story as it is being written by Jake, flaws and all. Perhaps this approach was influenced not only by Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique and by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose The Great Gatsby employs the same technique, but by jazz (a largely improvised music), which was sweeping not just the United States but Paris, as well, in the 1920s.
