Hemingway continues to perpetuate the illusion that the story Jake tells is improvised and unedited, with statements like, “Cohn made some remark about [the cathedral] being a very good example of something or other, I forget what.” Also, “Why I felt an impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know.” When we read about the man who sells the fishing tackle being out of his store, necessitating a long wait by Jake, Bill, and Cohn, we are fooled momentarily into believing that the events described really happened (perhaps to Hemingway). After all, why would someone bother to invent such a trivial detail?
The theme of payment continues in this chapter, with an accounting of various monetary transactions and a great deal of space devoted to the bet between Bill and Cohn. And Jake’s rage toward Cohn, because Cohn slept with Brett, begins to manifest itself: “I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn—nor as eager. I was enjoying it.” Later, he is even more explicit: “I certainly did hate him.” Again, if Jake can’t have Brett, then he wants a man worthy of her to do so, not the boyish Cohn. The Count seemed to qualify—as will the matador Pedro Romero a few chapters on.
Book II of The Sun Also Rises takes place mainly in an area of northeast Spain/southwest France occupied by a people known as the Basques. Inventive, eccentric, and fanatically independent, the Basque peasants stand in sharp contrast to the followers of fashion we encountered in Paris.
The Hemingway style bursts into bloom with Jake’s description of the car trip from Bayonne to Pamplona. Notice once again the emphasis on the concrete and specific, as well as the writer’s use of a very limited vocabulary. Note as well that the truism about Hemingway’s use of short sentences exclusively is inaccurate. He was fond as well of long compound sentences, like this one:
After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind.
In the description later of Jake’s visit to the cathedral, Hemingway employs the stream-of-consciousness technique that he borrowed from Joyce. All told, the writer’s style was much more varied than he is generally given credit for.
