This chapter is crucial with regard to Mike's characterization, as we see him genuinely falling apart because of the affair with Pedro Romero instigated by Brett. Suddenly the source of Mike's extreme drunkenness becomes clear. It is his fiancée's untamable promiscuity. The answer to Edna's incessant questioning? Yes, Mike is bankrupt, but not only in the financial sense. He is tapped out emotionally and spiritually, as well. Brett brings men joy, but she destroys them, too. Before chapter's end, Robert Cohn (introduced to us at the start of the book as a boyish naïf) will be ruined as well — and planning to leave the scene for good, a turning point in the novel's plot. Is the young bullfighter Romero next?
Though she never appears within Chapter XVI, Brett is its focus, as nearly everything that happens here is done in her name — even Romero's defeat of the bull. "All for sport, all for pleasure," the café owner says ruefully to Jake. He is speaking about the tragedy of the gored peasant, but he could be talking about Mike, Cohn, and Jake — as well as the Count, and countless others, too. Brett is no steer. She is a bull, and she can gore anyone who doesn't flee from her fast enough. (Of course, she has her reasons. To quote Mike himself, "She hasn't had an absolutely happy life." Note the horrifying story he tells here of her marriage to the deranged Lord Ashley.)
Pay special attention to the fistfight between Jake and Robert Cohn. Not only is this our payoff for the seemingly incidental information in the novel's first sentence that Cohn "was middleweight boxing champion of Princeton." It is also one of the most successfully rendered — one of the most accurate — fight scenes in all of literature. As the famous teacher of creative writing, John Gardner, often pointed out, action that is neither too sketchy nor so complicated that it becomes confusing is enormously difficult to render on the page. In the Barnes-Cohn bout that ends in seconds, Hemingway proves himself the gifted craftsman that he is reputed to be — a kind of champ of American letters, at least early in his career.
