“Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people…Externally he had been formed at Princeton. Internally he had been molded [sic] by the two women who had trained him. He had a nice, boyish sort of cheerfulness that had never been trained out of him, and I probably have not brought it out. He loved to win at tennis. He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance. On the other hand, he was not angry at being beaten. When he fell in love with Brett his tennis game went all to pieces. People beat him who had never had a chance with him.”
-The Sun Also Rises, p 52
I find this paragraph slightly out of place. Here it seems that after spending fifty pages describing how stubborn and pathetic and exacerbating Robert Cohn is, Hemingway suddenly changes his mind and decided Cohn is not too of a fella after all. Personally, I just find it rather annoying. It would have served Hemingway much better to place this paragraph within the first five or ten pages of the novel, before the reader had already formed an image of Cohn. Frankly, I find it is much easier to change one’s opinion of a character from good to bad than from bad to good. It would have been much more effective to describe Cohn as a good person first, and then describe how Lady Brett affected his behavior. Instead, though, Hemingway shows Cohn’s behavior post-Brett exposure, then attempts to backtrack and prove in hindsight that Robert Cohn, despite fifty pages that say otherwise, is in fact a good person. I don’t believe it.
check
ReplyDelete