“‘Listen, Jake,’ he leaned forward on the bar. ‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?’
‘Yes, every once in a while.’
‘Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?’
‘What the hell, Robert,’ I said. ‘What the hell.’”
-The Sun Also Rises, p 19
Well, Robert Cohn sounds like a cheerful character, doesn’t he? It seems that Cohn might be suffering some sort of midlife crisis. Then again, given his history, a midlife crisis is not too surprising. Hemingway does an excellent job of depicting Cohn as a rather pathetic creature. A victim of culture shock, Cohn becomes embittered and self-conscious. He marries the first girl that smiles at him. He then is shocked by his wife’s departure from him, though considering he was planning on doing the same, it seems as though the shock is not so much from the departure as from the idea that he was not his wife’s entire world. He promptly falls into the same rut with Frances.
Now, Cohn is suddenly beginning to realize that perhaps he does not have to attach himself to the first woman that shows him a bit of kindness. I am not stating this to summarize the plot; I am proving his patheity (thank you, chacha.com, for providing the noun form of “pathetic”). It is evident that Cohn is suffering from some degree of depression—or at least self-awareness—yet Hemingway’s rather despicable description of Cohn makes it rather difficult to show any amount of pity for him. It appears as though Hemingway wants the reader to feel pity for Cohn; frankly, I feel more disgust.
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