• Introduction
• Book 1
  • Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
• Book 2
  • Chapter 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
• Book 3
  • Chapter 19
• Closing

Book I 

Chapter I

Robert Cohn is first introduced in the novel. He, “was married by the first girl who was nice to him” and she left him for a “miniature-painter” (Hemingway 12). This is the equivalent of being left for a rock star, starving artist, or someone with a more interesting life. Robert Cohn is now in a relationship with an overbearing woman named Frances. Frances and Cohn have been dating for years and she wants him to marry her. She is losing her looks and is feeling pressure to lock Robert down. There is foreshadowing in this chapter relating to Cohn’s boxing career and his insecurities with being Jewish. 

Chapter II

Cohn goes to America and was able to get his book published. While in America, “several women had put themselves out to be nice to him, and his horizons had all shifted” (16). I imagine that Cohn was intimate with his first wife and Frances, but never had any success “playing the field” or “hooking up” with girls. But, alone in New York, he seemed to have “scored” and this changes him. Cohn, “realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle.” Cohn develops a new confidence due to his success and becomes “not so pleasant to have around” (16). 

Robert Cohn is now in the throes of a mid-life crisis and says, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it” (18). He reads a book called The Purple Land and becomes enthralled with the idea of going on an adventure. A good parallel in today’s world would be a person who finds a Youtuber or celebrity personality and develops their life based on that. In response to Cohn’s offer to pay Jake’s way on a South American adventure, Jake says, “listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that” (19). There is a great Adam Sandler SNL bit about this titled “Romano Tours.” 

Chapter III

Jake decides to have dinner with a prostitute and gets noticed by a group of his friends. He plays this off with humor, but there must have been embarrassment. Lady Brett Ashley is introduced in this chapter. She comes into the dancehall with a group of homosexual men. Jake says that Brett, “looked very lovely and she was very much with them” (28). By introducing Brett into the novel with a group of homosexuals, Hemingway is identifying Brett with sexuality that is outside of the mainstream. 

At the dancehall, Jake introduces Cohn to Brett.

Jake then says, “I saw Robert Cohn looking at her. He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land. Cohn, of course, was much younger. But he had that look of eager, deserving expectation” (29).

Jake is comparing Cohn’s gawking at Brett to how Moses looked when he saw the promised land in the Bible. It is worth noting that Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land. 

Brett is 34 and is a smokeshow.

“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover-jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey” (30).

Brett’s beauty is supernatural. 

Chapter IV

Jake and Brett are in love, but Jake, having been injured in the war, is impotent. While he was in the hospital for his injury, a liaison colonel came and said, “you, a foreigner, an Englishman” (any foreigner was an Englishman) “have given more than your life.” If one places sex as the highest good in one’s life, the colonel is right. Throughout the rest of the novel, one of Jake’s tragedies is that he is unable to overcome his physical desires and escape its enslavement. In this chapter, musing on his relationship with Brett, Jake thinks, “I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have” (39). Why Brett wants Jake is a key question of the book. Does she truly love him or is she using him? 

Chapter V

This chapter gives a slice of Jake’s life in Paris. Jake and Cohn get in an argument over Jake telling Cohn to “go to Hell.” Cohn stands up and demands that Jake take it back. Jake does. “Cohn smiled again and sat down. He seemed glad to sit down. What the hell would he have done if he hadn’t sat down.” This is foreshadowing for when Cohn doesn’t sit down later in the novel. After this argument, Cohn tells Jake, “you’re really about the best friend I have.” In response, Jake thinks, “God help you” (47).

Chapter VI

Harvey Stone is introduced at the start of this chapter. He has been on a five day bender and is included to illustrate the realities of the rampant drunkenness of the Lost Generation. Frances’s and Cohn’s relationship is put on display in their fight. Frances says that Robert, “told everyone that we were going to be married, and I told my mother and everyone, and now he doesn’t want to do it” (53). After he has been leading her on for years with the promise of marriage, Cohn is planning on leaving Frances. During this time, Frances has seen her looks and marriage potential sharply decline. Frances says that Cohn cries and cries about it to her, but, nonetheless, refuses to marry her. 

Chapter VII

Brett stands up Jake for lunch at the Crillon. Jake is in love with Brett, but she keeps on bringing guys around who are trying to wine and dine her. Brett walks all over Jake. He’s described later in the novel as the “human punching-bag.” Inside of Jake’s apartment, with the Count, Brett, “was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes on the rug. She saw me notice it. ‘I say, Jake, I don’t want to ruin your rugs. Can’t you give a chap an ash-tray?’” (64). The key question of the book is: Is Brett joking Jake?

The count says, “I’m not joking you. I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies. That’s what I always say.” Then Brett says, “you’re terribly right. I always joke people and I haven’t a friend in the world. Except Jake here.” 

“You don’t joke him.” 

“That’s it.” 

“Do you, now?” asked the count. “Do you joke him?” 

Brett looked at me and wrinkled up the corners of her eyes. “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t joke him” (65). 

The chapter ends with the curious addition of the black drummer at the club. Hemingway makes an innuendo that Brett has slept with the drummer. Brett’s sexuality crossing over racial boundaries, expanded on later in the novel, shows how unique Brett’s sexuality is. During this time in history, this type of relationship would be extremely rare.   

---

Book II

Chapter VIII

Being “tight” means to be drunk. Bill is hammered and that is why he wants to buy all those stuffed animals. The whole gang’s back together. Mike Cambell, Brett’s fiance, is introduced and is already drunk. 

Chapter IX

“Brett looked at me. ‘I say,’ she said, ‘is Robert Cohn going on this trip?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Don’t you think it will be a bit rough on him?’

‘Why should it?’

‘Who did you think I went down to San Sebastian with?’” (89).

This is Brett dropping an atomic bomb on Jake. She’s obviously brought other guys around Jake , but this one is devastating.

Jake and Bill get on a train and it is filled with Catholic Pilgrims. Before the 1960s, Catholics didn’t eat meat on any Fridays, they would eat fish instead. That’s where the term “snapper” comes from. Bill’s reference to the “Klan” is the KKK. The KKK hated black people, but also immigrants, many of whom were Catholic. 

Chapter X

This chapter has the strange moment with the old man with a goat on his back. Hemingway uses beautiful imagery to describe the road to Pamplona. Bill and Cohn are off to a bad start with their arguments over betting. Jake thinks that, “I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn – nor as eager” (104). Cohn is about to see his lover, Brett, and the man she is engaged to marry, Mike. Cohn is convinced that Brett will leave Mike and choose to be with him. Jake’s attitude towards Cohn is now hostile. There have been men in the past that Brett has walked over Jake with, but familiarity with Cohn makes it personal.

Chapter XI

Pamplona is described as hot, but the chapter ends in a much colder place. Once again, beautiful imagery of the countryside, Basque life, and the journey. At the inn, which is expensive, Jake and Bill order a hot rum punch and add more rum to it. “Direct action,” said Bill. “It beats legislation.”

“The girl brought in a big bowl of hot vegetable soup and the wine. We had fried trout afterward and some sort of a stew and a big bowl full of wild strawberries. We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles” (116).

Upset at the price of the inn, Bill and Jake guzzle down the included wine. “After supper we went up-stairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed” (116). Such a beautiful description of their first night at the inn. 

Chapter XII

Easily my favorite chapter in the book. Such a serene adventure. Putting the bottles of wine in the cold spring is the perfect detail. Jake and Bill share a wonderful day. Their fishing trip is disconnected from the troubles of the novel, but the “Brett business” still rears its head. Bill asks Jake directly about it. Bill then asks, “listen, Jake, are you really a Catholic?” Jake responds, “technically” (128). 

Chapter XIII

Harris is introduced in this chapter and he is such a lovely character. He touchingly gives Jake and Bill hand-tied fishing flies. A major theme in the book is the connection that people share based on service in The Great War.

Montoya, the owner of the Pamplona hotel, holds Jake in high esteem. This is because Jake has “aficion” for bullfighting. Jake has earned Montoya’s trust and is in his inner circle, unheard of for a foreigner. 

We learn that Mike was a big deal in the war, but has devolved into a total alcoholic. Steers are cattle that are castrated to make them more docile for meat production or service. Bulls are calves that are not castrated. Cohn and Mike get in a fight over Mike comparing Cohn to a steer. Mike says, “what if Brett did sleep with you? She’s slept with lots of better people than you.” Mike is a bad drunk. With Cohn gone, Mike wants to tell Jake what Cohn calls Brett. She really doesn’t want Jake to hear this, but Mike still says, “he calls her Circe, [Cohn] claims she turns men into swine” (148). Circe is an allusion to the Greek goddess featured in Homer’s Odyssey. She lures men to her island and uses potions and drugs to turn them into animals. 

After Cohn and Mike’s big fight, everyone, Cohn included, get together for dinner.

Jake thinks, “it was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people” (150).

Chapter XIV

Poor Jake turns miserable in the dark. He thinks, “women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship” (152). Jake is able to keep it together in the light, but, he falls apart in the dark. During this chapter, Jake goes to Mass a few times. 

Chapter XV

The fiesta starts with the description of the peasants starting to drink wine in the more affordable places. Jake says that money still has a concrete value to them, but, once the fiesta gets going, it won’t matter how much they pay. The fiesta starts and gets spinning, “it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences during the fiesta” (158). Cohn passes out early in the drinking. In this crowd of heavyweights, Cohn is as light as they come. 

Looking at Pedro Romero for the first time, Jake thinks, “he was the best-looking boy I have ever seen” (167). During the bullfight, Brett can’t look away from the gored horse. Cohn says that Brett is a sadist: A person who derives pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain or humiliation on others. This ties into the key question of “is Brett joking Jake?” Is Brett a sadist and gets gratification over the humiliations she puts Jake through? This goes beyond Jake to also include Mike, her fiance, but more on Jake because he does not, and cannot, have sex with Brett. The end of this chapter includes an important description of Romero’s bullfighting technique. 

Chapter XVI

Montoya comes into Jake’s room and asks if he should tell Romero that the American Ambassador has invited him to the Grand Hotel. Jake tells Montoya not to give Romero the message. Montoya agrees.

“Look,” said Montoya. “People take a boy like that. They don’t know what he’s worth. They don’t know what he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business, and in one year they’re through” (176).

Romero is more than a bullfighter. For Montoya, he represents a champion of the culture. Montoya has seen so much of his culture and heritage degraded by time and outside influence. Romero represents the best of what is vanishing. Jake, a person with the prized “aficion,” understands this and supports Montoya in protecting Romero. 

Shortly after this scene with Montoya, tragically, Jake betrays Montoya’s trust and acts himself as the corrupting outside influence on Romero. After Jake joins Romero’s table with his friends’s at a drunken party, “Montoya came into the room. He started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks. He did not even nod” (180-181). 

This is a gut-punch in the novel. Jake, wanting to please Brett, agrees to connect Romero with his drunken crew. Brett has an insatiable urge to have sex with Romero. It is beyond desire and into a compulsion. Jake knows that allowing Brett to be with Romero will forever divorce him from Montoya and the select few with “aficion.” The Brett and Romero connection also corrupts Romero as a great cultural hope. Pedro Romero is only 19 years old. 

Brett says, “I’ve always done just what I’ve wanted.” 

“I know.”

“I do feel such a bitch.”

“Well,” I said.

“My God!” said Brett, “the things a woman goes through.”

“Yes?”

“Oh, I do feel such a bitch” (188).

Chapter XVII

Bill and Mike are both drunk beyond recognition. Cohn, looking for Brett, clobbers Jake after calling him a “damned pimp” (194). He also knocks Mike down. This is the climax of the novel. 

In Cohn’s room, where he apologizes to Jake, Hemingway repeats that Cohn is wearing his “polo” shirt. The polo shirt draws back to Cohn’s Princeton days. Robert Cohn had experienced some success in his life, but, after college, Cohn has been in a steady decline. Earlier in the novel, he tells Harvey Stone that he would like to be back in college playing football. Stone calls him a case of arrested development. Cohn’s tragedy is that he thought that having sex with Brett was going to answer his problems and quench his search for meaning, but it has only left him deeper in his hole. 

The next day features a deadly goring during the running of the bulls. A man, who had a wife and family, is picked up with a horn through his body and slammed to the ground. The bull that killed the man is then killed by Romero and the ear is given to Brett. Jake, the “human punching-bag” (203), can be compared to the gored man. 

Jake has a conversation with a disillusioned waiter who is disgusted that a man was killed, “all for sport. All for pleasure” (201). How much of Jake’s life has been killed simply for pleasure? He never overcomes his appetite for food and drink, or, more importantly, his enslavement to Brett.       

Chapter XVIII

At this point in the novel, Cohn is shattered, Mike is a complete degenerate drunk, and Jake might as well have been gored to death. The major male characters of the book have all reached their nadir. With that in mind, here is how Hemingway choses to introduce Brett back into the story.

“I looked and saw her coming through the crowd in the square, walking, her head up, as though the fiesta were being staged in her honor, and she found it pleasant and amusing. ‘Hello, you chaps!’ she said. ‘I say, I have a thirst’” (210).

Mike is totally obliterated. Earlier, he ordered a bottle of brandy and six beers, after the drinks he’s already had. He chides Brett for being with Romero and then crashes over their table full of bottles and food. Brett and Jake leave the cafe. “Brett was radiant. She was happy. The sun was out and the day was bright” (211). After all this misery, Brett is still able to be described as “radiant” and “happy.” This would point to Brett being a sadist. She uses her charm and beauty, like Circe uses her potions, to turn men into swine.   

Brett wants to pray for Romero, so Jake and her go into a church. This does not last long. Brett says, “don’t know why I get so nervy in church,” then that praying “never does me any good” (212). In these scenes of the novel, Brett seems to have no conscience at all. She is brazen in the wickedness and strife she has caused. Going into Romero’s room, “she did not knock. She simply opened the door, went in, and closed it behind her” (213). 

The bullfighter Belmonte is obsolete in the face of Romero. He is washed up and the people hate him. They want the sense of tragedy that Romero is able to create. The new generation, encapsulated in Romero, has made what Belmonte stands for disposable and worthy of contempt. Does what Brett stands for make the ideas and values of the past worthless? 

---

Book 3

Chapter XIX

“Montoya did not come near us” (232). Jake’s few days alone in San Sebastian are beautiful. Take away what happened and what will happen and just imagine that type of vacation. Him swimming and diving off the raft is like a Baptism that, tragically, does not take. This San Sebastian bliss is ruined with a telegram from Brett. 

Jake responds then thinks, “that seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it alright. I went in to lunch” (243). 

Jake goes to Madrid and finds Brett’s hotel. “I opened the door. The maid closed it after me. Brett was in bed. She had just been brushing her hair and held the brush in her hand. The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants” (245). Brett tells Jake that Romero wanted to tie her down, make her more of a woman and mother. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch” (249). This is in relation to Brett deciding not to stay with Romero and become a mom.

Brett says, “it’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

“Some people have God,” Jake said. “Quite a lot.”

“He never worked very well with me” (249).

Brett’s relationship with God is her tragedy. She has a fundamental misunderstanding of God and prayer. It’s obvious that Brett went through trauma in the war. She was a nurse and must have seen gruesome things. Then, after the war, her husband, Ashley, was a maniac. Brett’s had it rough and is now in a tailspin that she can’t control or recognize as a disaster. 

“‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” (251).

Jake is right back where he started. In a car, with Brett, and she is gaslighting him on the love they could have shared.  

---

Closing

Where do the characters stand at the end of the book? Robert Cohn has been rudely awakened from his midlife crisis. Jake seems to be ensnared evermore by Brett’s spell. Mike and Bill don’t seem to be much changed. Montoya had his trust betrayed and a shining star of bullfighting dimmed.

Hemingway opens his book with two quotes. The first by Gertude Stein, “you are all a lost generation.” The second from the Biblical blook Ecclasiastes,

“one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose…the wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits…All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

 Hemingway was writing a book about a certain place in time and the people who lived there. Right after The Great War, so much had changed and was changing. These characters were caught in the maelstrom of massive amounts of change and it left them all for worse. 

Michael Lins 

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. 1st Scribner trade paperback ed.,                                 
      Scribner, 2003. Originally. published 1926.

©2024 Michael Lins. All Rights Reserved.