The narrator wonders: “His face was white. Yet Cohn’s girlfriend and would-be fiance, Frances, mercilessly harranges Cohn. In fact, one literary critic from the ‘60s described Cohn as an “aggrieved adolescent with a gnawing inferiority complex” (Gurko 64).Īs the novel progresses, Jake backtracks a bit, suspecting that he might have done an injustice to Robert Cohn. The antisemitism was always apparent to literary critics, though in earlier times they were perhaps not so preoccupied with this element of The Sun Also Rises. It is declared “unadulterated antisemitism” (Dudley). How does The Sun Also Rises survive scrutiny in a time in which academia is preoccupied with “Whiteness studies”? Not well. Jake even discusses Cohn’s nose, stating that having it flattened by boxing, “certainly improved his nose” (3). Cohn is referred to as a “Jew” on the first page (in the context that Cohn might have felt discriminated against at Princeton, and how that might have affected his character). Jake’s criticisms of Cohn explicitly take into account Cohn’s Jewishness. This is where Hemingway dabbles in some antisemitism, at least by way of his fictional characters. The Sun Also Rises begins with some fairly unflattering depictions of Robert Cohn by the first person narrator, Jake Barnes.
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