The Sun Also Rises Review 10/16/20

     What do I think about the book The Sun Also Rises so far? I think that the book is alright overall and as the reader, I can infer and take away many different things from looking at the relationship between the narrator Jake Barnes and his friend Robert Cohn. Looking at the those two characters relationship, I can see certain themes in the book like for instance what it means to be a man from the perspective of the book. In previous class discussions I've had, we've talked about toxic masculinity in the book which seems to be a popular idea from the book. In this review, we'll look the relationship between Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn and whether there relationship implies ideas of toxic masculinity.

    So what is the relationship between Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes? In the book, Jake Barnes is the narrator of the story and he opens the book up by talking about his friend Robert Cohn. From the tone of the book, one could infer that Jake Barnes does not think much of Robert Cohn. Robert Cohn is a Jew who was born into a wealthy family but at his time especially at Princeton, he was treated as an outsider and felt inferior and shy. To cope with this, he did boxing and became the middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. Overall though, Cohn's time at Princeton really deflated him and took a big impact on his confidence. Looking through the lens of Jake Barnes, he does not think of Robert Cohn in the best light and he sees Cohn as weak and not manly. Cohn marries the first woman who was ever nice to him and as a result, he was only married five years, had three children, and lost most of the fifty-thousand dollars his father left him. This shows how Jake Barnes, who narrates and says all this in the book, doesn't view Cohn as much because as the narrator, he could've presented Cohn in a completely different way. Instead he points out that basically he is weak and not very masculine because he lets woman control his life and take advantage of him easily. Even when Jake talked about Cohn's time as a boxer, he still said he didn't think much of it which shows the reader that to Jake, Robert is just a very unimpressive person.

    Looking at the relationship between Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes, does there relationship show signs of toxic masculinity? I think that looking at the relationship between Robert and Jake, Jake portrays Robert in a way that diminishes his presence. One could say that Jake may represent toxic masculinity as opposed to Robert who represents what man should not be. I wouldn't go as far to say that Jake is a representation of toxic masculinity in response to people who think otherwise, but I'd say Jake could represent a traditional standard of what it means to be a man given his background and being a World War One veteran. I think that many people would say Jake is the image of toxic masculinity because he doesn't align with modern standards but, I don't see how Jake shows qualities of toxic man unless one would argue that he is toxic for putting Robert Cohn down and looking down on him and emasculating him to an extent.

Comments

  1. MitchellOctober 26, 2020 at 8:55 AM

    Hemingway would not have been familiar with the term "toxic masculinity" (and if he did hear it, he'd probably want to fight whoever said it), but it's definitely a useful contemporary lens for looking at the characters in this novel. It's true that Jake outwardly manifests many "masculine" traits, and he's quite eager to convince the reader right out of the gate that he's a "better man" than Cohn is. We don't see Jake behaving in a very "toxic" manner outwardly, but his subtle undermining of Robert, of the gay men who accompany Brett, almost tries to implicate the reader (as if we must share his values). For me, the most remarkable line in the book is when Jake is alone, and his facade drops, and he's able to describe his "hard-boiled" act (i.e. his "masculinity") as an "easy" performance (in the daytime), but it gets him nowhere when he's all alone in the darkness with his solitary soul. In other words, Hemingway depicts Jake's gender identity explicitly as a *performance* (and an "easy" one, at that), which is pretty remarkable for a book published in 1926, when literally no one was talking about gender as performative.

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