A comparison of the characters of Jake and Robert Cohn helps bring out aspects of each and illuminate the meaning of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway provides only sketchy information about his characters, instead allowing them to be revealed through their words, their actions, and their interactions.
Jake is a particularly significant character in that the action of the story is revealed through his narrative, and the degree to which his words can be trusted is important. His sensibility colors the novel in a way that that of the other characters does not. Jake is especially able as a reporter of events because he tends to be dispassionate. The story is his version of certain events, standing as a confession of a betrayal he committed and that he wants to explain in this written form. He blames himself for what happened and not others, so his narrative should not be seen as an attempt at expiation. If it were, what he says about others might be suspect, as if he were trying to put the blame on them. The fact that he is confessing his own "sin" adds credence to what he reports.
Jake is a reporter in life as well, writing for a Paris newspaper after returning badly wounded from the war. Robert Cohn is also a writer on a different level - he has written a novel and also edited a literary review. He is very different from Jake, and the contrast illuminates both men. Cohn is more of an academic literary man who lives through the printed word both as a reader and in his own writing, while Jake is the active man who writes about real experiences and so lives fully to have something to write. The irony is that Jake, the more active man, has been left only a partial man because of the war, while Cohn, who does not aspire to that same sort of masculinity, retains his manhood and becomes the third leg of the triangle with Brett Ashley. The one aspect of Cohn's character that seems to mirror the active mal...