"I want to go to South America."
He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak. (18)
He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak. (18)
I saw Cohn coming over across the square.
"Here he comes."
"Well, let him not get superior and Jewish." (102)
"Here he comes."
"Well, let him not get superior and Jewish." (102)
"That Cohn gets me," Bill said. "He's got this Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he'll
get out of the fight will be being bored." (166)
get out of the fight will be being bored." (166)
This bias against Cohn's Jewishness doesn't seem to merit all of the hate he gets throughout the book. So why does everyone hate Cohn?
I want to point out that Cohn isn't such a bad person. Robert Cohn is just portrayed as an antagonist by the "gang" of Jake, Brett, Mike, and Bill, because he is so different from them.
1). Cohn has values that he defends, which is why he stands up for Brett's honor. These values also make him made when Brett goes off with Romero, because she isn't "absolutely fine and straight" (46).
2) Cohn has passions and ambitions that the rest of the gang lack. For example, he wants to go to South America right after reading "The Purple Land" by W. H. Hudson. No one else in the expat gang has a passion to go anywhere or do anything.
I actually know Cohn's personality, satisfactions, and fears from Jake's description of him in the first chapter. This makes him a multidimensional character. I don't feel like I know Brett, Jake, Mike, or Bill in the same way. These characters seem to perform only a couple of actions throughout the novel and don't seem to exhibit any growth. Even though they marginalize Cohn towards the end of the novel, Cohn plays a bigger role than the gang thinks he plays. He serves as a moral benchmark that the rest of the characters do not meet.
Another thing about Cohn, though, is that he doesn't seem to get it. Jake and the gang have their own world and way of doing things, and Cohn is completely outside of it. We talked a lot in class about how Cohn was almost pre-irony, in a sense, stuck in an outdated manner of being. At least, that's how Jake would see it, that he has moved past this, and is better than Cohn in some way. I would say the relationship between Cohn and Jake is more significant in the ways they are similar and don't admit it, than the ways they are different and focus on.
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