The Relationship Between Jake and Robert Cohn

In the very first chapter of the novel, Cohn is presented as one of Jake’s best friends. However, among all the details given about his character, veiled insults and criticisms seems to constantly come up. After discussing the idea that Hemingway intended for his prose to be the tip of an iceberg, those insults seems to be more and more significant. The friendship between Jake and Cohn doesn’t seem to be a mutually beneficial relationship; from the way that Jake treats him, it seems as though Cohn is someone that Jake believes he is better than, and being able to constantly put him down makes Jake feel better about himself.

For the first section of the book, Jake seems to beat Cohn in everything—he is well liked, seemingly successful, and witty. But, then Jake finds out that Cohn had gone on a trip with Brett, which is something that Jake is unable to do. After this point, Jake portrays Cohn as more and more inferior. In psychology, we talked about downward social comparison (which basically means that you choose some of your friends in order to feel better about yourself, because you perceive them to not be as good as you), to me, this seems to be the nature of Jake’s relationship to Cohn. Jake chooses to be friends with Cohn, not because he particularly likes or respects him, but because Cohn makes Jake feel superior, despite his injury from the war.

Jake belittles Cohn in many ways; he talks about how he was the champion middle-weight boxer at Princeton (not heavy-weight), about how he went to military school (not the war), and how he is his "tennis friend" (not a real friend, like Bill). And Jake is able to keep his constructed superiority up until the point when Cohn gets involved with Brett. At that point, Jake is forced to see a flaw in his schema (another term from psychology—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)). And his construction gives way to reality and his friendship with Cohn seems to deteriorate rapidly from there.