Toxic Relationships In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, he creates this group of characters called the expatriates. They have quite a relationship with one another and sometimes they have no relationship at all. They have this sense of a toxic relationship with one another between Jake, Robert, Brett, Bill, and Mike, you get this sense that they don’t really like each other, they just hang around each other because they don’t have any other friends to hang around—or maybe no one understands them like they understand each other. They seem to put up with the bland conversations and the day-to-day drunken bar life, but how does this shape the plot that Ernest is trying to convey? Is he saying that the toxic relationships that you convey in adult life just happen …show more content…

You get a sense of Cohn and how toxic he is as a human being, but also with his girlfriend and his relationships with women. He falls in love with every girl that basically says hi to him and it gets him in trouble. Cohn is a very unsatisfying human being, he’s not satisfied with much in life and he travels—or yearns to, in order to find himself without realizing that you can’t lose yourself in a place you’ve never been to. It begins with Cohn throughout Jake’s point of view and I believe it starts that way because he is the main toxic character of the story. We get to see the demolishment of Cohn as a human being as the story progresses. He starts as a boxer and a writer, not a very good one, but a writer nonetheless; which, are two important things to know throughout the story because one of a fault and one is not. We begin with the first line of the novel with Jake narrating “Robert Cohn was once a middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn” (11). Through Jake’s eyes you already sense a vibe that Cohn only has so many things to be impressed about and this is one of them and even though he doesn’t really like it, he still uses it as something to be impressed …show more content…

It really could’ve prospered if Cohn wasn’t so creepy about Brett and like a puppy dog. Mike was aware of Brett, sure, but he’s never had to personally deal with an ex-lover of hers I felt “…Brett’s gone off with men. But they weren’t ever Jews, and they didn’t come and hang around afterwards” (148). The sense of Cohn following them around and being love struck was something that Mike never had to encounter and it was weird—on all ends of the situation “’I can’t blame them. Can you blame them? Why do you follow Brett around? Haven’t you any manners? How do you think it makes me feel?’” (147). Like stated before, if Cohn didn’t follow Brett around like a puppy, I don’t think Mike would’ve cared. That relationship was formed on toxic values, it never had a chance to be

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