The Count
Brett is named four hundred and thirty times in The Sun Also Rises. The man telling the story is named one hundred and twenty-two.
Fair warning, this is a full summary, so the ending is spoiled. I read Ernest Hemingway’s novel in the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number sixty-seven thousand one hundred thirty-eight. Its title page says Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, nineteen twenty-six, and the book is dedicated to Hadley and to John Hadley Nicanor. It opens with two quotations, one from Gertrude Stein, calling a generation lost, and one from Ecclesiastes about the sun that also ariseth.
Here are the tallies. I counted each capitalized name in the story text. Brett, four hundred and thirty. Bill, three hundred and thirty-five. Mike, two hundred and fifty-one. Cohn, two hundred and twenty-eight. Jake, one hundred and twenty-two. Romero, one hundred and thirteen. Montoya, fifty-four. Let’s meet them in the order the book does.
Book One: Cohn Gets the First Page
The first words of the novel are not about the narrator. They are about Robert Cohn, who was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. The narrator says he mistrusts frank and simple people. In the first chapter we learn Cohn lost most of his fifty thousand dollars, wrote a novel, and lives in Paris with a forceful woman named Frances.
The narrator is Jake Barnes, an American who files newspaper stories from Paris. He is rarely named, because he is the one saying I. In chapter two Cohn wants to go to South America, after reading a book about it. Jake answers that you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. In my reading, that line is the novel’s thesis, and Jake doesn’t follow it.
So Book One has Cohn sixty-three times, Brett one hundred and nineteen, and Jake forty-six. And Brett has not appeared yet. She walks in during chapter three.
Brett, and the Thing That Cannot Be Fixed
It is a hot night at a dance hall in the Latin Quarter. Jake has brought a woman he met on the street, Georgette, and a crowd of young men arrives in two taxis. With them was Brett, the text says, and she is lovely. She has her hair brushed back like a boy’s, and she is Lady Ashley. Cohn looks at her, Jake says, as if he had seen the promised land.
Jake and Brett take a taxi. She pulls away and says don’t touch me, because she turns to jelly when he does. Jake was wounded in the war, in a way the book handles by hint rather than by name, and it stands between them. As Jake puts it, there is not a damn thing they can do about it. Back home that night, Jake does a little counting of his own. In chapter four he reads a bank statement of twenty-four hundred thirty-two dollars, subtracts four checks, and writes eighteen hundred thirty-two dollars and sixty cents on the back. Then he lies awake and cries over Brett.
That same night, a count with an elk’s tooth on his watch chain, who she says owns a chain of sweetshops in the States, offers Brett ten thousand dollars to go to Biarritz with him. She turns him down and tells him she is in love with Jake. Then Jake asks if they can live together, and Brett says she would just betray him with everybody, and he couldn’t stand it. She is going to San Sebastian, and she is going to marry Mike when the divorce comes.
The Gang Assembles
Book Two opens, and four names rise. Bill Gorton, Jake’s friend, arrives from America and goes off to Vienna, and comes back to tell Jake he was tight for four days. Mike turns up with Brett at the bar of the Dingo and asks if they can come to Spain. Jake says yes.
Look at the numbers. Bill appears once in all of Book One. In Book Two he is named three hundred and five times, and Mike two hundred and twenty-one. Book Two is the big one: eleven of the nineteen chapters, and by my count about two thirds of the novel, some forty-four and a half thousand words. Book One is a quarter, in seven chapters. Book Three is a tenth, in one.
On the twenty-fifth of June, Jake and Bill take the morning train from Paris, meet Cohn at Bayonne, hire a car for four hundred francs, and cross into Spain. In Pamplona they stay at the Hotel Montoya, run by Montoya, the man who loves bullfighting and gets named fifty-four times. Over lunch Bill bets Cohn fifty pesetas that Brett and Mike will turn up that night, and Jake makes it a hundred. In the end the pair are late. So Jake and Bill ride a bus up to Burguete to fish for most of a week, with an Englishman named Harris. A letter from Mike says Brett passed out on the train and is resting.
The Fiesta Explodes
Brett, Mike and Cohn all end up in Pamplona. Here is the knot. Brett went to San Sebastian with Cohn. She tells Jake so in Paris, before the trip, and says she thought it would be good for him. And Cohn is still in love.
At noon on Sunday, the sixth of July, the fiesta explodes. Rockets, drums, pipes, dancing in the square, and the bulls running through the streets at six in the morning. Cohn is the only one who never gets drunk, and he is miserable. Mike, in the narrator’s words, is a bad drunk, and he goes after Cohn again and again. The book’s period language about Cohn being Jewish, and its racial slurs elsewhere, are ugly, and I won’t repeat them. In my reading, the novel shows this as cruelty, from people who also say they love each other.
Romero Arrives
Romero’s name first appears late, in chapter fifteen. Montoya takes Jake and Bill up to room number eight, where a boy of nineteen is winding his sash for the bullfight. Jake calls him the best-looking boy he has ever seen. That afternoon Romero kills his first bull, and Montoya nods across the ring: this is a real one.
Then a quiet scene, the next day in the rain. Montoya tells Jake the American ambassador has asked for Romero to come for coffee. Jake says don’t give him the message. People take a boy like that, Montoya says, and in a year they are through. Remember that scene, because that evening Jake sits with Brett in a café and Romero comes over. Jake says he must find their friends. Twenty minutes later Brett and Romero are gone.
Brett tells Jake in the park that she is a goner, mad about the Romero boy. She asks him to stay by her and see her through this. And Jake says sure.
The Night of the Fists
Romero is named one hundred and thirteen times, all of them in Book Two. And in the middle of those, Cohn finds out. He calls Jake a pimp and hits him, and Jake is out cold. Then Cohn finds Brett and Romero in Romero’s room. Mike tells the story later. In his telling, Romero is knocked down about fifteen times and keeps getting up. Cohn finally says he would be ashamed to hit him again. Romero hits Cohn anyway.
Cohn comes to Jake in the dark, crying, and says please forgive me. Jake says sure, and then the book lets Cohn disappear. He leaves in a hired car the next morning, and the narrator and Bill say to hell with him.
On the last day of the fiesta, Romero kills a bull, his brother cuts off its ear, and Romero hands it to Brett. That night, Jake drinks absinthe until the world blurs at the edges, and Mike tells him Brett has gone with the bullfighter on the seven o’clock train.
Book Three, and the Shortest Count
In Book Three the names fall away. Brett is named only twenty-five times in about sixty-five hundred words, Jake eight. Cohn, twice. The fiesta is over, and the notices come down off the pillars.
Bill leaves for Paris. Mike goes to Saint Jean de Luz, broke. Jake goes to San Sebastian to swim and read. Then a telegram: could you come Hotel Montana Madrid, am rather in trouble, Brett. Jake thinks it through: send a girl off with one man, introduce her to another, now go and bring her back. He takes the Sud Express.
In Madrid, Brett is in bed. She says she made Romero go, and that he wanted to marry her. She would not be one of those bitches who ruins children. She is going back to Mike. They have martinis at the Palace bar and lunch at Botin’s, and Jake drinks three bottles of rioja alta.
Then they get in a taxi. Brett settles against him. Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together. And Jake says, isn’t it pretty to think so?
The Closing Tally
So who is the book about? Count again. Brett, four hundred and thirty. Jake, one hundred and twenty-two. In my reading, that is the point. Jake tells the story, but the book is about the woman he cannot have, the friends who orbit her, and a trip that ends where he began.
One more tally, for places. Paris is named thirty-eight times, San Sebastian thirty-four, Pamplona twenty-four, and Madrid twelve. Pamplona, the town of the great fiesta, is named less than Paris or San Sebastian, which, in my reading, fits a book about a trip that goes nowhere.
If you want to read it, the free text is on Project Gutenberg, ebook sixty-seven thousand one hundred thirty-eight. My question for you: did Jake make the wrong call in Madrid? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the count helped.
