Robert Cohn is one of the main characters in Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, about expatriates living in Europe after World I. The narrator of the novel, Jake Barnes, spends several pages at the beginning of the book discussing Cohn. They are tennis pals and both are writers. Barnes suggests that while Cohn can be annoying he likes him. In reality, however, Cohn is Barnes' opposite and displays characteristics which Hemingway despised.
Cohn went to Princeton and, even though he was a boxing champion and came from a wealthy family, he was the victim of prejudice because he was Jewish. We get the feeling that for most of his life Cohn did things more out of duty than because he wanted to. He is a man who seems to lack the ability to act or make up his mind. About boxing, Barnes says,
He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.
He enters a marriage to "the first girl who was nice to him." He's married five years and though he is unhappy and ready to end the marriage his wife beats him to it and divorces him, going off with another man. But rather than strike off on his own he falls into a relationship with another woman, Frances, who dominates him and hopes to rope him into marriage even though "her looks were going." Barnes comments on the control the woman has over Cohn:
I watched him walking back to the café holding his paper. I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life.
A drastic change comes over Cohn after he has his novel accepted by "a fairly good publisher" and "several women were nice to him." For Barnes the change in Cohn is not a good one. Cohn becomes arrogant and suddenly thinks, after reading a book about "splendid imaginary amorous adventures," that he has something to prove. Before his novel, Cohn had been only slightly annoying, but later he becomes insufferable.
After a weekend with Lady Brett Ashley, Cohn crashes the party in Pamplona, even though Brett is there with her fiancé, Mike Campbell. For Cohn, Brett is obviously the first woman he ever loved, and his new found confidence gives him the idea that someone like Brett could actually love him. When Brett spurns him for the bullfighter Pedro Romero, he turns violent, taking on Barnes, Campbell, Bill Gorton and badly beating Romero on the eve of his appearance in the ring.
In the end, Cohn is a pathetic figure. When we last see him he is sitting on the bed in the Pamplona hotel vociferously apologizing to Barnes over punching him. He has let every woman in his life control him. Not only does Brett control him, but she also makes a terrible fool of him. He is completely antithetical to Barnes, who avoids letting Brett control him, despite the fact he is obviously madly in love with her.
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