Hemingway's narrator [in The Sun Also Rises] seemingly represents "the true moral norm of the book," but he appears as such only to the prejudiced reader, prejudiced by the bias of the narrator's authoritative voice….

Read the novel from Cohn's point-of-view, and you end obversely in bias against Jake Barnes and his sophomoric code and his friends who damn Cohn by it. Reversal of intention: that Hemingway consciously schemed it so is evidenced by the fact that his narrator is honest enough to include in his story the self-incriminating testimony of witnesses against him, namely Bill Gorton, Robert Cohn, and Jake Barnes himself. Jake confesses his defections from the code he seemingly exemplifies and from his role as historian of the pretenders to it. (p. 173)

Characteristically, what Jake says of his friends applies also to himself. Jake's portrait of Cohn reflects himself; it tells us as much about Jake as about Cohn.

On Jake's own admission, we cannot accept his portrait of Cohn with any certitude: "Somehow I feel that I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly."… Jake Barnes, New York Herald journalist, is not a trustworthy reporter. (pp. 176-77)

Cohn is [pictured as] awful because he is always merely nice. Niceness is discredited because it declares a weakness, an exposed flaw in the mask of mock sophistication which Jake and his friends subscribe to. The criterion is irony, and Cohn never once speaks ironically….

In both The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby the narrators default on the standards by which they measure and judge others. Duplicity characterizes both narrators. (p. 178)

Contra Carlos Baker's notion of "the moral vacuum in Cohn," Cohn stands out as exemplar of the Christian virtues. That moral vacuum is located—by my reading—in Jake, in Brett, and in Mike; also in Romero. (p. 180)

Hemingway's public has been brain-washed by the Hemingway Code.

The story narrated by Jake Barnes is the story of Robert Cohn, the betrayed tin Christ. Everyone in The Sun Also Rises regards himself as a little tin Christ—the exceptions are the Count and Montoya and Cohn. They crucify Cohn as though he were one. They hang a wreath of twisted garlics around his neck while he sleeps on some wine-casks….

They blaspheme him. When Mike demands Cohn "Eat those garlics,"… it is as though Cohn were Christ—Cohn crucified by Judas Mike. When Cohn awakes, it is as though Christ Cohn were resurrected from the dead….

Says Judas Jake: "I'm not sorry for him. I hate him, myself." Says Brett: "I hate him, too…. I hate his damned suffering."… "Go away, for God's sake. Take that sad Jewish face away." So Mike speaks of Cohn as though Cohn were Christ. (p. 181)

Lady Brett Ashley has no sense of values and she has no sense of time: "I looked at the clock. It was half-past four. 'Had no idea what hour it was,' Brett said."… (p. 183)

Everything in The Sun Also Rises is rotten. Hemingway told Fitzgerald that The Sun Also Rises was "a hell of a sad story," whose only instruction was "how people go to hell."… (pp. 183-4)

Hemingway's narrator is crossed in identity with Cohn: "I put on a coat of Cohn's and went out on the balcony."… The surface reason for Jake's hatred of Cohn is envy that Cohn has possessed Brett, but the real reason stems from the subconscious recognition—rendered implicitly by his sharing Cohn's coat, for instance—that he, the outcast Jacob, shares identity with the outcast Robert Cohn and that in hating Cohn he is in effect expressing his own self-hatred.

That Jake shares identity with his antagonist, what does that spell out but the fact of a reversal of intention in The Sun Also Rises. How can Jake be represented by Hemingway critics as superior to Cohn if Jake is identified with Cohn? They thus switch places, and thereby I fashion my upside-down reading of the novel: Read it from Jake's side and he is right; read it from Cohn's side and he is right. But once you read it from Cohn's point of view, Jake is all wrong. Jake rebels against and disbelieves in that other side of his selfhood which Cohn represents. They are, as it were, the conflicting double selfhood of their creator—one side of Hemingway criticizing the other. (p. 188)

[Carlos Baker also] opines that Hemingway "early devised and subsequently developed a mythologizing tendency of his own which does not depend on antecedent literatures, learned footnotes, or the recognition of spot passages," and he adds that Hemingway's esthetic opinions "carried him away from the literary kind of myth adaptation" …; but the fact is that Frazer's The Golden Bough is the well spring source of Hemingway's mythologizing tendency in The Sun Also Rises. Any well-informed reading of the novel owes homage to The Golden Bough. It is loaded with "spot passages" and "learned footnotes" from Frazer, and—contra Baker—it exploits "the literary kind of myth adaptation." (pp. 189-90)

Ceremonies of haircutting, rituals and taboos of drinking and bathing and fishing—they are all recreated in The Sun Also Rises from The Golden Bough, a parallelism which has not been noticed (so far as I know). (p. 191)

Detached from Jake's claim—that is [Jew] Cohn's plight. If any remark by Cohn would detach him from Jake and his friends, it is his admission: "I'm not interested in bull-fighters. That's an abnormal life."… Cohn's values stand as the obverse of Jake's. Cohn's critique of the Narrator's Point-of-View provides the novel with its aesthetic antithesis. (p. 192)