Preview
Copywork
About This Passage
This passage performs the chapter's central rhetorical maneuver: the narrator declares systematic distrust of coherent stories, then proceeds to construct exactly the kind of coherent story his distrust should disqualify. Copying it slowly trains attention to how Hemingway lodges an epistemological stance — a claim about how knowledge is built — inside a voice that sounds offhand.
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Socratic Discussion
Narration Prompt
Retell the chapter's arc in a few sentences, moving in order through these moments: Cohn's boxing at Princeton and the antisemitic wound that drove him to it, the failed marriage and the failed magazine, Frances's two distinct phases of the relationship, and the dinner scene that closes the chapter.
Discussion Questions
- Jake opens by declaring 'I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together' — why might announcing that bias before constructing Cohn's portrait make Jake either more credible as a narrator, because he names his distortion before using it, or less credible, because the distortion is now fully operational, and which reading does the chapter's own evidence support more strongly?
- Jake chooses to verify Cohn's boxing title through Spider Kelly rather than by asking Cohn directly — why might that choice, as the chapter presents it, tell us something about how this narrator builds his knowledge of the people around him, and which detail in the Spider Kelly passage makes your reading clearest?
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
a sense of being less capable, valuable, or worthy than others; the feeling Cohn carried after Princeton's treatment of him as Jewish
Item 2
to work against and reduce the effect of something; what Cohn hoped boxing would do to his shyness and wounded self-esteem
Item 3
the use of another person for one's own benefit, with little regard for their interests; the chapter's word for Frances's first phase with Cohn
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
+ 7 more questions in the complete study guide
Get the complete study guide — free
Sign up and get your first book with every chapter included. Copywork, discussion questions, vocabulary, and critical thinking.
Sign up free