earticle

영어

This paper examines how the narrative of Jake Barnes, the narrator/protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, exploits Robert Cohn, a Jewish character, as a psychological backdrop for his idea of masculinity in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Despite his genital wound from the First Word War, Jake attempts to redeem his masculinity by replacing the presence of the penis with that of the phallus. Throughout his dominant narrative, Jake is focused on the various representations of the symbolic power of the phallus to compensate for his “lost” penis and thus defend his masculinity. Simply, Jake embodies the phallus, while Cohn embodies the penis. In his anti-Semitic portrayal of Cohn, Jake implicitly alludes to Cohn’s penis, a sign of the Other, which evokes the context of Jewish circumcision. Particularly, the narrator/protagonist links the image of Cohn to that of the steers in bullfighting scenes. The defeat of the steers indicate the inferiority of Cohn as a Jew with a circumcised penis. In contrast, by identifying himself with bullfighters, especially Pedro Romero, Jake, a white male subject, succeeds in marginalizing Cohn and in rescuing himself from his impotence.