“The Sun Also Rises” (post 3) by Ernest Hemingway: Bizarre Opening

The most outstanding and bizarre feature of this novel is the beginning of its first page with the name and backstory of Robert Cohn, an interesting, but secondary, Jewish character.

Why doesn’t the novel begin with the first-person protagonist, Jacob Barnes, and/or his love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, the two characters at the novel’s end?

Hemingway may have thought that a Jew and antisemitism would be an attention-getting opening, which it may have been, but it appears to me that the author felt he had things to hide and was afraid to discuss himself.

1. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises [1926]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2022.