Robert won the fight with Jake and Mike because he had
been a boxer when he was a student at Princeton. Plus, Jake and Mike were drunk. Robert
easily knocked them both out, despite Mike saying he was not really knocked out. Robert
may have won the physical fight, but he did not win any moral victory. He was in love
with Brett and had spent some time with her at San Sebastian. He did not understand
Brett and thought that because she had slept with him, it meant something. It meant
nothing to Brett.
Robert cannot accept this. He goes to
Pamplona for the bullfights and follows Brett wherever she goes, even though she is now
with Mike, the man she is supposed to marry. Robert is very serious - Brett tells Jake
she "hates his suffering." Robert thinks he has lost Brett, but he really never had her
to begin with. He has been a kind of loser throughout the novel. No one really likes
him, they just put up with him. He is Jewish and the others seem to be very
anti-semitic. They are always talking about him being a Jew in a very negative way, and
they accuse him of acting like a "superior Jew." So Robert Cohn has always been the
loser in the novel. He may have won a brief victory in a physical fight, but overall, he
is a loser.
After the fight with Jake and Mike, Cohn finds
Brett and her bullfighter boyfriend, Romero. He then starts a fight with Romero and
beats him up pretty badly in front of Brett. Instead of being thankful, Brett calls Cohn
an ass, and tries to help Romero. Once again, Cohn wins the physical fight, but the
moral battle was over before he even began because he was already a loser in Brett's
eyes.
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