Stream of Consciousness, Schadenfreude, and Getting "Tight"

Chapter ten seems at first like a giant stream of consciousness in which Jake Barnes tells the reader, in detail, every single event that transpires in his lackluster life with terse sentences. It is as though he has kept a travel log for himself. I rather like Jake and would prefer to think he would not inflict that kind of detail on outsiders intentionally.

However, through this stream of consciousness, we do get considerable insight into the round character that is Jake Barnes. Most characters in Hemingway's novel seem round, which rather impresses me. The concierge is one character I could argue to be a flat character because we only really learn that she is judgmental. I think the primary function of a flat character is to form subplots and minor details that make the book worth reading. Even though The Sun Also Rises comes from the point of view of just one main protagonist--Jake Barnes--the supporting characters each have a story. We have now seen Jake, Robert, Bill, and Brett each at their most arrogant and most vulnerable, and this allows us to imagine them complexly, whereas the rest of the characters fail to gain our full attention. It's sort of overwhelming to care about all of them at once, so I have semiconsciously chosen to care almost exclusively about Jake, who is, after, the main protagonist.

On a different note, "'I slept like a log'" is a simile. When the reader imagines the hypothetical slumber of a log, he or she understands that Jake means his sleep was undisturbed. A simile is like a metaphor. I am inclined to believe that the cockroach on page 97 is a metaphor for something--maybe for Robert--because why else could its mention have been necessary? Part of me thinks it's just part of Jake's stream of consciousness, though.

I also wanted to mention that when Jake enjoys Robert's nervousness on page 104, that joy in his friend's pain is called "schadenfreude." There is no word for that feeling in English.... It's a german word I read in the novel An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.

Finally, you'll be excited to know that I believe I've uncovered the meaning of becoming "tight." "'...and we're going to get tight now at lunch on the wine of the country....'" Perhaps tight means drunk, in which case it is a euphemism!