Jake is the novel's consciousness — we see everything through him and know almost nothing about his interior. His war wound has rendered him sexually impotent, making his love for Brett both total and impossible. He is the novel's ideal man in one sense (stoic, competent, honest about surfaces) and its most damaged figure in another. His narration is flat because flatness is survival. He drinks, he fishes, he watches the bulls, and he endures.

Brett is the novel's most complex character precisely because she is so consistently misread as simple. She is not merely a femme fatale — she is a woman of genuine feeling who has been formed by a world that offered her beauty as her primary currency and offered men her primary means of mobility. She loves Jake, genuinely, impossibly. She sleeps with Cohn, Romero, and others not from nymphomania but from the same restlessness that drives Jake to drink — she is looking for something the world will not give her. Her decision to send Romero away is the novel's most debated act of selflessness.

Cohn is the novel's punching bag and its moral mirror. He is the only character who feels things openly, expresses his feelings directly, and believes that love is supposed to lead somewhere. The novel treats this as embarrassing — because the other characters have learned that direct feeling is dangerous. But Cohn's crime is also his virtue: he hasn't been broken yet. His boxing champion backstory is ironic: the man trained to be physically hard is the novel's most emotionally vulnerable figure.

The novel's only genuine friendship lives between Jake and Bill. Bill uses humor as connection rather than deflection — his jokes are genuinely funny, not a wall. The fishing chapters at Burguete, where Bill and Jake are at their easiest with each other, are the novel's warmest. Bill represents the American friendship ideal: loyal, unpretentious, honest through humor, present without agenda.

Romero is the novel's standard against which all other men are measured — and all fall short. He is nineteen, uncorrupted, genuinely brave, skilled in a craft that requires real courage. The bullfight is not a metaphor for him: it is simply what he does, and he does it with complete integrity. His refusal to stay down during Cohn's beating is his character expressed physically. He represents what the war destroyed: a man whose code is intact.

Mike has made his peace with being a failure, which makes him oddly pleasant company. He is bankrupt, drunk, faithful to Brett in his way (though she is perpetually unfaithful to him), and completely without illusions. His cruelty to Cohn — the 'steer' speech — is not malice but the drunk man's compulsion to say the true thing. He represents the decayed English upper class: the manners remain, the money is gone, the damage is real.