Oh the anecdotes.

This novel is more or less a compilation of over sized anecdotes. My favorite, and the one I'm going to focus on is the one about the death of O'Brien's childhood friend. After seeing a dead man in Vietnam, O'Brien tells a friend that the man reminds him of someone. "There's this girl I used to know. I took her to the movies once. My first date," he said on page 216. The girl's name was Linda. O'Brien tells us about the date and how he finds out about her having a brain tumor. He tells us how she died and he went to her funeral. He tells us that though he was only 9, he truly loved this girl.
Though a pretty lengthy anecdote, it is one that puts the turmoil cause by the war into perspective. This anecdote shows us how even the death of someone you didn't know could bring back terrible memories. The memories of the war were very similar to this one. They were vivid and usually not positive. O'Brien uses this anecdote to show the true effects of the war.

Why yes. That is an anecdote.

I'm going to turn the steering wheel here a bit and go back to the very beginning of the novel. I've been thinking about why Hemingway put in that anecdote about Cohn's life, and I think I know why. Cohn is described on page 12 as a member "of one of the richest Jewish families in New York." He had everything that he could have wanted, except for love. He married once, but that ended in divorce. We are then told about Frances and we soon realize that they aren't in love, but Cohn just feels like he needs a woman in his life. After that relationship fails too, the novel really begins. These two failed relationships that the short anecdote tells us about set the stage for Cohn's place in the novel. Hemingway uses this anecdote not because we need to know so much detail about Cohn's life, but because we need to understand the reasons why Cohn is so desperate for Brett's love throughout the novel. Hemingway successfully uses this anecdote to allow us to see the troubles of Cohn and why his personality is such a desperate one. We are able to see into the character of Cohn through this anecdote.