Old Billy

In my opinion, there are very few normal people in this novel. One of these is the central character Jake who at least thinks moderately straight. The other is his newly introduced friend Bill. Bill is the comedian of this novel. When with Jake, he's very comedical and will go off on random rants about anything he can think of. He is very articulate. When they are along fishing in Spain, Billy and Jake seem to have a really good time together that Jake and Cohn never seemed to have. This kind of represents how Jake never really wanted to get close to Cohn. Also, to me, Cohn became very annoying in the novel when he whined and got mad at everybody. However, Bill seems to be an easy going guy, who enjoys to get mad at Cohn because no one likes him, and is easily my favorite character. One passage that really made me laugh was on page 121 when Bill went on about Abraham Lincoln being "a faggot" and many other people were also included in this rant.