"Isn't It Pretty to Think So?"

Jake’s final words in the novel are, appropriately enough, ambiguous. Do we hear this as a wistful statement, basically agreeing with Brett’s assertion that “we could have had such a damned good time together” (251)? Or is he being snide, even sarcastic—basically, “Yeah, right, dream on!” Is this a moment of softness for hard-boiled Jake, one of the only points in the novel where he lets down his defenses and admits to the impractical but all too human inclination to wish things were otherwise? Or is he sick of Brett and this whole mess, bitterly resenting the fact that their “damned good time together” must always remain hypothetical, unrealized, his desire for her unrequited? Depending on how you read the preceding 250 pages, both possibilities could be viewed as significant progress for Jake as a character: he’s either finally loosening his uptight compulsion to cling to his ideal of masculinity as stoical, taciturn, and unemotional (using a dainty word like “pretty” and acquiescing as the force of the turning taxi presses Brett against him), or he’s finally asserting himself, “ending” the “game” with Brett and reasserting his masculine sense of control by refusing to indulge in these irrelevant what-ifs. It’s either one of his most or least hard-boiled lines in the novel, depending upon how you hear it.

While I hesitate to commit to one or the other (I generally like ambiguity in art, and ambiguity is what keeps this novel so interesting for me—I can’t help but fall for Brett a little bit, and genuinely sympathize with her and love it when she’s on the page, but I also totally see where the haters are coming from; I do sometimes want to resist her on Jake’s behalf), this line always sends me back to Jake’s earlier remark to Brett back in chapter 16, just as everything’s starting to hit the fan, and Brett is taking Jake aside to confess that she’s “a goner” for Romero. They’ve just sent Cohn packing (“Go on to bed”), even though he’s actually lingering in the shadows still, and Brett is complaining about how “very badly” Cohn has been “behaving”:

     “He depresses me so.”
     “He’s behaved very badly.”
     “Damned badly. He had a chance to behave so well.”
     “He’s probably waiting just outside the door now.”
     “Yes. He would. You know I do know how he feels. He can’t believe it didn’t mean anything.”
     “I know.”
     “Nobody else would behave as badly. Oh, I’m sick of the whole thing. And Michael. Michael’s been lovely, too.”
     “It’s been damned hard on Mike.”
     “Yes. But he didn’t need to be a swine.”
     “Everybody behaves badly,” I said. “Give them the proper chance.”
     “You wouldn’t behave badly.” Brett looked at me.
     “I’d be as big an ass as Cohn,” I said. (185)

This exchange is revealing in a number of respects. Brett clearly doesn’t include Jake in the cast of men who are “collateral damage” from her affairs: Mike and Cohn, she implies, have some stake in the situation, and she sees this as an opportunity for them to “behave well”—to be “modern” and grown-up about the whole thing, not to cause these embarrassing scenes. But she doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that Jake himself is hurting, or that he might be inclined to “make a scene” himself. Nowhere is his special role in her universe made more explicit: he’s not like these other guys, and yes, this has everything to do with his wound. Jake, she implies, behaves so well. He never makes a scene, never yells drunken insults at Brett and Romero or tries to punch anyone in the face (although, remember, he privately has this same impulse when he sees her with the gay men in her opening scene and has to leave the premises to cool down). Jake’s so much more grown-up than these two weeping, fighting boy-men, and this is why Brett relies on him, emotionally, psychologically, and even sometimes financially. Good old Jake. But Jake’s response is sobering: “Everyone behaves badly.” He just hasn’t had “the proper chance.” He’d be “as big an ass as Cohn.” What a remarkable admission: as much as he (and everyone else, including the reader) is currently exasperated with Cohn, we should be careful not to judge him too harshly. We don’t always respond to rejection as stoically and as cooly as we’d like to admit; sometimes we behave badly. Sometimes our emotions make us say awful and embarrassing things, and alcohol tends to enhance this inclination (just ask Mike). We’d like to think that we’d be Jake in this scenario—stoical, cool, detached—but the heart can make us act the fool. We’ve all been Cohn at one time or another.

This admission seems like a remarkable moment of self-knowledge on Jake’s part, and it informs my reading of the final line. He almost seems to be alluding to this idea: it’s “pretty” to think (or imagine) that Jake and Brett would have been different, superior to all this dysfunctional, neurotic, ego-driven craziness we see surrounding affairs of the heart and the libido in this novel. It’s even easy to think so—Jake and Brett often seem like they would be great together, if only it weren’t for this injury of his. But in these two lines, Jake forces us toward a more realistic (if disheartening and unromantic) conclusion: the only reason he can be so cool and stoical is that he’s out of the game. He cries alone in his room at night—it hurts, and that hurt has everything to do with the “pretty” wish Brett articulates in this final scene. He too wants to believe that they’d be the greatest couple since Adam and Eve. But he knows this isn’t true. He’s perfectly capable of acting the ass, and he admits that he’d even be as bad as Cohn—the worst ass in a cast of asses. Jake almost suggests that he’d like to act more like Cohn at times—Jake only fantasizes about punching the gay men in the face; Cohn actually does punch his perceived “rivals” in the face.

So why doesn’t Jake make more of a scene? Some readers want more from him here—you don’t want him to “take it” from Brett the way he does. You want him to insult her, to ditch her, to abandon her altogether. But Jake doesn’t blame Brett for his injury; he blames fate, or luck—“of all the ways to be wounded” (38). Jake’s stoicism is a philosophical response to the universe dealing him a terrible, humiliating, emasculating blow. His quarrel is with the universe itself, his rotten luck, circumstance, fate—whatever you want to call it—but he doesn’t (and shouldn’t) resent Brett. Why bother making a scene? Why hit Cohn, or Mike, or Romero? Why insult Brett? It will achieve nothing. The “heroism” many old-school readers see in this quintessential “Hemingway hero” has to do with this acceptance of his fate and his perseverance in the face of an absurd condition. He realizes that his and Brett’s relationship—with its “purity,” its easy confidence—has everything to do with the fact that sex is not part of the equation. All things being equal, he’s forced to admit, he’d be as big an ass as Cohn. Any suggestion that things would be ideal between him and Brett in some alternate universe is nothing but a “pretty” delusion. And Jake Barnes doesn’t deal in pretty delusions.