What Makes Jake So Special?
By Ruby Mitchell
Brett’s relationship with Jake, in contrast to all of her other relationships with men, is by far the most driven by love and respect. Brett shows an immense amount of love towards Jake, and clearly respects him more than she does any other man she knows. Brett can’t even seem to stand her own fiancée, and she is constantly coming to Jake to complain about her various love interests, lamenting how annoying and “badly behaved” they are. Jake is the man Brett always comes back to at the end of the day, the only man who doesn’t seem to annoy her, the only man she ever truly confesses she loves (while she says that she loves Romero, this love is very short lived once they go to Madrid together, and we never really see her tell Mike that she loves him, only that he is “her sort of thing”), but coincidentally, Jake is also the only man that she can never be with. Brett’s go-to seems to be sleeping with a man and discarding him, usually leaving him obsessed with her, which she finds unbearable. Considering this trajectory and Bretts inability to stay loyal to a man, especially after she’s slept with him, the natural assumption would be that she would want nothing to do with Jake. Jake has nothing to offer Brett––he is literally unable to sleep with her, and they both admit that because of that they would never be able to be together. So why does Brett always come back to Jake? He has nothing to offer her that the other men in her life don’t also have, so what makes him so special to her? I argue that the only thing that sets Jake aside from the other men in Brett’s life, and the only thing that makes her so enamored with him, is the fact that she can’t sleep with him. Coincidentally, this is the one thing keeping them from ever truly being together, but the fact that they can never truly be together is what keeps Brett coming back to Jake.
Jake has a superiority complex about himself compared to the men that Brett sleeps with. He views himself as more secure than the rest of her partners, who have all been ruined by her dismissive attitudes towards them. Though Jake prefers to view himself as above all of Brett’s other partners, he willingly admits that he would be “as big of an ass as Cohn,” responding to Brett’s assertion that he “wouldn’t behave badly” (Hemingway 185). Though Brett might assume that Jake would be much more “well behaved” than the rest of her partners, Jake understands that if he were in the position of her other partners, he would embarrass himself just as much. Whether Jake would openly admit it or not, his injury has served as a blessing in disguise for his relationship with Brett. If it weren’t for Jake’s injury, he and Brett would likely have slept together, Brett would have treated him the same as she treats every other man she sleeps with, and Jake would have become obsessed with her, and she would have left him. Jake’s inability to ever have a real relationship with Brett serves as a safety net for the heartbreak of her being with other people. Jake can’t possibly be hurt by her promiscuity because it can’t affect him; he doesn’t have a reason to care, because there was never a possibility of them being together in the first place. Because of this, Jake will never have the opportunity to make an ass of himself over Brett’s love life, and Brett will go on assuming that he is perfect, “well behaved,” and will never embarrass himself over losing his chance to be with her, because that chance never existed for him in the first place.
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, New York: Scribner, 2006.
