so maybe "Jake and Brett" isn't a great idea (or, where I play devil's advocate for the hell of it)

 I already argued in class for the point I'm about to discuss, and as I said in class, I don't necessarily believe that what I am about to argue is set in stone or the most prominent/likely meaning behind Jake's famous closing words, "Isn't it pretty to think so". I just think this is an interesting, different way of looking at the situation, so I'll be diving into it now.

Rather than just displaying Jake's disillusionment in the likelihood of a relationship with Brett, I think this line also displays a disillusionment in the base idea that a relationship between Brett and him would work out. Basically, he no longer thinks that, even if his injury didn't exist, they "could have had such a damned good time together". He doesn't believe he and Brett are as compatible as they'd been assuming from the very beginning. If they were to get together, even in the perfect world where Jake wasn't injured, they'd end just as terribly as all of Brett's previous relationships we've seen.

The main justification and support I have for this claim comes mainly from what we've learned about Jake as a character throughout the story, and what we've seen him doing in the scenes leading up to the final one after he parts ways with Bill and Mike. Jake hides so much under the stoic front he puts up that little manages to get through sometimes, but as a reader, we get see a lot of things about him that none of the other characters are able to. For one, Jake's actually quite religious - he doesn't really show it in Paris, but while in Spain, he goes to pray and seems rather serious about it all. Second, bull-fighting, and the community/culture surrounding it, is extremely important to Jake. Spain and the yearly bull-fighting trip seem like very personal and intimate things to Jake, something almost "untainted" by the rest of the modern world that's falling to pieces, as seen in Paris. 

The issue is that the other characters don't really know this, or at least not the cast of main side characters like Brett. Time and time again, especially towards the end of the novel, I started seeing clashes between these personal, more secret parts of Jake, and Brett. At the beginning of the novel they seemed pretty compatible, like they were each other's only confidants, the only other person who could understand them. Their relationship was presented like the only reason they weren't together was Jake's injury, otherwise they would be the perfect couple. As the novel progresses, this idea is slowly broken down.

For example, multiple times, Brett makes a comment about Christianity or God, mainly poking fun at it or something along the lines of how she doesn't believe in it. Take the following dialogue, which actually occurs in the scene where Jake goes to Brett in Madrid at the end of the book (dialogue starts with Brett, and alternates between Jake and Brett):

"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch"

"Yes."

"It's sort of what we have instead of God."

"Some people have God," I said. "Quite a lot."

"He never worked very well with me." 

"Should we have another Martini?" (248-249)

Brett makes some remarks about religion, and how "not being a bitch" is her stand in for God, and Jake seems to react pretty negatively. His response of "Some people have God. Quite a lot" sounds almost defensive or upset, and he quickly flips the topic, without Brett seeming to realize that Jake has any issues with her words. I make this assumption as Brett makes very similar remarks, with similarly negative responses from Jake, quite a lot throughout the book, and never sees anything wrong in those instances either. Jake and Brett are supposed to know each other very well, supposed to be extremely close, and yet this rather important part of Jake's life is just completely unknown to Brett, even directly clashes with her personality and views without her realizing it. 

The same clash can be seen with bull-fighting, just at a much higher scale. We already know that bull-fighting is an incredibly important part of Jake's life - it's what he goes to for comfort, he's an aficionado, he's in with the crowd in Spain. I would put it as being his in the way little else is, it's not part of the front he put's up everywhere else. And then we see him have to choose between this part of his life and Brett - and he picks Brett. We see the direct fallout with Montoya, who won't even look in his direction. And then we see Jake basically sulk and mope this massive loss for a decent amount of pages. Everything he thinks about and does is either a very obvious and very bitter reaction towards losing bullfighting - such as when he goes on rant about how money buys good, loyal friends, who aren't your friends for "obscure reasons" - or a very obvious and bitter attempt to distract himself from thinking about bullfighting - such as the strange scene with the manager of the bicycling... something. I'm not really certain what to call it.

Anyway, the point is, he chose Brett over bullfighting, and he seems to be greatly regretting it, maybe even thinking he chose wrong. Very soon after - literally just a couple days - Brett messages him saying that everything basically fell apart between her and Romero, the exact person he gave up bullfighting to help her get with. 

With the context of the events leading up to the final scene, I don't think it's a stretch to say that Jake has finally realized something about himself and Brett - it was never going to work anyway. He thought he could be someone special, the one person who actually managed to work out with Brett despite her massive, trailing tail of relationships that Did Not Work. And maybe they do have something special, something that other people don't have with Brett, but Brett will still be Brett and Jake will still be Jake, and fundamentally, Brett and Jake clash. Brett takes absolutely nothing seriously, largely as a coping mechanism it seems, and doesn't see that Jake does have things that he takes very seriously, since Jake had previously been functioning under the same mask that nothing ever gets to him.

Jake's only seeing this clash now that he's brought Brett out of the normal setting where they see each other - Paris, and Paris like cities - to Spain, this untouched, pastoral place. Brett interacts terribly with many of the things Jake genuinely holds dear without even realizing it. The reader is beginning to see it, and so is Jake. Maybe Jake can still be her confidant, still be her close friend, but they'll never be able to function under the level of closeness and intimacy that a relationship would require. 

That last line by Jake isn't him remarking on how it's pretty of Brett to still imagine them having a relationship - it's him bitterly saying it's pretty of Brett to think they're compatible enough in the first place. She doesn't know and understand him well enough to be in a relationship, and even here, Brett continues to be unaware of Jake's meaning. 

I can also make some arguments directly against the claim that the last line of the book shows that Jake has finally realized that the relationship with Brett is never going to happen. For one, Jake is already aware of this, as throughout the entire book, he's never seemed to actually make any move for something more - he understands pretty well that it's never going to happen, even being the one to say, multiple times, that it won't work out. Secondly, the things that Hemingway wrote and included in the story strongly support the idea that Jake is coming to the conclusion that he and Brett just aren't compatible. For instance, the subtle discourse between Brett and Jake that occurs over things special and secret to Jake, such as the whole religion thing, heavily suggests that Hemingway is going for the outlook I'm currently arguing for. What would be the point of Hemingway including these things, and even kind of emphasizing them with the number of times these clashes occur, if he wasn't trying to make some point about Jake and Brett not being right for each other? 

In addition, the progression of events leads much more logically to Jake's conclusion that he and Brett don't fit than to the conclusion that they'll never be a thing. The catalyst of this line are mainly the events that happened in Spain, with Brett and Romero, and Brett telling Jake that she and Romero didn't work out. These events don't introduce anything new that would lead Jake to the realization that he's been clinging to a dream that won't ever happen. What occurs during these events to suddenly clue Jake in to the fact that he's almost deluding himself, if everything else that has happened between him and Brett already hasn't managed to? Did he help get Brett together with Romero because he thinks that it would somehow give him more of a chance with Brett, and when it all fell apart, realized he was deluding himself? That just doesn't make sense. It makes a lot more sense to say that those events led to him realizing the things I argued earlier in this blog. 

I'm already starting to come up with some counterarguments to what I literally just wrote, so I'll stop this here since you're not at my blog to see me just argue with myself. But once again, I'm arguing this for the sake of seeing where it goes (and I kind of want to go more into it still, but I've already wrote a lot and my brain's going in loops at this point). The other view of the last line, that it's just Jake expressing disillusionment with the dream of a relationship with Brett, is really just as likely, if not more so. Or maybe it's a mix of both, or Jake is just so disillusioned he doesn't think it's even worth the time to consider anymore (credits to Lucas for this idea). 

Let me know your thoughts and argue with me down below if you actually managed to get through this post, sorry for the length!