You must know. I can't stand it, that's all. Oh darling, please understand!. Don't you love me?. "Love You, I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me" (Hemingway 26). Jake asks Brett to go with him to the country for no real reason at all but just to go off with the one he loves, but Brett declines saying that both Brett and Jake know that any relationship beyond being friends is pointless. Jake is still adjusting to his impotence, while Brett will not sacrifice a sexual relationship for the man she loves. Since Brett and Jake aren't going to pursue any kind of romantic relationship because they know it will fail, they start a relationship that may prove to be even harder. They become best friends. This presents a great difficulty for Jake, because Brett's presence is both pleasurable and agonizing for him. Lady Brett Ashley serves as a challenge to a weakness Jake must confront. Since his war experience, Jake has attempted to reshape the man he is and the first step in doing this is to accept his impotence. As Brett constantly reminds Jake of his disability, Jake's manly hood is challenged in the most personal way, and despite Brett's love for Jake she feels forced to marry another. Though physically impotent and emotionally tortured Jake remains morally sound while Mike, Cohn, and Romero, who are physically whole, have become morally decedent (Donaldson 77). .
Mike Campbell is Brett's next planned fiancee. Mike is ridiculously in love with Brett even though he knows of her short affairs with other men. Mike loves her beauty, as do all of the other men in this novel, but his love only goes as deep as her beauty and nothing else. In the first scene of the book Mike can not stop for one minute commenting on Brett's beauty: "I say Brett, you are a lovely piece. Don't you think she's beautiful?" (79). Throughout most of the book Mike continues this pattern of just talking about her beauty and nothing else, and his best remark was when he said she was just a lovely, healthy wench.
