I feel as though I've finally decided on my viewpoint in the raging debate of "is Brett a good person?"/"is Brett a literary bitch?" debate. I reached this new conclusion while I was working on my response paper, but it also has a basis in my panel presentation and private debates I've had with classmates outside of class. Unfortunately my conclusion doesn't side with one side in particular, so it may come across as simply wishy-washy and indecisive.
I feel like Brett is too complex of a character to simply characterize her as all good or all awful, which is the divide I've seen between a lot of my classmates. She's either a loving mother-figure who cares for all the characters and is trying to understand her own emotions, or she's a manipulative whore who plays with the emotions of others in order to gain a sick thrill of control (This is not to say all my classmates have claimed one of these arguments. This is simply what I have noticed from observing and participating in less structured and formal discussions outside of class). I feel that Brett's character is a little bit of both.
She's a burden to Jake, who is trapped in his infatuation, unable to act on it or change his current situation, but at the same time I don't think she intentionally causes Jake to suffer. And even though I don't view Brett as a "mother figure" within the story, I do see her as a human being. She can feel sorrow and regret, and can give in to selfishness and vanity, but overall, she is still learning who she wants to be as a person. In the same way I can't claim to know any of you fully as people simply based on our classroom interactions, I don't feel I can fully judge Brett based on the observations and feelings exhibited by Jake. I see her as a human pretending she knows who she is, all the while trying to learn.
That may be an over-humanization of what we draw from the text, but the more I look over old passages, the more I see a complexity of Brett, and a shimmer of the hidden iceberg beneath the water.
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