Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss great last lines in the context of 'Don't read the last page.' Uncle Jerry quotes the famous last line of The Sun Also Rises, 'Isn't it pretty to think so?', and Angela immediately connects it to Taylor's line on folklore: 'isn't it just so pretty to think?' suggesting Taylor may have read Hemingway.

A Farewell to Arms

Uncle Jerry discusses the Dear John letter tradition and identifies Agnes von Kurowsky as the real person behind Catherine Barclay in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The novel draws on Hemingway's own experience of receiving a Dear John letter from Kurowsky after falling in love with her while convalescing from a war wound. The connection to Dear John is through the Dear John letter tradition itself: Taylor's song uses the epistolary frame that the novel fictionalises from Hemingway's biography. The song does not quote or directly allude to the novel, but both works share the same cultural tradition of the letter that ends a relationship.

The Sun Also Rises

“And isn't it just so pretty to think All along there was some Invisible string Tying you to me?”

Uncle Jerry identifies the chorus line 'isn't it just so pretty to think' as an allusion to the closing line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes responds to Lady Brett's wistful fantasy about what their relationship could have been with the deflecting reply 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' Uncle Jerry explains the context: Jake, a World War I veteran with a grievous injury that prevents physical intimacy, knows Lady Brett is unreliable and frequently unfaithful, so his response is tinged with ironic resignation. In the song, Taylor borrows the phrasing but shifts the register from Hemingway's bitter irony toward genuine wonder, asking whether it is cosmically significant, or just beautiful to imagine, that fate was guiding her all along.