Isn't it Pretty to Think So?

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

That isn't the exact last line of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, but it's near enough to the end to qualify as the last words of the novel.
It doesn’t seem like an especially profound grouping of words. But consider what's said before it.

"We would have been so good together."

By then, both the reader and the narrator know that they wouldn't have been. So when the narrator tells Brett, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" the reader can only nod in agreement with that sad, final truth.

Writers work hard to craft the opening sentence. So much hinges on it. It has to draw the reader in, set the tone and pace, maybe even establish character and setting. Sometimes, it's good enough to be a stand-alone quote. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But a great opening line isn't enough to carry the novel. Everything that follows has to support the opening statement. Eventually, the story comes to a close, and we've been convinced or we haven't. At the end, something has to tie it together, and even though the words may seem mundane out of context, within the context of the novel, the ending has to be as profound, or even more so, than the opening. It's the final impact. The words that will linger.

I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway's work. The Sun Also Rises isn't even in my top one hundred favorite books. And yet, when I'm trying to wrap up a story, these lines always come back to me because of how perfectly they complete the story he told. It isn't a happy ending. It's the right ending. Only a master of the art could get so much out of such a deceptively simple statement.