Allusion of "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot

"The Waste Land", an enduring allusion in the novel, acts as a symbol in both a diegetic and meta-literary fashion; in the former, it symbolizes Jessie and Ethan's mutual love for literature and specifically poetry, and in the latter reaffirms common themes in the novel such as death and inscrutability. The poem features death-centric symbolism within itself, and Jessie and Ethan both remark on the difficulty of interpreting it. In this way, the poem symbolizes the difficulty of attempting to discern any meaning from death, with which Jessie and Ethan are both intimately familiar, and reinforces the idea to both of them that tragedy shared is more easily endured.