Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald - Caren J. Town (essay date winter 1989)


The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald - Caren J. Town (essay date winter 1989)

Caren J. Town (essay date winter 1989)

SOURCE: Town, Caren J. “‘Uncommunicable Forever’: Nick's Dilemma in The Great Gatsby.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 31, no. 4 (winter 1989): 497-513.

[In the following essay, Town deconstructs the language used by Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway, noting disconnections between what he says and what he actually means.]

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact—lifting
from it—neither hanging
nor pushing—

—William Carlos Williams, from “The Rose”

During their first meeting in The Great Gatsby, Daisy Fay Buchanan playfully calls her cousin (and the novel's narrator) Nick Carraway “an absolute rose.” He responds:

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from...

[The entire page is 7560 words long]

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