Yeah. it might have been a reach. There’s a soliloquy about Gatsby’s death: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”
I was relying too heavily on people knowing that moment in the book.
It’s… honestly haunting when you read it in the context of the novel. My arm hairs are standing on end just revisiting it. The narrator, Nick, might sound cordially distanced, but he's emotionally rocked by all of this. They were really great about understating psychological trauma back in the day.