[Sarah L.] Kaufman has a favorite sentence that serves as a touchstone. It’s the last sentence of “The Great Gatsby,” and I bet you do know this one: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” She grows eloquent on the magic of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diction. “You might feel his verbs in your body, so delicately you’re not quite aware of it,” she says. “The repeated B sound — beat, boats, borne back — is percussive. The physical resonance of the verb beat may echo internally in many ways, as you feel a soft drumbeat, as your heart beats. Reading ‘borne back’ may light a brief, indistinct flickering inside, a sense of how your own consciousness can whoosh backward in time.”
Apart from the fact that I have never understood what Fitzgerald is trying to say here — isn’t the whole point of the book not that Gatsby is doomed to return to the past but that he can’t? — I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”?
What a peculiar response, especially from an eminent literary critic. Isn’t it the case that a person paddling vigorously, the person working desperately against a strong current, is fairly beating the water with his oars? And such a person is Nick Carraway, the character who utters these words. The sentence isn’t about Gatsby at all — Gatsby is dead — but about Nick, who very badly wants to put the whole Gatsby-and-Daisy era of his life safely into history, but no matter how energetically he beats the waters, he cannot; he is ever borne back into his painful past.