Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man.
This is Nick Carraway near the start of The Great Gatsby. It is one of the many lines that make him a kind of mirror we can only see from the thin edge, a surface that might reflect the world from the front side but who may be no more than the black at the back of the glass on the other. Up to this point, Nick speaks of himself in semi-noble terms (as we often do when giving a formal recounting of ourselves) and that, along with the first part of the sentence I’ve cited, leads us to think he might flash in a different direction. With American independence and Emersonian Self-Reliance he should say, “so I was not going to do that sort of thing.”
Instead, we get, “so I supposed it could support one more single man.”
It is a local masterpiece to include the word “single.” One more interchangeable person, one more anybody, one more edge of a guy who does not know if he is full of ligh…
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