Literary Allusions (Part I: Poetry)

Using Eliot, Frost, and Dickinson to talk about isolation, barriers, and truth

One theme of Community Day is that isolation warps our thinking. It causes us to make up stories about ourselves and others. Without interpersonal bonds, we become untethered; our minds become unmoored from the real things around us.

This damaging isolation can be the result of childhood neglect, being shunned, loneliness, incarceration, quarantines, or something else. All of my main characters suffer from one or more of these. This includes the narrator.

As I discussed in a previous column, my narrator is unreliable. He explains from the start that he’s a storyteller. He made up tall tales as a kid. As an adult, he worked as a literary editor. He likes to exaggerate and entertain. So maybe his winding, over-the-top story in Community Day is simply a good old-fashioned yarn. Or maybe his thinking has become unhinged due to isolation.

I made the narrator a writer/editor so he could naturally allude to works of fiction while telling his story. Some of his references are obvious; some subtle. The list includes the Bible, Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Twain, Chekhov, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Toole, and more. The ongoing question of the novel is whether the narrator is using fiction to tell the truth…or if he is just telling fiction.

Today, I want to briefly share how my narrator’s allusions to three poets help him make his points about isolation, barriers, and truth: The poets are T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson.