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 those first three words to sell the comment.
It's... honestly haunting when you read it in the context of the novel. My arm hairs are standing on end just revisiting it. There's no reduction that you could make on the literature that would the story the same. The narrator might seem distanced now, but it was raw as fuck at the time