32 pages • 1 hour read
William Carlos WilliamsPaterson
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Paterson
Paterson is introduced in Book 1 as the name of the city of Paterson, New Jersey, as well as Paterson, the character. Using the same name for both is one of several ways that Williams makes connections between the two through connecting the body of Paterson the man with the city itself. Paterson the man acts throughout all five Books as an authorial stand-in for William Carlos Williams, and at times, the boundary between Williams-as-character and Paterson blurs, especially in some of the sections where letters are collaged into poetry.
As a character, Paterson is a protagonist who acts to ground the abstraction of Williams’s images: his personhood is a place for readers to return to after Williams’s flights of fancy. He’s described as an Everyman character: a poet-doctor who enjoys close observation of both the human and the natural worlds around himself. Paterson spends most of Book 2 acting as a readerly voyeur in a walk through the park. In other sections, he’s written to as Dr. P or referred to simply as Paterson. He is unconstrained by traditional morals and morality; in Book 4, he takes a mistress despite being married. He is highly interested in sexuality and especially in exceeding the boundaries of traditional decorum for someone of his social standing.
The city of Paterson has existed since before the Revolutionary War, and the history of the place recurs thematically through the introduction of specific historical interludes throughout the book: from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Throughout the books, particular focus is paid to the times of the city’s most rapid development; namely the 18th and 19th centuries, when the city was more densely settled and civic infrastructure created.
Passaic Falls
The waterfall Passaic Falls is the headwaters for the river that runs through the city of Paterson. While it’s mentioned throughout all five books, it’s featured most heavily in Book 1. Several minor characters, such as Mrs. Sarah Cummings, are killed by or otherwise interact with the Falls; this interaction underscores and repeats the broader points Williams makes about connections between the human body and the natural landscape. The Falls is where Paterson’s body is most immediately and intimately connected to the landscape of the city of Paterson through images of boulders that form the skeletal structure of the body of a man.
Additionally, in Book 3, Passaic Falls is the origination point for the flood that threatens much of the infrastructure of Paterson. The river erodes away an important embankment that supports a train trestle and endangers both lives and businesses.
As the city of Paterson grows, it follows the natural course of the river, with the Falls as a focal point of the entire city. The course of the river dictates not only the shape of the city itself but constrains human movement over time. The river, not people, decides how Paterson changes.
A.G.
The character A.G. recurs across Book 4 and Book 5. In Book 4, he writes to Paterson in the hopes that Paterson can help him with his career; A.G. is a budding poet who hopes for some professional success in poetry. A.G. attempts flattery and to draw on their shared connection as “brotherly children of the muses” to the city space of Paterson to get the poet Paterson to help him (173). A.G. was a student at Columbia University in New York City before spending time in a psychiatric hospital and traveling.
He considers himself as next in the lineage which Paterson began—the lineage of poets tied to the city of Paterson as well as poets who draw primarily on direct experience of the world in their writing. His writing process is influenced by his dreams, by his reading of other poets, and by contemporary popular culture like Groucho Marx.
A.G. finds a job at a newspaper in Newark, New Jersey; there he learns in more detail about the ins and outs of city and state politics. He spends a great deal of time wandering around the seedier neighborhoods of Paterson and he tells Paterson that these neighborhoods are the true heart of the city—he romanticizes poverty and drunkenness.
In Book 5, A.G. has found professional success as a poet; he writes to thank Paterson for writing an introduction to his latest book of poems, which is being printed in the U.K. As a slightly older poet, he sees himself as being even more deeply of the same lineage as Paterson: his personhood is deeply entwined with the beauty of both Paterson and of America; his influences are Whitmanic.
Related Titles
By William Carlos Williams
