THE GREAT GATSBY – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Setting:
The Great Gatsby suggests rather than develops the era of
the twenties, it does evoke a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that
seemingly will never come again. The loss of an ideal, the disillusionment that
comes with the failure to compromise, the efforts of runaway prosperity and
wild parties, the fear of the intangibility of that moment, the built-in
resentment against the new immigration, the fear of a new radical element, the
latent racism behind half-baked historical theories, the effect of Prohibition,
the rise of a powerful underworld, the effect of the automobile and
professional sports on post-war America – these and a dozen equally important
events became the subject of The Great Gatsby, a novel that evokes both the
romance and the sadness of that strange and fascinating era we call the
twenties.
The Great Gatsby is a novel that is set against the ending
of the war. Both Nick and Gatsby have participated in the war, although like
much of the historical background in the novel, these events are more implied
than developed. When Nick first meets Gatsby, Gatsby asks, “Your face is
familiar... Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?” Nick tells him,
“Yes... The ninth machine-gun battalion,” to which Gatsby responds, “I was in
the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen eighteen.”
Imagery:
Fitzgerald has described events such as European immigrants
bringing with them socialist ideas, or the growing resentment of “foreigners”
among Americans in The Great Gatsby. He speaks of the streets of New York
filling up with people with “the tragic eyes and short upper lips of
South-Eastern Europe,” an illusion that gets picked up with Meyer Wolfsheim and
his “gonnegtions”. Fitzgerald also
described blacks coming from the South to cities like Chicago and New York. As
Gatsby and Nick enter the city over the Queensboro Bridge, they see a panorama
of ethnic faces outlined against the skyline of the new city, itself one of the
unstated forces at work in the novel. The Tom Buchanans control the legal
institutions of this city, and the Meyer Wolfsheims control the underworld.
Imagery and
Foreshadowing:
-
The owl-eyed man steps from a car “violently
shorn of one wheel” – next chapter, we find out that Tom Buchanan was involved
in an automobile accident outside of Santa Barbara where he “ripped a front
wheel off his car.” – Myrtle Wilson killed by an automobile
-
Rain falls on the reunion of Daisy and Gatsby –
Rain falls on Gatsby’s funeral
-
Daisy and Jordan sit on a couch that seems to
float to the ceiling – in Chapter 7 they sit on the same couch oppressed of the
heat, as if the airiness of their being has finally come down to earth
-
The carnival gaiety of Gatsby’s parties
disintegrates under Daisy’s disapproving eye
-
The city that Nick sees in its “wild promise of
all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” gives way to the reality of death
in chapter 4 where, “A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms.”
-
The copy of Clay’s “Economics” that Gatsby reads
while waiting for Daisy is apt for a woman whose voice is “full of money”
-
The “out-of-date timetable” that Nick uses to
write down the names of Gatsby’s guests proves the obsolescence of Gatsby’s
dream
-
The words that Myrtle speaks when she first
meets Tom, “You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever,” reverberate with
irony
Themes:
A thematic subcurrent of The Great Gatsby involves a sense
of a new, urban public manipulated by power brokers, and Nick’s sudden
awareness that a World Series can be fixed gives him insight into the
corruptibility of this vast world.
Fitzgerald was working within terms of several broad themes
in this novel. One involves the theme of America, the initial sense of promise
of the New World as it was played out by the Frontier and transformed by the
new megalopolis. A second involves the theme of love and romance, embodied in
Daisy Fay and played out and transformed in her five years of marriage with Tom
Buchanan. A third, of course, involves Gatsby himself, his internalising these
themes - first, by modelling himself on Dan Cody and second, by making his
reunion with Daisy inseparable from the idea of self.
When one lost the sense of life or promise, which Fitzgerald
characteristically predicated on youth – then life lost its sense of wonder,
its splendour, and its romantic promise. To desire was, ironically, more
important than to have. The man who had great wealth, Tom Buchanan, or the man
who was beaten by life, George Wilson, lacked the intensity of experience of a
Gatsby who was a “son of God” and who “sprang from the Platonic conception of
himself,” as the novel tells us. To lose the romantic conception of oneself is
to move to hellish world, which in the novel is embodied by the valley of ashes
and incarnated by George Wilson, who appropriately becomes the agent of
Gatsby’s death when Gatsby loses his sense of wonder and “romantic readiness”,
when his world becomes “material without being real” and a rose becomes
“grotesque.”
Theme of Lost Past:
-
Over wound clock
-
Declining seasons of the year: Novel begins in
late spring and ends in late autumn
Theme of romantic
exhaustion and lost promises:
-
Intensified by ash heaps and dust imagery
-
“Mingled her dark thick blood with the dust” –
language infuses both religious and romantic meaning.
-
Tom’s remark, Gatsby “threw dust into your
eyes,” not only picks up the dust/ashes imagery but connects it with the theory
of seeing/misseeing.
-
The custodian of the Valley of Ashes, an “ashen
and fantastic figure,” George Wilson murders the green dreamer, Gatsby is
ironic
-
Violence of Myrtle’s death is attached to the
many references to bad driving and moral carelessness
-
‘Green light’ at the dock suggests Gatsby’s
fertile dreams and money
Absence
of God:
-
Except for Gatsby’s godlike sense of the
potentiality of self, God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the
commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, and embodied by the
equally blind eyes of the owl-eyed man who appears at Gatsby’s party and
reappears at his funeral, bridging the connection between the two, just as the
end product of Gatsby’s parties are embodied in the orange pulps and lemon
rinds and by that other symbol of romantic waste and emotional exhaustion – the
valley of ashes. This is a blind world because there is no source of moral
vision.
Symbolism:
Gatsby and Moon
Symbolism:
-
The ‘moon’ that bathes Gatsby’s house at the
start of the novel
-
Same moon shines on Gatsby when he waves goodbye
at the party
-
Stands vigil at Daisy’s house after the fatal
accident
Gatsby and God
Symbolism:
-
“She blossomed for him like a flower and the
incarnation was complete.” Note the word ‘incarnation’.
-
Called a “son of God.”
Structure of the
Novel:
Both structurally and chronologically, The Great Gatsby
builds towards Chapter 5, the scene in which Gatsby again meets Daisy after
their long separation. In a nine-chapter novel, this is the exact halfway
point; the first four chapters build toward this moment, while the last four
chapters lead away from it.
Chapter 5 is the static centre of the novel. Here, past and
present fuse; the dream comes as close to “incarnation” as it is possible for
it to come. Fitzgerald infuses this section with time images and references.
Jay Gatsby:
What Fitzgerald did in The Great Gatsby was to raise his
central character to a mythic level, to reveal a man whose intensity of dream
partook a state of mind that embodied America itself. Gatsby is the last of the
romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his
personal grail.
Gatsby brought his Western intensity East and found a
“frontier” equivalent in the New York underworld, the world of professional
gamblers, bootleggers, financial schemers and a new breed of exploiters that
the East bred differently from the West. Such a man will stand out in
“respectable” company because he will lack social credentials.
The romantic intensity that the pioneers brought to a new
world, Gatsby now brings to a beautiful, but also rather superficial,
self-involved, self-protecting, morally empty young woman. The power of this
novel ultimately comes from the structured relationships between these
narrative elements. We have two kinds of seeing in this novel: a visionary
whose vision has been emptied and a moral observer who is initially
unsympathetic to what he sees in the visionary. “Gatsby... represented
everything for which I have an unaffected scorn,” but who is eventually won
over by what is compelling and poignant in Gatsby’s story. Nick comes to see
that Gatsby’s fate cannot be separated from his own or from the destiny of
America.
Gatsby’s Father Figure –
Meyer Wolfsheim:
Meyer Wolfsheim becomes Gatsby’s second father figure and
introduces him to the New York underworld. It is thus with money that comes
from bootlegging, gambling and bucket shops that Gatsby makes the fortune that
allows him to buy his mansion on West Egg. When Nick confronts Wolfsheim after
Gatsby’s death, he asks him if he had started Gatsby in business. “Start him! I
made him!” “I raised him out of nothing, right out of the gutter.”
To Gatsby, money is money, and he never understands the
difference between East Egg or West Egg. That is why Daisy is “appalled by West
Egg.”
Gatsby - “Son of
God”:
In one of the biographical recollections that Nick Carraway
gives, he tells us that Gatsby “was a son of God” and that “he must be about
His Father’s business.” The “Father’s business” turns out to be the pursuit of
a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatsby’s resolve comes at the moment
he invents himself – “so he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a
seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent.” – And this moment comes
simultaneously with Gatsby’s meeting Dan Cody. Once this equation is in place,
Dan Cody takes on godlike proportions, and his business – the exploitation of
America – becomes Gatsby’s business as well, even to the extent that Gatsby
creates the kind of self necessary for such a pursuit.
Wilson goes out and kills the wrong man. Not only is God
blind, but Wilson, his agent, is blind as well, and Wilson becomes an incarnate
inversion of Gatsby. Pale of face, with yellow strawlike hair, he seems to
leave a trail of ashes behind him, a possibility of death, the death of a
godlike vision.
George Wilson:
The function of the exhausted apostles is taken over by
George Wilson, who also sits in front of his garage – between the railroad and
the road, watching the traffic go by. He is described as “one of those worn-out
men” who “sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars
that passed along the road.” Wilson and his wife live in “a small block of
yellow brick,” surrounded by a “waste land” which locates them among the middle
class. Their failed sense of wonder and disbelief in God makes their world an
equivalent of hell, which is like the “impenetrable cloud” of dust that is
prevalent in the Valley of Ashes.
