Fantasy Animates All Great Books: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Pt. 2)

Click here for Part 1 of this analysis.      

 

       I hold this notion about great fiction:  A great book always incorporates elements of fantasy. Fantasy (and poetry, also) requires symbolism (or myth, if you prefer), and we gain our greatest insights into the nature of things through symbolism, metaphor, and myth.  Gatsby reaffirms my notion. 

 

        First, a word about the book's lyricism.  It's fraught with images that are a delight in themselves. Here are two examples.

 

         Gatsby is showing Daisy his shirts:

        "He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher -- shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

        " 'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because -- because I've never seen such beautiful shirts before.' "

        So much poetic sensuality and color pulled from something so simple! And of course it's symbolic, too. It reminds Daisy of what she may have missed out on.

        And then this quotation, describing how Gatsby's parties develop:

        "The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music [isn't that wonderful?], and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light."

        When I read that paragraph, I paused and thought, that reminds me of the style of some other writer -- who does that remind me of? It eluded me. And then it hit me. Dylan Thomas! That sea-change at the end. Sea metaphors are so important in Thomas. The room becomes an ocean of shifting sounds and colors, in which nothing is permanent and all this vitality is swept along toward dissolution.

        Before I speak of the book's deeper symbolism, I want to talk about its comedic qualities, for while its tragic slant may take precedence, it remains a sharp, funny satire. Some of the most notable comic elements occur in the extravagent parties held at Gatsby's mansion. There are some great comedic vignettes here -- the man in the library, the permanent guest who occupies a bedroom as a squatter. But my favorite comic element is the mock epic catalog of the names of the attendees at Gatsby's parties. The book is worth reading for that alone! I don't have room here to quote the whole thing (it's on p. 61 of the Scribner, 2004, edition), but I will quote the first paragraph:

        "From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all."

        This goes on for a good two more pages and I can just imagine Fitzgerald having a blast writing it. It's definitely a blast to read! But it has a certain serious purpose, also. These hilariously named people are all hollow, insubstantial, satiric cliches without lives apart from the venue of Gatsby's magnificence.

 

       Before I get to the deeper symbolic elements,  let me insert an example of incidental symbolism in the awkward scene where Gatsby and Daisy meet. It involves a "defunct clock" that the agitated Gatsby knocks off the mantel, catching it in his hands and apologizing.

        " 'It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.

        "I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor."

        This isn't just an idle bit of business; the dead clock symbolizes time standing still, as Gatsby and Daisy are transported back to their last meeting. But of course it's impossible to recapture the past; time has been symbolically smashed and can never be restarted.

  

        The first chapter of the book displays the beautiful people, the elegant home and lifestyle of the Buchanans. However, there is trouble in the Buchanan paradise; Tom Buchanan is having an affair. The chapter ends with our first glimpse of Gatsby, a shadowy figure in the dark gazing with trembling yearning across the water at the green light at the end of the Buchanan's dock that symbolizes Daisy for him. We are ushered into his world of a misty, unattainable dream.

        Chapter 2 (the "slumming" chapter) couldn't contrast more sharply. We meet Tom's mistress and see how the scruffier portion of humanity lives and how the rough-and-tough football player Tom can move between both worlds without compunction.

        And here is how Chapter 2 begins:

       "About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghostly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with laden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."

        We can see that we are actually in the sterile world of T. S. Eliot, the world of the Waste Land and of "Prufrock" and of the "Hollow Men." But brooding over this ash dump (in the days before gas and electric heat, all of New York City would have been warmed by coal and wood, and the ashes have to be disposed of somewhere) is a remarkable vision: Dr. T. J. Eckleburg's eyes behind a pair of enormous yellow spectacles -- a billboard advertising an oculist's business. What a sight! By the end of the book this unsettling vision has become a symbol for the all-seeing, all-knowing (perhaps uncaring or perhaps vindictive) watchfulness of God.

        How this transformation occurs I won't discuss, not wanting to play the spoiler. But I will say this: This question remains to the end: Whose version of the accident was correct? The narrator wasn't present in the car, so he can't verify anything (clever!). Gatsby tells him Daisy was driving. Obviously Daisy told her husband that Gatsby was driving, because Tom says at one point, "He ... never even stopped his car."

        But isn't it possible that she told him the truth and Tom -- or both of them -- chose to put the blame on Gatsby, anyway? There is a scene where Nick peeks through the window and sees Daisy and Tim talking:

        "They weren't happy ... and yet they weren't unhappy, either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said they were conspiring together."

        Obviously we'll never know for sure. Personally, I think Daisy would have never had the backbone to take responsibility if she had been driving, and I think it's entirely possible that she lied to Tom, or else caved in to him or willingly conspired against Gatsby.   And I'm inclined to think Gatsby was telling the truth. He made his money in the sleaziest way imaginable, and he can't be called honest, and yet he retains a kind of impractical dreamer's sense of honor.  I don't think he would have let Daisy take the rap as it were if she hadn't actually been driving. And he's talking to Nick, who is his only real friend -- he had no reason to lie, nothing to gain by it. It's my opinion that Daisy was driving that car.

        What we do know is that the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg found an avenging angel who wreaked his vengeance on the wrong man because of Tom Buchanan's lack of honor. Perhaps an adaptation of my favorite quotation from Evangeline Walton's The Island of the Mighty is relevant here: the god Eckleburg went forth "after the fashion of all orthodox gods, to damn the creature that he had fashioned ill."

        And so we return again to "The Hollow Men" (who meet in Gatsby's mansion, search for the unattainable, and await the vengeful Eyes of Eckleburg):

 

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

 

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

 

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

 

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

"We Are the Hollow Men": The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Pt. 1)

Find Part 2 of this analysis here.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

--T.S. Eliot (published 1925)

        In my American literature class in college, we read the 20th-century novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.  It's a compelling piece of realistic fiction, but it doesn't hold a candle to The Great Gatsby and it's too bad I never got around to reading Gatsby until now.  Of course, I'm a person who relishes a subtle, poetic style and complexity clothed in simplicity, and that's just what Gatsby has.

       I realize that thousands of essays, critiques, masters' theses, and doctoral dissertaions have been written on Gatsby, and I haven't read any of that material.  What follows is not a scholarly analysis, but simply my personal impressions of the book.  I don't plan to publish a review on Goodreads or Amazon -- it's superfluous for a classic of this sort -- but I did rank the book on Goodreads.  I noticed that, incredibly, some readers had given it only one star.  I assume those are people who have no literary education and no grasp of literary fiction, and they can't be faulted for that.  That's why we have such a wide variety of authors and books.  But certainly  I find anything less than five stars for Gatsby to be laughable.

       First, the Zeitgeist.  We're told that Fitzgerald acutely rendered the Jazz Age -- the time of affluence and loosening moral sensibility that arose in the 1920s.  But life at any period is multilayered and fiction reflects only the layers that the author chooses to discuss.  No period of history is so simple that displaying one aspect or portraying one class can reveal it completely.  I say that because my mother grew up in the 1920s.  She was born in 1909 and so was only 13 in 1922, the year the book is laid; the book's characters are thirtyish.  But she was definitely a flapper -- she and her mother both "bobbed" their hair about 1922, she danced the Charleston, and she wore the short dresses with fringe (but she always said they came just above the knee -- nothing like the underwear length women sport nowadays).  Her family was comfortably off but not rich; she never drank or frequented speakeasies and organized crime was only a story in the newspapers.  She was also a smart, serious student in high school, studying Latin and loving math.  She belonged more to the class discussed by the book's narrator near the end, where he is about to return home to the Midwest.  So I would say, don't take Gatsby as typical of the great majority of people in the United States in the Jazz Age, any more than aliens just come to Earth ought to take reality shows, the Kardashians, and Lindsey Lohan as the types by which to measure our own moment of time.

       I do think Fitzgerald fits with the era's artistic sensibility, however, because as I was reading I kept thinking of T. S. Eliot and of James Joyce, both of whom wrote in the same period.  I couldn't give you a direct comparison with Joyce because I haven't read him recently, but something about Chapter 2, where Tom and Nick go "slumming," reminded me of the way society is portrayed in Ulysses and other Joyce books.  And the same sense of emptiness and despair that underlies most of Eliot's poetry also exists beneath the beautiful exteriors in Gatsby.  These really are "hollow men," destined to end with a whimper.

       The narrative technique in Gatsby is worth studying.  However, I want to point out that apparently nobody ever told Fitzgerald that it's a no-no to use speech verbs other than "said," "asked," "replied," etc.; or to use adverbs to describe how people are speaking.  Here is a list of certain phrases:  he asked helplessly; she cried ecstatically; she added irrelevantly; he remarked decisively; I answered shortly; she complained; Daisy retorted; she remarked contemptuously; demanded Daisy; objected Daisy; objected Tom crossly; insisted Daisy; I confessed; broke out Tom violently; insisted Tom; she whispered enthusiastically; suggested Miss Baker; I inquired innocently; she said hesitantly, I repeated blankly; she said suddenly; inquired Daisy coldly; I asked quickly; demanded Tom suddenly; he advised me; corroborated Tom kindly.

       And that's just the first chapter!  It would be easier to count the few times that Fitzgerald actually used an unqualified "said."  So, if an unquestionably brilliant stylist like Fitzgerald could do that, I don't think the beginning writers out there need to worry too much about an occasional "he queried abruptly."  Actually, it's the overall effect that matters.  If it's obtrusive and awkward, then don't do it.  (I confess, I doubt that I would ever write: corroborated Tom kindly.)    

     

       However, that's just an amusing quibble.  Let's talk about the point of view and the characterizations.  I'm not fond of first person; it often feels artificial to me, because it always implies that the narrator is writing the tale.  Was Huckleberry Finn really writing his own story?  I don't think so!  I do use first person in my Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head series; Di'fa'kro'mi is a bard and he is composing the story, so it doesn't feel phony. 

       This said, I found Gatsby's narrator, Nick Carraway, to be exactly what the story needs.  He isn't just a wooden figure posed to observe and tell about the action; he is both a bystander and a essential participant in the plot and it's made clear later in the book that he is indeed writing down these memories.  He is Daisy Buchanan's cousin so he has a right to step into her social circle; he lives next door to Gatsby, so of course he would meet him and get to know him; and he is a subtly drawn character in his own right.  

       One never knows with narrators; when they make statements about themselves, can you take them at face value?  Nick says at one point: "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."  Should this statement be believed?  Somehow I think it should; in his actions Nick comes off as a decent, honest man who is grounded in compassion and who tries his best to do the right thing.  I found the first few pages of the book to be a bit enigmatic; I even thought, if the whole book going to be this obscure, I don't know if I'm going to like it. 
       But if you go back and reread the beginning after you finish the book, you understand that Nick is trying to account for why he behaved as he did during the course of the story.  "I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me."  People sense this and tend to share confidences with him and reveal intimate things.  This makes Nick the perfect narrator.  Nick ultimately becomes disillusioned about this inclination of his: "I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.  Only Gatsby ... was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn." 
       In fact, all the way through, Nick's reaction to Gatsby consistently displays this ambivalence -- he goes on to say in the beginning: "No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." 
       Even the last time Nick sees Gatsby, his reaction is ambivalent:  " 'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn.  'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'  I've always been glad I said that.  It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end."  It isn't Gatsby himself that Nick admires; it's what he symbolizes -- an incorruptible, idealistic dream that can never be fulfilled amid the world's cynical, self-seeking corruption. 
       The book ends like this:

       "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... and one fine morning -- 

       "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

       Presumably, a past that symbolizes a better time.

       As for the other characters, Nick's non-judgmental approach allows us to view them with a dispassionate and unsentimental eye.  There is no cut-and-dried villain; all possess the same character flaw of  smallness, of never seeing the need to take responsibility for one's actions.  Tom Buchanan is the most despicable in that regard, and Daisy is simply too weak a character to even understand the possibility of rising to any noble plane.  She is not the newly liberated woman of the 1920s; it's Jordan Baker the golf champion who typifies this phenomenon -- a woman who doesn't need to truckle under to a man for support (consider the symbolic contrast of the names "Jordan," more commonly a male name, and "Daisy," a quickly fading feminine flower).  Baker remains a bit of an enigma.  At one point, Nick pronounces her inveterately dishonest; she once got into trouble for moving her ball in a golf tournament, and yet toward the climax, he describes her as "too wise to ever carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age."  Perhaps her type is destined to survive.

        Among the lesser characters, even Mr. Wolfsheim, unfortunately portrayed as the stereotypical Jewish shyster, is not castigated; he is merely the opportunistic charlatan seizing all opportunities to advance his self-interest.  George Wilson the mechanic and his wife Myrtle (who is Tom Buchanan's mistress) play more significant roles.  Myrtle deserves a better fate; she is simply acting out a desire to share the life of beautiful people as she understands it.  Wilson, whom Tom describes at one point as "so dumb he doesn't even know he's alive," ends by being the agent of the plot's climax.  Interestingly, when Tom realizes that Daisy and Gatsby had a relationship, he remarks to Nick, "You think I'm pretty dumb, don't you?"  And shortly thereafter, Nick observes "there is no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."  Both Tom and George Wilson have just discovered that their wives may have cheated on them, and it is making them equally sick.
      

 In Part 2 of this analysis,
I'll consider the symbolic and mythical underpinnings
 of the book, as well as its comedic qualities.