The following is adapted from a wonderful on-line article:
'An analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby”
through a consideration of two Italian translations'.
By Paul Armstrong
Libera Universita’ Di Lingue E Comunicazione Iulm
Facolta’ Di Lingue, Letterature E Culture Moderne
Corso Di Laurea In Lingue E Letterature Straniere
Milano, Italy
(Last edited/adapted by JB- 30/04/18)
(Last edited/adapted by JB- 30/04/18)
Paul’s brilliant analysis of Fitzgerald’s language has been added to and adapted (by me) and organised into short, manageable sections for you.
Introduction
When F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1924, he wrote "I want to write something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned". For this new novel he intended to adopt a narrative form characterized by economy of expression and clarity of design and to develop his themes through a method of implication rather than by explicit statement.
The language in the novel, which Fitzgerald described as "blankets of excellent prose", is characterized by the use of repetitive structures which redevelop ideas and situations through parallels and differentiation. The novel is, in essence, perfectly planned and designed.
For instance: one of Gatsby’s drunken guests has an accident and can’t understand why the car won’t go, Jordan Baker passes so close to a workman that her car tears a button off his jacket, and Daisy Buchanan kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby’s car. All of this careless driving is symbolic of the lack of responsibility with which these characters conduct their lives and provides an important example of their moral carelessness.
The novel also abounds in colours and flowers which form narrative connections that achieve symbolic significance through repetition.
For instance:
a narrative thread is established between the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock (Ch. 1) and the "fresh green breast of the new world”(Ch. 9): the two passages ultimately linking Gatsby’s dream with that of the Dutch sailors who first touched the shores of the New World. Then, of course we have the green light at the end as well- 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future...'. (useful for effective conclusion/intro and structure/style essays!)
Apart from the language in the novel tending to form patterns of incremental repetition, other elements of style include suggestive descriptive phrases:
1. in the form of oxymoron, as when Nick Carraway’s ambivalent attitude towards the leisured class surfaces in his mention of Jordan Baker’s "charming, discontented face", of Daisy’s "absurd, charming little laugh", and of Tom’s "magnanimous scorn". (useful for narrative voice essays, pupils!)
2. by linking of nouns with surprising adjectives, like "triumphant hat-boxes", and the frequent incongruity of subject and verb, like the wreck of the car which "crouched” in George Wilson’s garage.
3. by the use of a vocabulary of impermanence: words like "drift” and "restlessness” appear frequently, reflecting the insecurity of the era and the lack in purpose or direction in people’s lives.
Characterization is not therefore a straightforward business in The Great Gatsby. It is frequently developed through suggestion rather than revealed through objective description. The result is a novel that generates a richness and complexity of meaning.
Finally, there are hundreds of words related to time, as we would expect in a novel whose main character wants nothing less than to bring back the past, to preserve a golden moment from five years earlier that he wanted to last forever.
Everything- and I mean everything- in the novel is there for a reason.
Everything- and I mean everything- in the novel is there for a reason.
Analytical and Evaluative Comments
“ it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams (. . .)
These early words seem to anticipate Gatsby’s murder by George Wilson, the car mechanic who runs a garage and petrol station in “the valley of ashes”. The words “foul”, “dust”, and “wake” carry powerful resonances of death, murder and funeral rites. In chapter 2, Nick describes the valley of ashes as a place "where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” Men move “dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” Nick frequently uses the verb "ashen" to describe Wilson who seems literally to dissolve into the valley of ashes: he “mingled immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair ". At the end of the novel when Wilson goes to Gatsby’s house to kill him, Fitzgerald describes Wilson
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Nick describes Long Island as: “that slender riotous island”
"Riotous” anticipates the profligate and wanton behaviour of the residents of East and West Egg.
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“Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water”
East Eggers live in houses that are palace-like, stately mansions affordable only to the very rich. Here is introduced one of the novel’s key themes, wealth and the corruption that comes with it. The verb "to glitter” suggests that these houses reflect light like gold or something magical. Notice too the use of the adjective "white” to describe the palaces in East Egg, harking back to the white castles of fairy-tales. It was Daisy who chose the “cheerful red and white colonial mansion” she and Tom live in and we know Daisy is often linked with the colour white. She speaks of her own "white girlhood”. On the night Gatsby first met her "the sidewalk was white with moonlight” as "Daisy’s white face came up to [Gatsby’s] own.” Whiteness appears to refer to, and reinforces our impression of, Daisy’s purity. However, by the end of the novel, we realize that white, in fact, denotes an emptiness at the heart of Daisy, a lack of conscience- a vacuous nature- an empty page. But why the red? Is it the colour of power? Blood? Perhaps, it again foreshadows later events- the blood of Myrtle that will be on the hands of the Buchanans (for Daisy did kill Myrtle and Tom indirectly kills Gatsby by framing him). ( setting, effective intro, character...)
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“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together … I felt that Tom would drift on forever …”
The Buchanans have spent a year in France
The words “drifted”, “unrestfully", and "drift on forever” also anticipate the end of the novel when the Buchanans do indeed move from East Egg. After Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson in a hit-and-run accident, she and Tom leave East Egg in a hurry without telling anybody where they will be moving to.
Fitzgerald develops characterization through suggestion. Nick observes that Tom’s eyes are "flashing about restlessly", that Tom “had been hovering restlessly about the room” and that Daisy’s "body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee". Again all this restlessness suggests Tom and Daisy’s anxiety and nervous pursuit of action.
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“The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door jumping over sun – dials and brick walls and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.”
Notice the imagery here. Fitzgerald turns the lawn into a wave which dashes itself up “from the momentum of its run” and spreads itself out over the side of the house ("it reached the house drifting up the side"). The words used to describe the lawn are words of movement- verbs (“ran”, “jumping”, "drifting", "momentum of its run"). The repetitive structure is evident: in just a few pages Fitzgerald has effectively associated the Buchanans with words of movement. They drift "unrestfully” or "restlessly”. Even their lawn seems to be moving. Fitzgerald wants us to know from the outset that the Buchanans are wealthy, morally vacuous drifters. The Buchanans’ association with restlessness, with nervous movement, also anticipates the final outcome of the novel when Tom and Daisy leave Long Island after the killing of Myrtle Wilson in a hit-and-run accident. (effective intro/character...)
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When Nick arrives at the Buchanans’ for dinner Tom Buchanan is described for the first time in terms that emphasize his physical presence. “He seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body.”
Tom is associated with words of movement ("shifting” and "moved ") reinforcing Fitzgerald’s description of him and his wife as wealthy drifters. The word choice "cruel body” and “great pack of muscle” suggests that the physical aspect of Tom’s nature is capable of bursting out instinctively at any moment, as indeed it does. We are immediately aware of his aggressive nature which we later see concrete when Tom bruises Daisy’s finger and breaks Myrtle Wilson’s nose in a rage.
Fitzgerald writes that Tom’s body "was capable of enormous leverage". The mechanical imagery of 'leverage' reinforces the idea of Tom’s physical power. However, “leverage” suggests not only physical power but the power to influence: morally, socially, emotionally. In chapter 7 when Tom tells Daisy that Gatsby is a bootlegger involved in all sorts of criminal activities, his words have a vital influence ("leverage") over Daisy who abandons Gatsby without hesitation the moment she hears them.
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When Nick finally meets his cousin Daisy, her first words are:
"I’m p – paralyzed with happiness.”
This ambiguous phrase suggests that somehow Daisy is unable to enjoy her life. Daisy’s life is "paralyzed", stagnant with inactivity. Her wealth, which is what gives her all her "happiness", has taken care of all of her needs. Unintentionally, she indicates to Nick her strong sense of boredom, her inability to enjoy life. In the end we discover that Daisy suffers from moral paralysis too as seen in her ability to offer no compassionate reaction to either Myrtle or Gatsby’s death.
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Nick describes the interior of Wilson’s garage:
“the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner.”
An aspect of Fitzgerald’s style is to juxtapose incongruous words. In this example, notice the incongruity of subject (Ford) and verb (crouched): an animal or a person can crouch down, but not a car. Also the verb has the double meaning. It suggests not only Wilson
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Myrtle Wilson
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"And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day … repairing the ravages of the night before.”
Gatsby's guests don’t just damage his property, they actually ravage it. "Ravages” suggests a hidden, darker side to Gatsby's typical party guest; a violent side which anticipates the later violence. The reader wonders that if Gatsby's partygoers are capable of ravaging his property, what else are they capable of doing? Indeed the final accident, caused by Daisy, in a sense Gatsby's last guest, will result in Gatsby’s murder after he is falsely identified as the driver of the car that has killed Myrtle.
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At the opening of Chapter 3, Nick describes the party on the lawns of Gatsby’s mansion.
“The lights grow brighter … the earth lurches away from the sun … yellow cocktail music … an opera of voices pitches a key higher … Laughter … spilled with prodigality … tipped out at a cheerful word … groups change … swell … dissolve and form in the same breath; … confident girls … weave … glide on … sea change of faces and voices and colour … constantly changing light.”
The whole description suggests vividly the effect of alcohol on the party-goers. Things seem to “lurch” and “weave”. Laughter “spills” and is “tipped out” as if it were drink. The music at Gatsby’s party is “yellow” impossible since we cannot hear a colour. The riotous guests are mixing their sense impressions. Notice too that yellow being a colour akin to gold suggests that Gatsby’s money is everywhere, even in the music that is being played. Guests laugh "with prodigality" suggesting their reckless, extravagant life style. Much of Fitzgerald’s word choice is associated with movement ("lurches", "spilled", "tipped out", "change more swiftly", "swell", "dissolve and form", "weave here and there", "glide on", "constantly changing"). This creates intoxicating atmosphere of restlessness and disorder, suggest again the confused and nervous pursuit of action which characterizes the lives of Gatsby’s partygoers.
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At the end of Chapter 5, Gatsby and Daisy are finally alone. Leaving them, Nick sees Gatsby peering into Daisy’s eyes listening to her enchanted voice. Nick describes Daisy’s voice as:
“a deathless song.” (note the contrast to Nick's previous descriptions of her voice as 'breathless' and 'charming' and Gatsby's description of it being 'full of money'.
Although the word "death” is attached to the suffix “less", its presence is ominous. "Death” foreshadows a tragic development. "Deathless” hints at the fact that Daisy will not die; but "deathless” might also be suggesting that Daisy will have something to do with Gatsby’s "death” since it is Gatsby himself who is listening to her "death”- less voice. At the end of the novel George Wilson murders Gatsby because he thinks that Gatsby was driving the car that ran over and killed his wife. Instead, the driver of that car was Daisy, who is thus indirectly linked with Gatsby’s death.
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Nick tells us that when Gatsby met Daisy for the first time as a young officer in 1917 and implies that it was purely by chance.
“he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident.”
As in the example above of Daisy’s “deathless” voice, the words “by a colossal accident” foreshadow tragic developments. Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship ends with, and by, a "colossal accident". The killing of Myrtle Wilson leads to the "colossal” mistake of George Wilson murdering Gatsby, the wrong man since it was Daisy and not Gatsby who was driving the car.
Note the verbal patterning in which the language, through the words “by a colossal accident” and "deathless", ominously hints at the fact that Daisy is a fatal woman whose love is death.
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In Chapter 6, after getting to know him better, Nick presents the real story of Gatsby’s past.
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”
"Platonic conception” is a strange formulation since on the one hand a "conception” is something which is conceived (an embryo, a foetus) through sexual intercourse, while on the other hand "Platonic” can suggest Platonic love, a kind of love in which sexual intercourse is absent. In this sense, "Platonic conception” could suggest that the boy created himself anew ("sprang from") according to an ideal scheme or plan of action ("Platonic conception"), but that he also wanted a kind of love in which sexual attraction was present, a love in which pregnancy ("conception") was possible through sexual intercourse. Whatever that 'Platonic conception' meant to James Gatz, from the ashes of that young boy Jay Gatsby came into existence.
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Still remembering what he has learnt about Gatsby’s youth, Nick informs us about Gatsby’s belief that:
“the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”
This phrase seems to contain an allusion to Daisy, whose original surname, Fay, is an old English word for "fairy". So the words "fairy’s wing” might hold a subtle allusion to Daisy, who for Gatsby is an image of excellence and perfection, as indeed is the image of a fairy. The suggestion may also, therefore, suggest that the reality of the material world around Gatsby ("the rock of the world") is less important to him than his dream (“a fairy’s wing")- indeed, that his world is built upon this dream. The image here is certainly one of fragility and illusion- a fairy's wing is both mythical and delicate- certainly not capable of holding up a rock, nevermind the 'rock of the world'.
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(further edited to here- 30/4/2018)
Another point in Nick’s description of Gatsby’s youth is this:
“He stayed there … two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitors work with which he was to pay his way through.”
The ferocity registers the intensity of Gatsby’s dissatisfaction with the hand life has dealt him: "the janitors work with which he was to pay his way through” college. Gatsby conceived an image of himself as a person who had great things to accomplish and to aspire to ("he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself") so the ferocity may also suggest that he has the energy, the strength and the anger to lift himself out of this routine life, out of his allotted role. Indeed a few pages previously, Nick writes about the “colossal vitality” of Gatsby’s “illusion”. Look at the confident plosive alliteration of the 'd' here which almost stamps out hi determination- perhaps not only reminding us of a drum-beat, but also of the powerfull heart-beat of Gatsby.
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In Chapter 6, Daisy and Tom attend one of Gatsby’s parties for the first time. After the party, when Tom and Daisy have gone home, Gatsby tells Nick that he is sure that Daisy didn’t enjoy herself.
“He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.”
"I wouldn’t ask too much of her", I ventured. "You can’t repeat the past."
"Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
Gatsby believes that he can repeat the past, that he can arrange everything with Daisy just as it was five years ago and relive that beautiful moment in the present. Yet as he speaks of his dream, he is walking on a "desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers". The adjective "desolate", with its connotations of loneliness and abandonment together with the fruit rinds, discarded favors and crushed flowers all create an image of the superficiality of Gatsby’s present joys. Also, these small, fragile objects have been irreversibly changed, crushed by Gatsby’s riotous guests. They are images that suggest that the past is in the past and can’t be resurrected. These images of the irreversibility of the past suggest that Gatsby’s dream of being permanently reunited with Daisy can never be realized.
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In chapter 7, while prepapring to go to New York, Gatsby of Daisy:
"Her voice is full of money”, he said suddenly.
Here Gatsby seems unconsciously to be telling us that Daisy represents to him the American Dream itself, that he sees her as an embodiment of the glamour of wealth. For Gatsby, Daisy represents everything for which he has yearned all his life. Ironically, Gatsby loses Daisy for the same reason that he adores her: her patrician arrogance.
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After Myrtle’s death, Nick tells Gatsby to go away from West Egg for a while since his car is bound to be identified by the police. But Gatsby refuses to consider leaving while there is still a chance that Daisy may change her mind and return to him. As they sit together Gatsby tells Nick about his relationship with Daisy five years previously. Daisy belonged to a social class which had always seemed remote from him, and feeling aware of his own poverty and lack of background, all through their courtship and even later when they became intimate, Gatsby tormented himself with his unworthiness pretending to Daisy that he was financially secure and belonged to the same social class she belonged to. Here are Nick’s words:
“He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretences. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same strata as herself – that he was fully able to take care of her.”
What is interesting here is Fitzgerald’s use of the adjective "phantom” to describe Gatsby’s money. "Phantom” means illusory, unreal, invisible and the word implies, as is the case, that Gatsby’s millions didn’t exist. Indeed Jay Gatsby, the young soldier, was tormented by the fact that he was too poor for Daisy. "Phantom” also has the meaning of spectre, ghost reinforcing the suggestion of death.
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In Chapter 8, Gatsby insists that Daisy has never really loved Tom:
"Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married – and loved me more even then, do you see?"
Suddenly he came out with a curious remark.
"In any case,” he said , "it was just personal."
Gatsby’s words take us back to "his Platonic conception of himself". Daisy’s love for Tom is just a small matter ("it was just personal") whereas his love for Daisy is an ideal kind of love that reaches beyond the level of personal feelings into something transcending the people involved. His love for Daisy is therefore bound up with his vision of the ideal, with "his Platonic conception of himself".
Gatsby’s desire is to transcend the world as it is and to somehow move beyond people towards something greater and better. His pursuit of transcendence, his vision of moving beyond the level of personal feeling towards something better is clear.
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Towards the end of Chapter 8, Nick tells Gatsby that he thinks him better than all the others put together.
"They’re a rotten crowd", I shouted across the lawn. "You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."(pg.122)
Nick is making a moral judgement when he calls people like the Buchanans and Jordan Baker "rotten". By describing them as "rotten", morally corrupt, Nick associates all of these people with the moral laxity of the American upper class. Realizing that Gatsby’s dream, however tainted and pathetic, is beyond the comprehension of this "damn bunch” of people, Nick tells Gatsby "they’re a rotten crowd . . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together."
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Here is the passage, which also ends the novel.
“I spent my Saturday nights in New York
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at the huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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 – tomorrow 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. (pgs. 143 – 144)’
The use of "material” to describe a car is another example of Fitzgerald’s unexpected adjectives. Mention of a "material car” picks up on the theme of materialism, of cars as being an index of material success, and takes us back to Myrtle’s death. In having Myrtle run down by Gatsby’s car, Fitzgerald seems to be sending a message. Gatsby’s car, the biggest and fanciest around, is, after all, a clear and obvious manifestation of American materialism. It is tragic that Myrtle died so brutally, but her death takes on greater meaning when we realize that it is materialism (“a material car") that bought about her death. Myrtle wanted all the material comforts money could buy: it was her desire for money that led her to have an affair with Tom, whom she initially got involved with because of the expensive looking clothes he wore. Myrtle, a woman whose dream was to spend her life acquiring material possessions, was, in effect killed by her own desires ("a material car"). We should also notice that the car that killed Myrtle was yellow, the colour of gold, hence the suggestion of wealth and expensive material possessions.
Nick perceives Gatsby’s house as a "huge incoherent failure". "Incoherent” is an unusual adjective to describe a house and suggests that somehow Gatsby’s mansion does not hold together firmly, that Nick almost sees it as lacking consistency, solidity. Metaphorically, then, Gatsby’s house becomes his dream: it is magnificent, "huge", yet "a failure", ultimately not holding together but collapsing, disintegrating, like Gatsby’s broken dream.
Nick goes to the beach, to the edge of the continent, and here he has a vision that transcends the moment and carries him back to the arrival on the coast of the pioneering Dutch sailors. He refers to "inessential houses” melting away as the moon rises and again what we notice is Fitzgerald’s use of a surprising and unexpected adjective to describe a house. Whereas Gatsby’s "huge incoherent failure” of a house and the "material car” pick up on the theme of materialism and the misery it can bring, the idea of "inessential houses", houses that are not of the essence, points to idealism (an "essence” is a metaphysical idea) in contrast to materialism as the other version of reality. This time, however, it is Nick who has a transcendent vision in which houses dematerialize ("inessential houses") beyond the material world that surrounds him, carrying him back to the moment in which the first Dutch sailors arrived on the coast. In a way, because it is Nick who has this transcendent vision and sees the "inessential houses” melt away and make way for the lush vegetation that greets the first Dutch sailors, we may see Nick’s role as the writer of the novel as the process of extending Gatsby’s transcendent, ideal vision so that we may all share in it.
As Nick sits in meditation on Gatsby’s beach he tries to recapture the wonder that the Dutch sailors must have felt at their first sight of this newly discovered and unspoilt country: “I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world ", he writes. These thoughts get linked with the thoughts of Gatsby and his dream of Daisy. In fact "flowered” suggests Daisy, whose name is the name of a flower. The "fresh, green breast of the new world", taken as an image of the ideal world the early settlers dreamed about, associates the mind with a country that is lively ("fresh"), fertile ("green"), and creative ("breast of the new world"). However, these words can also be associated with the youthfulness Daisy represents ("fresh"), with the green light at the end of her dock ("green"), and with the fact that she is a mother ("breast").
At the beginning of the novel, while watching Gatsby, Nick witnesses a curious event. Gatsby, standing by the waterside, stretches his arms toward the darkness, trembling. This gesture seems odd to Nick because all he can make out across the Sound is a green light, such as one finds at the end of a dock. Later, when Gatsby finally meets Daisy, Gatsby tells her that her house is right across the Sound from his. He then continues, informing her "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.” Prior to that day, the green light represented a dream to Gatsby and by reaching out to it, he was bringing himself closer to his love. Now that Daisy is standing beside Gatsby, her arm in his, Nick notes that the green light will no longer hold the same significance. Gatsby’s dream, the goal for which he patterned his adult life on, must now change. However, Gatsby was still dreaming about Daisy the day George Wilson murdered him. Perhaps Gatsby was happiest with his dream: the dream never deserted him but the reality of Daisy did. Green is the colour of hope, promise and renewal. The green light held for Gatsby all the promise and wonder that the original settlers once had for this green land ("green breast of the new world"). The problem Gatsby faces with his hope in the green light is that in America
We should also notice that during his reverie Nick describes America America America
Nick writes that Gatsby believed in the "orgastic future". "Orgastic” is another example of Fitzgerald’s use of unusual adjectives. When Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, queried this word, Fitzgerald told him that it was the alternative version of the adjective "orgasmic", and that in his view it was more appropriate to this final passage than the word "orgasmic” was because only "orgastic” suggested an intense experience which seemed to stand outside the flow of historical time. Fitzgerald was very insistent about retaining this word instead of the more commonly used "orgasmic": “I want "orgastic”– it’s exactly the thing, I think", he wrote to Perkins. Fitzgerald knew, of course, exactly what he wanted but the idea of "orgastic” suggesting an intense experience that stands outside of historical time is quite baffling. Some editions of the novel mistakenly preserve "orgiastic", the adjective from "orgy", which was an unauthorized and incorrect change made by Edmund Wilson in 1941, after Fitzgerald’s death.
Nick concludes his passage by writing “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” He notes how we are all a little like Gatsby, boats moving up a river, going forward but continually feeling the pull of the past. Although one may look at Gatsby and realize the futility of chasing dreams (at the expense of missing the joy of the present and neglecting reality), in the end, is anyone really that different?
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Conclusion
One of the concerns of the novel is the condition of America in the early twentieth century, but more specifically Fitzgerald is examining the fate of American ideals during a period when the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence, issued in 1776, were under threat from the pressures of modern life. Fitzgerald’s favoured title for the novel was "Under the Red, White, and Blue", invoking the Stars and Stripes, the national flag as an emblem of those ideals. Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers who formulated the Declaration enshrined within it the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Yet Fitzgerald depicts a society that is without fundamental equalities and riven by class distinctions, dramatically rendered in the different fortunes of the Buchanans, who live in fashionable East Egg, and the Wilson’s, trapped in the dismal valley of ashes. The novel thus raises the question of what makes a successful nation. Does material prosperity lead to loss of valuable ideals such as honesty, loyalty, and fairness? Does the success of some in acquiring wealth necessarily disadvantage many others and so create a divided and failed society? America has traditionally cherished the notion of the self-determining individual, living with minimal interference or regulation from government and social pressures. 'The Great Gatsby' portrays a society in which individuals have been regimented during wartime, and subjected to Prohibition during peacetime. We are told that as a young officer, Jay Gatsby was "liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.” More generally, the novel shows the emergence of a mass society with pressure placed upon individual integrity from such sources as advertising and fashion and through images spread by cinema and magazines. The concept of the self–regulating individual must be revised in a society where you are what you wear, and where you are defined by the car you drive or the house in which you live. Where does morality sit in a culture such as that?
Fitzgerald was interested in the tensions that exist between two variant definitions of the American Dream. The first is an idealised version which preserves the sense of wonder and of limitless possibility at the heart of what America means - a "fresh, green breast of the new world”. This America is an embodiment of human potential, free from any limits set by past experience. It is this aspect of Gatsby that Nick Carraway admires unequivocally. However, another version of the American Dream has come to be predominant. This is a materialistic version in which the process of creating one’s self is equated with getting rich. Gatsby has recreated himself, shedding the past, abandoning his parents, just as America tried to jettison European history and values with its Declaration of Independence. Gatsby’s intention was to create an ideal self ("he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself", Nick writes) held together by hope and wonder. But this ideal is tainted by the criminal means he employed to attain his wealth. It is this aspect of Gatsby, the corruption within his lifestyle, and his vulgar exhibitions of affluence that provoke Nick’s scorn. Fitzgerald presents the tensions that exist between these two definitions of the American Dream in terms of an apparent paradox in which success in material terms inescapably means failure in terms of the ideal. Still in terms of Fitzgerald’s meditation on American ideals, the New World’s "fresh, green breast", which represented a dream of infinite possibilities and fulfilment, has diminished to become the "green light” at the end of the Buchanans’ dock, the artificial marker of a rich man’s property. In this way Fitzgerald’s disappointment in the American Dream is the disappointment of all those whose idealistic dreams have been betrayed in the materialistic wasteland that America has become.
The decade following the First World War in America has become popularly known as the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald played a major role in characterizing these years as a period of pleasure–seeking and of reckless exuberance. Many of his short stories provide an entertaining picture of youthful hedonism, but in his more substantial fiction, a far more gloomy and at times sinister version of the age emerges. The novel usually cited as capturing the essence of this version of the Jazz Age is The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Fitzgerald’s close friend Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway depicts a group of young expatriate Americans, wandering aimlessly through Europe, sensing that they are powerless and that life is pointless in the aftermath of the Great War. But the feeling of loss and emptiness had already been identified by Fitzgerald when, at the end of This Side of Paradise (1920), he wrote of a new generation "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” 'The Great Gatsby' may also be seen to encapsulate this perception of life without purpose, of restlessness, dissatisfaction and drifting. Daisy Buchanan complains that she has "been everywhere and seen everything and done everything". The prospect of having to devise ways to while away the years ahead appals her: "What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon and the day after that, and the next thirty years? ", she complains. Her social set shares this purposelessness. They drift, restless but without direction. In contrast to those who drift around him, Gatsby’s life is directed and purposeful. Nick writes that Gatsby was "committed . . . to the following of a grail.” Gatsby, like a knight in Arthurian romance, has taken Daisy as his grail, the sacred object of his quest. He possesses the devotion, courage, and sense of purpose typical of the Arthurian Grail Knights, but his wasted land is a world in which materialism has taken the place of religion. Gatsby’s life ends in murder. His energy is cancelled out in a case of mistaken identity. Fitzgerald seems to be suggesting that such a hopeful attitude to life is untenable in the materialistic wasteland that modern America had (and has) become.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return, Penguin Books, 1994
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, Touchstone, 1996
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise, Boston
Tim Parks, Translating Style, Cassell, London
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise , Penguin Books, 2000
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack – Up with other Pieces and Stories, Penguin Books, 1965
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Penguin Books, 1966
Lionel Trilling, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945, Columbia University
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