F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1926) is, at first sight, a novel about love, idealism and disillusionment. However, it soon reveals its hidden depths and enigmas. What is the significance of the strange "waste land" between West Egg and New York, where Myrtle Wilson meets her death, an alien landscape presided over by the eyes of T J Eckleburg whose eyes, like God's, "see everything"? And what are we to make of the novel's unobtrusive symbolism (the green light, the colour of American dollar bills, which burns at the end of Daisy's dock, the references to the elements - land, sea and earth - over which Gatby claims mastery, the contrast between "East" and "West"), or its subtle use of the personalised first narrator, the unassuming Nick Carraway?
It is a novel which has intrigued and fascinated readers. Clearly,
as a self-proclaimed "tale of the West", it is exploring
questions about America and what it means to be American. In this
sense Gatsby is perhaps that legendary opus, the
"Great American Novel", following in the footsteps of
works such as Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn.
We will return to this aspect of the novel in more detail later
on. However, we also need to be aware that it is a novel which
has much to be say about more abstract questions to do with faith,
belief and illusion. Although rooted in the "Jazz Age"
which Fitzgerald is so often credited with naming, it is also
a novel which should be considered alongside works like The
Waste Land, exploring that "hollowness at the heart
of things" which lies just below the surface of modern life.
Eliot himself remarked that the novel "interested and excited
me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American,
for a number of years". Viewed from more distant perspectives
it is possible to see Gatsby as an archetypally tragic figure,
the epitome of idealism and innocence which strives for order,
purpose and meaning in a chaotic and hostile world. In this sense
Gatsby contains religious and metaphysical dimensions:
the young man who shapes a "Platonic vision of himself"
and who endows the worthless figure of Daisy with religious essence,
eventually passes away into nothingness, with few at the funeral
to lament the passing of his romantic dream.
If we approach the novel firstly in terms of the metaphysical
and existential dimension we can see that, at its heart, the novel
dramatises the attempts to construct order and purpose in a disparate
and chaotic universe. Nick, the narrator, strives to make sense
of all the chaos and carnage, but it is Gatby's attempts to construct
a sense of order for himself which dominates the novel. Eventually
we learn that Gatsby is an invention, a self-constructed figure,
who arises out of the West and, in the best traditions of American
self-help, strives to "get on" and "make something
of himself". Nothing is more poignant in the novel, I'd suggest,
than the extracts from Jimmy Gatz's "Schedule", the
notes at the end of the young lad's copy of Hopalong Cassidy.
From these humble beginnings Gatsby had constructed a new image
of himself, achieved through the emulation of father figures -
Dan Cody and Walter Wolfsheim - and the rejection of his true
father, the "solemn old man" Henry Gatz who arrives
from the West, at the end of the novel, to attend his son's funeral.
And Gatsby, motivated by ambition and a romantic conception (ultimately
flawed) of love for Daisy. Right to the end of the novel Gatsby
is inspired by the twin dreams of romantic fulfilment and money,
and to this end he conquers and masters the elements. This desire
for "unutterable visions" is, as Nick Carraway affirms,
sothing positive when set against the forces of violence and destruction,
the "winds of chaos" as Nick describes them. Against
Gatsby the novel presents us with the violence of Tom Buchanan
(who, early in the novel, voices for the first time this sense
of underlying chaos - "Civilisation's going to pieces"),
the arid waste ground where Tom's mistress and cuckolded husband
live, the insufferable and stifling heat of New York, or the pointless
conspicuous consumption of Gatsby's many hundreds of pleasure-seeking
party guests. For Nick, who presents Gatsby to us as "worth
the whole damn bunch put together", his neighbour may well
be a romantic and an idealist, but ultimately he strives for order
and purpose, guided by principles which he believes to be sacred
and enduring.
What this amounts to is that, for all his faults, Gatsby is presented
as a type of existential hero within this novel, guided by a vision
and a mission, but ultimately and inevitably unable to withstand
the forces of chaos and violence. In this he has much in common
with Fitzgerald's other heroes, who also are in relentless pursuit
of an elusive dream which is within their grasp but which ultimately
eludes them. Some critics have detected the influence of Fitzgerald's
own life on this preoccupation: certainly there is much to support
this approach if one looks into Fitzgerald's biography, particularly
in accounts of his marriage life with Zelda, or his wrestling
matches between writing and alcoholism. And yet one can also see
the influence of writers such as Conrad (the Conrad of Lord
Jim or Heart of Darkness), and their treatment
of central characters torn between their own idealism and the
way that they find the world to be. Yet it would not be appropriate
to present the novel simply as a timeless tale of a tragic innocent,
for it would be hard to find a novel which is more deeply rooted
in a specific time and culture, and it is here that we should
start considering the novel as a tale of American life and the
American Dream.
Near the end of the novel Nick pulls back from his account to reflect that his has been a "tale of the west": Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, Jordan, Nick himself, all originate in the West and, Nick suggests, therefore "possess some sort deficiency" which makes them "subtly unadaptable to the Eastern life." What does this mean? In the novel's terms we can see that the 'West' is characterised in terms of a certain sort of innocence, of idealism, of rawness perhaps, when contrasted with the sophistication and glamour of the 'East'. Gatsby, like Tom and Daisy, "goes East" to pursue his dream, perhaps the American Dream but, unlike them, becomes a victim and fails in his vision.
To understand what is going on here we have to understand the
wider context of this version of America's self-imaginings and
what it meant in the 1920s. The need to come to terms with America,
to understand what it means to be American, lie deeply rooted
in the American cultural psyche: mythology (whether of the "New
Adam" or the "Final Frontier") are integral and
vital components of the American cultural imagination, perhaps
understandably so given the sheer size and diversity of the country.
For the Founding Fathers, who first ventured to Virginia or New
England, a passage to America was to a new Eden, an opportunity
to start again. By the middle of the nineteenth century we can
see the myth of the "West" emerging, a resilient image
of the West as being on the frontier between culture and nature,
and travellers going to the raw wilderness of the West in search
of gold and a fresh start. By the time that Fitzgerald writes
this national mythology has turned full circle from the vision
of the Founding Fathers. Within the novel the East is a place
which is both ancient and corrupt, whereas the West possess virtuous
qualities of rawness, innocence and idealism - the novel's internal
visions of East Egg and West Egg develop this symbolism in various
ways. The vision which Gatsby pursues when he goes East is one
of success, of fulfilment, one fuelled by a dream of the distant
and romantic past (the idyllic times with Daisy, back there in
the west), and one which continually draws him on, as he looks
out at night to the "green light" which beckons him
on.
What this leads up to is the view that the novel identifies Gatsby
with America herself. His dream, the novel suggests, is also that
of America, with its emphasis on the inherent goodness within
nature, on healthy living, youth, vitality, romance, a magnaminious
openness to life itself, a dream of the East which has been dreamed
up in the West. In this sense the novel becomes various things,
a "pastoral documentary of the Jazz Age", an exploration
of the American Dream, or perhaps a savage criticism of that dream.
Gatsby, lured on by Daisy, who is no more than a symbol for him,
pursues the Green Light, the dream of progress and material possessions,
and is eventually destroyed. And in this, the novel suggests,
we are witness to the possible destiny of America herself, failing
to look back to that "vast obscurity beyond the city, where
the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night",
and forever looking Eastwards, to the Green light, to Europe,
to a new dawn.
There is much else that we could explore in this extraordinary
novel. There are, for example, the questions about the ways in
which it is constructed, the effects of its use of the personalised
narrator, for whom acquaintance with Gatsby means attempting to
discover himself. There are also issues to do with the way in
which the novel is put together, its juxtaposition of scenes dramatising
important events and brief passages of commentary and interpretation.
One could also look at the literary parallels behind the novel,
the similarities with Heart of Darkness, (and Marlow's
attempts to discover Kurtz and also perhaps himself), with the
novels of Mark Twain or Henry James (who also explore these fundamental
issues of innocence/experience in terms of the contrast of East
and West), and perhaps most notably with T S Eliot's The
Waste Land. For me, as the designer of this course, this
seems the most natural finishing point, given that this course
is concerned with the development of writing between the Wars.
Eliot provided his generation with a challenging and disturbing
vision of the modern world, where faith in religion and culture
has been reduced to the relentless pursuit of money and the shallow
dreams of tarot readings and jazz ballads. In Gatsby,
with its insider's view of the hollowness at the heart of the
modern American world, we have a world where money, status and
progress have become the new "savage gods", the new
"green lights", where the sense of religious vision
has become reduced to an advertising hoarding and the bespectacled
figure of the now forgotten oculist T J Eckelberg. Similarly we
may refer back to the mysterious "ou-boum" which haunts
the world of A Passage to India, and the vision
in the cave which may be nothing, or may simply be ourselves and
our thoughts. Whatever the answer the need to find or cling onto
a sense of meaning and value amidst the chaos, violence and arbitrariness
of contemporary life is seen, in Forster's novel and Eliot's poem,
as a positive thing. It is the same, I would suggest, the same
in Gatsby, for he, Nick assures the reader, "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.". Gatsby may have been exposed as a dreamer, but
it is his willingness to cling to this dream, as a means of bringing
sense, order and purpose to his life, which distinguishes him
from those who have simply lost the ability to dream, Eliot's
"Hollow Men" and Gatsby's ungrateful guests
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