Chapter 1
As the first chapter begins, we are introduced the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick is in the process of writing a book about his experiences on the East Coast of America, and in particular about his dealings with a man called Jay Gatsby. Nick tells us very little about his own origins, except that he is a descendent of the Dukes of Buccleuch.
Nick tells us that he has served in the First World War and that it has had a major impact on his life. His move to the East Coast of America was triggered by returning home to the Mid-West to find it a place changed from the one he remembered before he left.
In turn, Nick moves to West Egg. It is here that he – and the audience – first becomes aware of Jay Gatsby who lives in a mansion next to Nick. Nick describes West Egg as full of ‘white palaces’.
Nick recounts a visit to the house of Tom Buchanan, one of his old collegiate buddies from Yale, and Daisy, Nick’s cousin once removed. Buchanan in an archetypal alpha male: he is physically strong, extremely wealthy and hides a burning aggression; he also holds racist attitudes.
As the evening draws to a close, Nick catches his first glimpse of Gatsby; the enigmatic protagonist of the novel is staring, almost transfixed, by a green light at the end of the Buchanan’s dock.
Chapter 2
The narrator, Nick, describes the ‘Valley of Ashes’, which is desolate area between West Egg and New York. The Valley of Ashes sits beneath a massive advertising hoarding featuring Dr T.J. Eklenburg.
In the ‘Valley of Ashes’ we are introduced to Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a motor mechanic, who is having an affair with Tom Buchanan.
In this sequence of the narrative, Myrtle is accompanied on a shopping trip to buy cosmetics, magazines and a dog. This is followed by a visit to the apartment that is kept entirely for Myrtle and Tom’s adulterous liaisons. Here, they are joined by Catherine, (Myrtle’s sister), and a photographer and his wife.
As the group drink, they begin to speculate about Jay Gatsby.
Chapter 3
One summer evening Nick goes to Gatsby's house for the first time. He is invited by Gatsby's chauffeur and it ends up being a very large and crowded event. He knows no one at first, but sees Jordan and stays with her for the most of the evening. While he is there many guests talk about Gatsby. He is a very mysterious man to them and everyone has their speculations as to how he obtained his money. Some say he was a bootlegger, some say a spy during the war, and others think that he has the look of someone who's killed a man.
While moving through the party Nick finally meets Gatsby, although he wasn't aware of it at first. They make small talk and find out that they had seen one another during the war. But their talk is short lived because Gatsby has business to attend to. Jordan says that Gatsby is an Oxford man and Nick watches him curiously for the rest of the evening. He notes that Gatsby seems detached and distant from almost everyone.
Later in the evening Gatsby asks to speak to Jordan. After their meeting, she tells Nick that Gatsby has told her something amazing that she can't talk about right now but she asks Nick to look her up sometime.
Nick does end up calling on Jordan. They start to spend time with one another and he likes her company. But he says that he has to end his "tangle back home", the engagement misunderstanding, before he can start a relationship.
Chapter 4
Nick goes back to Gatsby's for another party. Nick gives a detailed list of all of those in attendance and just what kind of people he thought they were.
One morning Gatsby's car pulled up in Nick's driveway. Gatsby tells Nick that they are going to be going to lunch together and Nick agrees. As they are driving, Gatsby tells Nick that he would like to dispel any myths that Nick may have heard about him. Gatsby says that he came from a wealthy family from the midwest - San Francisco - to be exact. He said that his parents died and left him a lot of money. After that he went to war and lived in all of the great cities and later attended Oxford College. Although Nick is skeptical of this story Gatsby shows him a medal he earned from the war and a picture of himself at Oxford. Gatsby also tells Nick that he has a "big request" to make of him but that Jordan Baker will talk to him of it later. Nick is confused, but Gatsby will speak no more of it.
When they reach the city Nick is introduced to Gatsby's friend Meyer Wolfsheim, who they dine with. After Meyer leaves Gatsby tells Nick that he is a gambler and the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. As they are talking about Meyer, Nick sees that Tom has also come to the restaurant. Nick thinks that he will introduce the two men but when he turns around, Gatsby has disappeared.
After this, Nick goes to meet Jordan for tea. She tells him the story of how she got to know Daisy when they were both younger back in Louisville. Daisy spent quite a bit of time with a young soldier in those days, and now Jordan realized that that soldier was Jay Gatsby. But he had to go to war, they lost contact and Daisy ended up getting engaged to Tom. Jordan was at the wedding and the day before they were to be married, Daisy received a mysterious letter. After reading it, she told Jordan that she wasn't going to get married, but went through with it anyway. Soon after the honeymoon, she and Tom were expecting a baby.
Daisy had forgotten all about Gatsby until she heard Jordan and Nick talking about him not long ago. Daisy asks about him and Jordan pieces together that he was the soldier Daisy had spent so much time with. Nick points out what a coincidence it is for them to be living near one another now but Jordan says that it is anything but. Gatsby bought the house to be close to Daisy. This is where Nick fits in. Gatsby would like for Nick to help him see Daisy again.
Chapter 5
When Nick returns from the city that evening he finds Gatsby admiring his house. He tells him that he plans to invite Daisy over for tea. Gatsby tries to act casual but it is obvious he is excited. During their exchange Gatsby tries to offer Nick some kind of job, but Nick sees it only as a polite gesture and turns it down.
The next day Nick invites Daisy to tea and tells her not to bring Tom. Gatsby comes over to inspect everything to make sure that the tea goes perfectly. Daisy finally arrives and Nick goes out to meet her. When they return inside Gatsby is nowhere to be found. A moment later there is a knock at the door and Gatsby walks in. He and Daisy look at one another in awkward surprise. Nick tries to make the afternoon go smoothly but realizes that the two would like to be alone. He goes out to his porch to let them catch up. When he returns the two seem relaxed but entranced with one another. Gatsby invites them over to see his house. While walking over, Nick asks Gatsby about how he made his money but is answered with a curt "that's my business". The group are given a tour and Gatsby tries to impress Daisy with all of the possessions he has filled his house with. Nick, again realizing that his presence is not needed, leaves the two alone.
Chapter 6
A reporter calls at Gatsby's home in attempt to learn more abut him. This visit was fueled by Gatsby’s status as a sort of celebrity. He asks questions about many of the myths surrounding Gatsby, but Nick gives us the truest account of Gatsby's life.
He was born James Gatz in North Dakota. His parents were poor farm people and to escape the blandness of his existence, Gatsby created a fantasy world. Part of this fantasy included the name Jay Gatsby. As a young man he worked along the shore of Lake Superior doing odd jobs. He tried a small college for a couple of weeks but quickly grew restless and went back to the shore. While walking the shoreline he spots a yacht owned by the wealthy Dan Cody. He warns Cody that he might have sailing troubles. Cody takes Gatsby under his wing. When Cody died Gatsby was supposed to receive a large portion of his fortune but was tricked out of it. However, Gatsby had created a persona and found something that he wanted to achieve at all costs.
After an absence of several weeks due to work, Nick goes over to see Gatsby one Sunday afternoon. While there, Tom Buchanan and two others arrive on horseback. Gatsby tries his hardest to be hospitable to the trio. They make an attempt to invite Gatsby with them somewhere but when he goes to get ready, they leave without him.
Tom and Daisy attend Gatsby’s next party. Tom immediately dislikes the party and begins to question how Gatsby came into so much money. Daisy also seems to be unhappy at the party - which concerns Gatsby. He tells Nick that he will make things right with her and they will be able to go back to how they once were.
After hearing this, Nick tells the reader of an evening Gatsby and Daisy spent together in their youth. The moment was so perfect and beautiful to Gatsby that he has spent all of his time trying to recreate that moment. It is this recreation that he believes will make him happy.
Chapter 7
Nick goes to the Buchanans for an afternoon with Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, and Jordan. While they are there, the group - including Gatsby - sees Daisy's child for the first time. As the group talk, Daisy says she loves Gatsby. Being a hot and uncomfortable day, they all decide to go into the city to find something to do. Tom asks to take Gatsby's car. It seems odd to Gatsby but he lets him. Tom, Jordan and Nick drive off together with Daisy and Gatsby in Tom's blue sports car.
Tom stops at Wilson's garage to fill up the gas tank and speaks to Wilson. Wilson alludes to the idea that he thinks his wife is having an affair and that he wants to get some money to move out west. Nick thinks he sees Myrtle watching them from the window.
The groups meet up in the city and decide to take a hotel suite to enjoy a few cold drinks. While there, Gatsby and Daisy begin to act more obvious about their affections in front of everyone. Tom begins to get angry and starts shouting at them. As the fight continues, Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy has never loved him but that she has always loved him – Gatsby. Daisy quietly agrees. Tom, enraged, says that he has investigated Gatsby and found out that he earned his money through being a bootlegger. The argument dies down and Gatsby and Daisy decide to leave in his car. The rest of the group quietly exit with Tom.
Meanwhile, a neighbour of Wilson's, stops by to see him and finds him very ill in his office. Wilson tells him that he has locked his wife up and that they will be leaving tomorrow. Wilson never tells Michaelis why they are leaving or why Myrtle is locked up. Michaelis leaves Wilson alone.
Later, he comes out of his restaurant and hears Wilson and Myrtle fighting. During the fight, she runs into the road just as two cars are approaching. She is hit and killed but the car does not stop.
Tom pulls up a little later when he sees all of the commotion around Wilson's. It is established that the car was Gatsby's. Wilson believes that it was Tom who hit his wife since Tom was driving Gatsby’s car earlier in the day. Tom assures him it wasn't. When the group arrives back at Tom's, Nick decides to wait outside for a cab. While waiting, Gatsby appears from behind a bush. He admits that Daisy was driving the car. Nick asks Gatsby to come back with him but Gatsby wants to wait outside the house to make sure that nothing happens to Daisy.
Chapter 8
Early the next morning Nick goes over to check up on Gatsby. He has been at Daisy's all night just watching to see if she was safe. He and Nick stay up talking about Gatsby's past. Gatsby is being very honest with Nick and tells him that Daisy was the first nice girl he had ever really met. He was in love with her and planned on marrying her but the War split them apart. When it was over, he intended to go back and marry her but ended up at Oxford instead. When he finally makes it back to America and goes to Louisville, he cannot find Daisy. She is on her honeymoon with Tom Buchanan. Nick has to leave Gatsby to go to work. He is concerned about him, but Gatsby insists that he will be fine. After Nick leaves, Gatsby decides to use his pool and relax.
Nick narrates what happened at Wilson's following Myrtle’s death. Michaelis stayed with Wilson in order to look after him. Wilson tells Michaelis that someone killed Myrtle on purpose – the person who was having the affair with her. Michaelis thinks it is all nonsense and tries to talk reasonably to Wilson. He ends up staying there until late. A man Michaelis recognized from the day of the accident offers to stay with Wilson. When Michaelis returns, both Wilson and the man are gone. Wilson tries to locate the yellow car, and therefore, its owner. By early afternoon, he is on his way to gatsby’s house. Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool and then kills himself.
Chapter 9
In this chapter, Nick’s narration takes place two years later when he recalls the events of Gatsby’s death.
Nick calls Daisy's house to speak to her but she and Tom have left and cnnot be contacted. He also tries to contact Meyer Wolfsheim but fails. Wolfsheim sends a letter later saying that he cannot comes to Gatsby's side. A few days later, Henry Gatz - Gatsby's father - comes to the house. He had heard about Gatsby's death in the paper and came at once.
On the day of the funeral, Nick goes into the city to see Wolfsheim. Nick has to force himself into Wolfsheim's office, but Meyer refuses to come to the funeral saying that he can't get mixed up in another man's death.
When Nick returns to the house, Mr. Gatz describes Gatsby when he was younger. Gatz shows Nick a schedule that Gatsby wrote out. It suggests a very driven and determined young Gatsby.
The minister arrives at the house and is ready to start the funeral but Nick asks him to wait for more people to arrive. No one does. When the small group goes to the cemetery, another man arrives for the service. He was a man who came to Gatsby's party that summer and thought he should be there out of respect. He is the only one who does so.
Nick goes to see Jordan. She claims that she is engaged to another man and, although not surprised, Nick pretends to be.
In October, Nick sees Tom on a street in the city. Tom admits to telling Wilson that it was Gatsby who owned the car that killed Myrtle.
Nick deceides to move to the Midwest. Nick’s narration becomes one of contemplation as he recalls the house, the parties and Gatsby’s faith and hope.
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On one level the novel comments on the careless gaiety and moral decadence of the period. It contains innumerable references to the contemporary scene. The wild extravagance of Gatsby's parties, the shallowness and aimlessness of the guests and the hint of Gatsby's involvement in crime all identify the period and the American setting. But as a piece of social commentary The Great Gatsby also describes the failure of the American dream, from the point of view that American political ideals conflict with the actual social conditions that exist. For whereas American democracy is based on the idea of equality among people, the truth is that social discrimination still exists and the divisions among the classes cannot be overcome. Myrtle's attempt to break into the group to which the Buchanans belong is doomed to fail. Taking advantage of her vivacity, her lively nature, she seeks to escape from her own class. She enters into an affair with Tom and takes on his way of living. But she only becomes vulgar and corrupt like the rich. She scorns people from her own class and loses all sense of morality. And for all her social ambition, Myrtle never succeeds in her attempt to find a place for herself in Tom's class. When it comes to a crisis, the rich stand together against all outsiders.
Myrtle's condition, of course, is a weaker reflection of Gatsby's more significant struggle. While Myrtle's desire springs from social ambition, Gatsby's is related more to his idealism, his faith in life's possibilities. Undoubtedly, his desire is also influenced by social considerations; Daisy, who is wealthy and beautiful, represents a way of life which is remote from Gatsby's and therefore more attractive because it is out of reach. However, social consciousness is not a basic cause. It merely directs and increases Gatsby's belief in life's possibilities. Like Myrtle, Gatsby struggles to fit himself into another social group, but his attempt is more urgent because his whole faith in life is involved in it. Failure, therefore, is more terrible for him. His whole career, his confidence in himself and in life is totally shattered when he fails to win Daisy. His death when it comes is almost insignificant, for, with the collapse of his dream, Gatsby is already spiritually dead.
As social satire, The Great Gatsby is also a comment on moral decadence in modem American society. The concern here is with the corruption of values and the decline of spiritual life - a condition which is ultimately related to the American Dream. For the novel recalls the early idealism of the first settlers. Fitzgerald himself relates Gatsby's dream to that of the early Americans for, at the end of the novel, Nick recalls the former Dutch sailors and compares their sense of wonder with Gatsby's hope. The book also seems to investigate how Americans lost their spiritual purpose as material success wiped out spiritual goals. The lives of the Buchanans, therefore, filled with material comforts and luxuries, and empty of purpose, represents this condition. Daisy's lament is especially indicative of this:
'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, 'and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'
Fitzgerald stresses the need for hope and dreams to give meaning and purpose to man's efforts. Striving towards some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvement, a sense of his own identity. Certainly, Gatsby, with 'his extraordinary gift of hope', set against the empty existence of Tom and Daisy, seems to achieve a heroic greatness. [...] Fitzgerald goes on to state that the failure of hopes and dreams, the failure of the American Dream itself, is unavoidable, not only because reality cannot keep up with ideals, but also because the ideals are in any case usually too fantastic to be realised. The heroic presentation of Gatsby, therefore, should not be taken at face value, for we cannot overlook the fact that Gatsby is naive, impractical and oversentimental. It is this which makes him attempt the impossible, to repeat the past. There is something pitiful and absurd about the way he refuses to grow up.
Metaphor Analysis |
Gatsby's green light: Located at the end of the Buchanans' dock, this green light represents Gatsby's ultimate aspiration: to win Daisy's love. Nick's first vision of Gatsby is of his neighbor's trembling arms stretched out toward the green light (26). Later, after Daisy and Gatsby's successful reunion, a mist conceals the green light, visibly affecting Gatsby. Nick observes, "Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever....Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one" (98). This image suggests Gatsby realizes he must face the reality of Daisy, rather than the ideal he created for her. |
Theme Analysis |
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby's quest for Daisy Buchanan, examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's American Dream. Written in 1925, the novel serves as a bridge between World War I and the Great Depression of the early 1930's. Although Fitzgerald was an avid participant in the stereotypical "Roaring Twenties" lifestyle of wild partying and bootleg liquor, he was also an astute critic of his time period. The Great Gatsby certainly serves more to detail society's failure to fulfill its potential than it does to glamorize Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age." |
The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925. The novel would prove to be Fitzgerald's most accomplished novel, and was an immediate critical success. Despite the favorable reviews, the sales for the novel were disappointing.
Within the novel, Fitzgerald uses the character of Nick Carraway as the first-person narrator. It is through Carraway's eyes that we see the other characters and the world they live in. Carraway is the only character in the novel to exhibit, and hold onto, a sense of morals and decency throughout the novel. Symbolism is heavily used, and can be found in both the characters actions and the physical objects.
Through the novel, Fitzgerald puts across the idea that the American dream has been corrupted by the desire for materialism. We see that Gatsby had a pure dream, but became corrupt in his quest towards that dream.
Much has been made of Fitzerald's relation to his characters. Many of the characters in his novels are based on people from his life. Within the characters of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby we can see the dueling parts of Fitzgerald's own personality. Gatsby and Fitzgerald are alike by both being self-made men who have achieved financial success. Similarly, they both achieved their financial success for the love of a woman. Gatsby felt that he needed wealth to win the hand of Daisy, and Fitzgerald felt the same about Zelda. The love of a woman was the motivating factor behind virtually all of Gatsby's actions, and many of the young Fitzgerald's. Fitzgerald would spend the majority of his career struggling to earn as much money as possible to maintain the privelaged lifestyle that Zelda desired.
Nick Carraway can be seen to represent the outsider that Fitzgerald felt himself to be. Both Fitzgerald and Carraway found themselves surrounded by high society and dishonest people. Neither of them truly fit in with those surroundings. One of the major themes within the novel is East vs. West. Carraway comes from the West, and returns to it by the novel's end. Through Carraway, Fitzgerald shows his fondness for the West, which he idealized as being a moral land. It is their dissatisfaction with their surroundings that Carraway and Fitzgerald share. It is because of such feelings, that they both feel like outsiders.
One of the most important themes in the novel is class and social standing. It is a barrier for almost every character. East and West Egg acts as a symbol of this in it's physical makeup. Tom and Daisy live on the East which is far more refined and well bred. Nick and Gatsby are on the West which is for people who don't have any real standing, even if they have money. The green light shines from the East Egg enticing Gatsby towards what he has always wanted. And Daisy, the woman that Gatsby has always wanted but never gets, lives on East Egg. The barrier that the water creates between these worlds in symbolic of the barrier that keeps these people apart from one another and from much of what they want.
Fitzgerald uses the word careless a lot in describing most of the people and events in this book. There seems to be no fear of consequence, of judgment. So who is doing the judgment? That is, in part, what the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg are there for. These eyes are from a billboard that looks over Wilson's garage. The eyes are always mentioned whenever Nick is there. They look over the situation, objectively, but offer a kind of judgment on the characters and their actions. They are placed near Wilson's because that is where some of the most selfish acts take place: Myrtle's death, Tom's affair. All of these crimes go unpunished. So they eyes look on and remind the characters of the guilt that they forget to have for what they have done.
The green light is a multi-faceted piece of symbolism in the book. It's most obvious interpretation is that the light is symbolic of Gatsby's longing for Daisy, but that is too simplistic. Daisy is part of it, but the green light means much more. Gatsby has spent his whole life longing for something better. Money, success, acceptance, and Daisy. And no matter how much he has he never feels complete. Even when he has his large house full of interesting people and all of their attention, he still longs for Daisy. He created in his dreams for the future a place for her, and he will not be content to have that gaping hole. So the green light stands for all of Gatsby's longings and wants. And when Nick talks about the green light at the end of the book he says "It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther...." . He connects the green light to all people. Everyone has something that they long and search for that is just off in the distance. That is the green light.
The word that can sum up many of the themes in the book is position. The word encompasses themes like class, wealth, social standing, and others. Gatsby's whole life is spent trying to attain money and status so that he can reach a certain position in life. That is what motivated him to move to West Egg, make money by any means necessary, and strive to win Daisy back. There is a position in life that he yearns for and will do all that it takes to achieve it.
Daisy and Tom on the other hand show how people can use their position to look down on others and live their life carelessly. As Nick says about Daisy, "in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged". It is this superior mind set that allows Tom to cheat on his wife and allows he and Daisy to run away from the death of Myrtle. They need not worry about such things because they are too good for it. Nick sees it as a kind of carelessness. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness...". They can use their wealth and position to escape whatever they choose.
The word careless also sums up one of the most important ideas in the book. Nick refers to Jordan, Tom, and Daisy as careless in one form or another. Their actions are careless and they are careless people. This is due to the ease of their life. These people live the decadent life of the roaring twenties that many of the writers of this era were criticizing. The mindless, indulgent, irresponsible life style where consequence is just an afterthought. Fitzgerald uses these characters to expose this life with their selfish actions. This carelessness can be seen when Tom and Daisy run away after Myrtle is killed or when Jordan is driving Nick through the city. These people do not worry about paying for their actions so they do as they please. Tom is not worried about hurting Daisy so he flaunts his relationship with Myrtle, his mistress. Daisy, in turn, goes off with Gatsby without a thought to her marriage. Consequence is a unheard of concept to these people so they live their lives without thinking about it.
To understand Gatsby one has to look at not only his true life, but the life that he tried to create for himself. The truth is that he came from poor beginnings and created a fantasy world where he was rich and powerful. Even in his youth Gatsby was not content with what he had. He wanted money, so he managed to get it. He wanted Daisy, and she slipped through his fingers. So even when his wealth and stature are at their greatest, he will not be content. He must have Daisy. Yes, there is love. But more than that there is a drive to posses her because that is what he wanted for all of those years. She was part of his image for the future and he had to have her. And although Gatsby seems very kind, he is not afraid to be unscrupulous to get what he wants. When he wanted money, he was more than willing to become a bootlegger. His drive is what makes him who he is, good and bad. And it is this drive that ends up ruining his life.
Daisy is a trapped woman. She's trapped in a marriage that she is unhappy in and trapped in a world where she has no chance to be free or independent. She is at the mercy of her husband, a man who takes her for granted. Daisy is also terribly clever, delivering some of the funnier lines of the book. When a reader looks at the foolishness and shallowness of Daisy they must realize that Daisy may be doing out of necessity. As she said when she delivered her daughter, "- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool". Daisy is smart enough to understand the limits imposed on her and has become jaded and indulgent because of them.
The word careless also describes Daisy well. Many of the things that Daisy does, the accident with Myrtle in particular, show a woman who is just careless. She has become very much wrapped up in herself. Part of this is due to the fact that she had been spoiled all her life. She was born into money and had an endless assortment of men who would continue to spoil her. So she has learned to think only of herself without regard for the people that it may hurt.
Jordan faces the same problems that Tom and Daisy do. She has been born with money and has lived in a culture full of money and has been spoiled by it. She is surrounded by people like the Buchanans who perpetuate her indulgent behavior. This can be observed in the scene where she and Nick are driving in the city and calls her a careless driver. She says she doesn't worry because the other people on the road aren't as careless as her and that she makes sure she surrounds herself with people who won't "crash" into her. It can be seen that Jordan has no concept of accountability and that has been furthered by the people who allow her to go unaccountable.
Being born into a family that is wealthy has made Tom a spoiled man. He hasn't really worked his entire life and instead spends his days in indulgence and ease. This is what motivates Tom; gratification. He has a shameless affair with Myrtle because it satisfies his needs. He flaunts their relationship in public because he does not concern himself with the consequences of his actions, he's never had to. This is also why he and Daisy escape in the end of the book. There was a situation they would have to face and they didn't want to. So they ran to their money and fled the situation, leaving it to be dealt with by others. Tom will spend his whole life doing things like that because that is who he is: A careless man who won't be bothered by the suffering he causes.
Nick is the hardest character to understand in the book because he is the narrator and will therefore only give us an impression of himself that he would like to give. He tells the reader that "I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known", but we see him lie on several occasions. So it is all but impossible to get an accurate picture of Nick. By the end of the book he is very jaded, though. When he and Jordan break up he says "I'm thirty. I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor". So the experience with Gatsby and the others takes it's toll on him. But in the end, the reader cannot be certain of who the real Nick is.
The following quotes are not explained here, though most of their meanings are fairly evident. The speaker of the quote is also identified here. All quotes deal with theme or symbolism.
Quote |
Speaker |
"I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." |
Daisy |
"I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged." |
Nick |
"- but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby's shoulder and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one link." |
Nick |
Nick: "Suppose you meet someone just as careless as yourself?" |
Dialog |
"You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock." |
Gatsby |
"So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end." |
Nick |
" 'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!' " |
Gatsby |
"His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once again return to a certain place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was..." |
Nick |
"Her voice is full of money" |
Gatsby |
"It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy- it increased her value in his eyes." |
Nick |
"... and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor." |
Nick |
" 'They're a rotten crowd' I shouted, across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together' " |
Nick |
Jordan: "You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I though you were rather an honest, straightforward, person. I though it was your secret pride." |
Dialog |
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." |
Nick |
"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- " |
Nick |
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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
Gatsby's Pursuit of the American Dream
The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is about the American Dream, and the downfall of those who attempt to reach its illusionary goals. The attempt to capture the American Dream is central to many novels. This dream is different for different people, but in The Great Gatsby, for Jay, the dream is that through wealth and power, one can acquire happiness. To get this happiness Jay must reach into the past and relive an old dream and in order to do this he must have wealth and power.
Jay Gatsby, the central figure of the the story, is one character who longs for the past. Surprisingly he devotes most of his adult life trying to recapture it and, finally, dies in its pursuit. In the past, Jay had a love affair with the affluent Daisy. Knowing he could not marry her because of the difference in their social status, he leaves her to amass wealth to reach her economic standards. Once he acquires this wealth, he moves near to Daisy, "Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay (83)," and throws extravagant parties, hoping by chance she might show up at one of them. He, himself, does not attend his parties but watches them from a distance. When this dream doesn't happen, he asks around casually if anyone knows her. Soon he meets Nick Carraway, a cousin of Daisy, who agrees to set up a meeting, "He wants to know...if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over (83)." Gatsby's personal dream symbolizes the larger American Dream where all have the opportunity to get what they want.
Later, as we see in the Plaza Hotel, Jay still believes that Daisy loves him. He is convinced of this as is shown when he takes the blame for Myrtle's death. "Was Daisy driving?" "Yes...but of course I'll say I was." (151) He also watches and protects Daisy as she returns home. "How long are you going to wait?" "All night if necessary." (152) Jay cannot accept that the past is gone and done with. Jay is sure that he can capture his dream with wealth and influence. He believes that he acted for a good beyond his personal interest and that should guarantee success.
Nick attempts to show Jay the folly of his dream, but Jay innocently replies to Nick's assertion that the past cannot be relived by saying, "Yes you can, old sport." This shows the confidence that Jay has in fulfilling his American Dream. For Jay, his American Dream is not material possessions, although it may seem that way. He only comes into riches so that he can fulfill his true American Dream, Daisy.
Gatsby doesn't rest until his American Dream is finally fulfilled. However, it never comes about and he ends up paying the ultimate price for it. The idea of the American Dream still holds true in today's time, be it wealth, love, or fame. But one thing never changes about the American Dream; everyone desires something in life, and everyone, somehow, strives to get it. Gatsby is a prime example of pursuing the American Dream.
NICK CARRAWAY has a special place in this novel. He is not just one character among several, it is through his eyes and ears that we form our opinions of the other characters.
Often, readers of this novel confuse Nick's stance towards those characters and the world he describes with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's because the fictional world he has created closely resembles the world he himself experienced. But not every narrator is the voice of the author. Before considering the "gap" between author and narrator, we should remember how, as readers, we respond to the narrator's perspective, especially when that voice belongs to a character who, like Nick, is an active participant in the story.
When we read any work of fiction, no matter how realistic or fabulous, as readers, we undergo a "suspension of disbelief". The fictional world creates a new set of boundaries, making possible or credible events and reactions that might not commonly occur in the "real world", but which have a logic or a plausibility to them in that fictional world.
In order for this to be convincing, we trust the narrator. We take on his perspective, if not totally, then substantially. He becomes our eyes and ears in this world and we have to see him as reliable if we are to proceed with the story's development.
In The Great Gatsby, Nick goes to some length to establish his credibility, indeed his moral integrity, in telling this story about this "great" man called Gatsby. He begins with a reflection on his own upbringing, quoting his father's words about Nick's "advantages", which we could assume were material but, he soon makes clear, were spiritual or moral advantages.
Nick wants his reader to know that his upbringing gave him the moral fibre with which to withstand and pass judgment on an amoral world, such as the one he had observed the previous summer. He says, rather pompously, that as a consequence of such an upbringing, he is "inclined to reserve all judgments" about other people, but then goes on to say that such "tolerance . . . has a limit".
This is the first sign that we can trust this narrator to give us an even-handed insight to the story that is about to unfold. But, as we later learn, he neither reserves all judgments nor does his tolerance reach its limit. Nick is very partial in his way of telling the story about several characters.
He admits early into the story that he makes an exception of judging Gatsby, for whom he is prepared to suspend both the moral code of his upbringing and the limit of intolerance, because Gatsby had an "extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness". This inspired him to a level of friendship and loyalty that Nick seems unprepared to extend towards others in the novel.
Nick overlooks the moral implications of Gatsby's bootlegging, his association with speakeasies, and with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man rumored to have fixed the World Series in 1919. Yet, he is contemptuous of Jordan Baker for cheating in a mere golf game. And while he says that he is prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman: "It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot," it seems that he cannot accept her for being "incurably dishonest" and then reflects that his one "cardinal virtue" is that he is "one of the few honest people" he has ever known. When it comes to judging women - or perhaps only potential lovers - not only are they judged, they are judged by how well they stand up to his own virtues.
Nick leaves the mid-West after he returns from the war, understandably restless and at odds with the traditional, conservative values that, from his account, haven't changed in spite of the tumult of the war. It is this insularity from a changed world no longer structured by the values that had sent young men to war, that decides him to go East, to New York, and learn about bonds.
But after one summer out East, a remarkable summer for this morally advantaged young man, he "decided to come back home" to the security of what is familiar and traditional. He sought a return to the safety of a place where houses were referred to by the names of families that had inhabited them for generations; a security that Nick decides makes Westeners "subtly unadaptable to Eastern life". By this stage, the East had become for him the "grotesque" stuff of his nightmares.
What does this return home tell us about Nick? It is entirely reasonable that he would be adversely affected by the events of that summer: the death of a woman he met briefly and indirectly, who was having an affair with his cousin's husband and whose death leads to the death of his next-door neighbor. His decision to return home to that place that he had so recently condemned for its insularity, makes one wonder what Nick was doing during the war? If the extent and the pointlessness of death and destruction during the war had left him feeling he'd outgrown the comfort and security of the West, why has the armory he acquired from the war abandoned him after this one summer's events?
Don't we perhaps feel a little let down that Nick runs away from his experience in the East in much the same way that he has run away from that "tangle back home" to whom he writes letters and signs "with love", but clearly doesn't genuinely offer? Is it unfair to want more from our narrator, to show some kind of development in his emotional make-up? It is unfair to suggest that this return home is like a retreat from life and a kind of emotional regression?
The only genuine affection in the novel is shown by Nick towards Gatsby. He admires Gatsby's optimism, an attitude that is out of step with the sordidness of the times. Fitzgerald illustrates this sordidness not just in the Valley of Ashes, but right there beneath the thin veneer of the opulence represented by Daisy and Tom. Nick is "in love" with Gatsby's capacity to dream and ability to live as if the dream were to come true, and it is this that clouds his judgment of Gatsby and therefore obscures our grasp on Gatsby.
When Gatsby takes Nick to one side and tells him of his origins, he starts to say that he was "the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West - all dead now . . ." The truth (of his origins) doesn't matter to Gatsby; what matters to him is being part of Daisy's world or Daisy being a part of his. Gatsby's sense of what is true and real is of an entirely other order to Nick's. If he were motivated by truth, Gatsby would still be poor Jay Gatz with a hopelessly futile dream.
Recall the passage where Nick says to Gatsby that you can't repeat the past, and Gatsby's incredulity at this. Nick begins to understand for the first time the level of Gatsby's desire for a Daisy who no longer exists. It astounds Nick: "I gathered that he wanted to recover something . . . that had gone into loving Daisy . . . out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees . . . Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago . . ."
These are Nick's words. Whose "appalling sentimentality" is operating here? Has Nick reported any of Gatsby's words - which comprise so little of the novel - to suggest that he would even begin to put his love for Daisy in these "sentimental" terms? Is not this excess of sentiment in fact Nick's sentiment for Gatsby or perhaps Nick's attempt at displaying those "rather literary" days he had in college? Or both?
We should consider the distance that Fitzgerald has created between his presence in the story and Nick's and their implications. Fitzgerald has created a most interesting character in Nick because he is very much a fallible storyteller.
When an author unsettles an accepted convention in the art of storytelling by creating a narrator like Nick, it draws attention to the story as fiction, as artifice. Ironically, in doing this, he has created in Nick a figure who more closely resembles an average human being and thus has heightened the realism of the novel.
Key Issues:
Success - Gatsby uses a corrupt form of the American dream to acquire the wealth he thinks he needs to win back Daisy. Tom and Daisy must have a huge house, a stable of polo ponies, and friends in Europe. Gatsby must have his enormous mansion before he can feel confident enough to win Daisy. The energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but fundementally empty form of success. Gatsby had been in love with Daisy for a long while. He tried every way that money could buy to try to satisfy his love and lust for Daisy. Instead of confronting her with his feelings, he tried to get her attention by throwing big parties with high hopes that she might possibly show up. Gatsby was actually a very lonesome and unhappy man who lived in a grand house and had extravagant parties. He did it all for one woman, who initially was impressed with his flagrant show of wealth. Daisy was extremely disenchanted after she found out how Gatsby had aquired his fortune.
Morals - The characters in this novel live for money and were controlled by money. Love and happiness cannot be bought, no matter how much money was spent. Tom and Daisy were married and even had a child, but they both still committed adultery. Daisy was with Gatsby and Tom was with Myrtle. They tried to find happiness with their lovers, but the risk of changing their lifestyles was not worth it. They were not happy with their spouses but could not find happiness with their lovers. Happiness cannot be found or bought. Daisy lost her love and respect for Gatsby when she found out he was a bootlegger. Tom, after having an affair himself was angry about Daisy's affair. Hypocrisy tends to be a trait in the very rich.
Hope - Gatsby bought a house in West Egg, in the hopes that he would win Daisy back. He did this so that he could look across the bay to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He expected her to turn up at one of his parties, and when she didn't, he asked Jordan to ask Nick to ask Daisy. Fitzgerald stresses the need for hope and dreams to give meaning and purpose to man's efforts. Striving towards some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvment, a sense of his own identity. Fitzgerald goes on to state that the failure of hopes and dreams, the failure of the American dream itself, is unavoidable, not only because reality cannot keep up with ideals, but also because the ideals are in any case usually too fantastic to be realized. Gatsby is naive, impractical and oversentimental. It is this which makes him attempt the impossible, to repeat the past. There is something pitiful and absurd about the way he refuses to grow up.
By Ned Mack
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald has become a literary classic of the 1900’s, currently selling more paperbacks annually then copies of all editions during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. His novel about American society in the 1920’s has been praised for both its brutal realism and its keen depiction of the age that The New York Times referred to as the era when, “gin was the national drink and sex was the national obsession”(Fitzgerald
vii). “ . . . indifference is presented as a moral failure - a failure of society, particularly the society of the American east to recognize the imperatives of truth and honesty and justice” (Gallo 35). In The Great
Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald criticizes American society in the 1920’s for its tendencies to waste, advertise, form superficial relationships, and obsess over appearances.
F. Scott Fitzgerald criticizes the wasteful tendencies of American society in his novel, The Great Gatsby. He uses the valley of ashes to comment on this aspect of American society. The valley of ashes is a bleak area
situated between the West Egg and New York City, “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”(Fitzgerald 23). This unpleasant wasteland is located right along the roadway and train route between the eggs, home of the lofty aristocrats, and New York City, the exciting and fashionable metropolis
where many of the nations wealthiest people live, work, and entertain themselves. “There is no essential difference between the moneyed wastelands of New York City and Long Island and the valley of ashes,”
(Gallo 49) Referring to an eye doctor’s billboard in the valley of ashes, Nick, our narrator comments:
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes dimmed a little by
many painless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. (Gatsby 23)
Fitzgerald employs this section on the valley of ashes and Dr. T.J.Eckleburg’s billboard to criticize American society and values. He is portraying the American habit of using up what is useful or has value and
leaving the waste products behind. His symbol is that the wood (valuable) was used to build a fire and then the ashes (waste products) were left behind. The valley of ashes was once a flourishing town, but was used
until it was no longer valuable and was thus abandoned (like ashes after all the wood has been burned). Gatsby’s parties were also a form of social commentary in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Gatsby’s acquisition and disposal of fruit (and rinds) in such large quantities is another example of society’s using up the serviceable and leaving the superfluous behind. The actions of Tom and Daisy also illustrate this tendency to ignore the
waste products and obstacles. “ . . . Daisy accidentally runs down and kills Myrtle Wilson. Completely unnerved, Daisy speeds away . . . ‘they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their wealth or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .’” (Gallo 36-44)
There is an obsession with advertising present in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The billboard in the valley of ashes is held above the rest of the town and represents society worshipping advertising. The god of the valley of ashes is not only a faceless nonentity whose distorted perception must be rectified by man-made lenses, but also the creation of the advertising business that is dedicated to persuasion through fallacies and exaggerations. That any deity exists who ‘sees’ man’s transgressions and despairs is... just another advertising slogan. (Gallo 50) The billboard also portrays a theme in the novel of individuals (in society) advertising themselves. This theme is seen at Myrtle’s party when Mr. and Mrs. McKee attempt to promote Mr. McKee’s photography business and he says, “I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island” (Fitzgerald 32). Mrs. McKee goes on and on about the tremendous number of portraits her husband has done of her and how Myrtle should have him take her picture. Tom also illustrates this characteristic of American Society in the 1920’s
when he says, “I’ve got a nice place here”. Similarly, Gatsby says, “My house looks well doesn’t it?” (Fitzgerald 91) in a blatant attempt to broadcast his wealth for Daisy’s benefit. Daisy attempts to promote her
husband, exclaiming that “Tom’s getting very profound”. The fact that this is something to boast about reveals the effort behind it. Being profound is much more admirable then studying up so you can appear profound.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald criticizes the American obsession with appearances. At Myrtle’s party several characters attempt to portray themselves differently then they truly are. Myrtle tries to make it seem
as though she has a kitchen full of servants and chefs waiting on her. “‘I told that boy about the ice... These people! You have to keep after them all the time.’ . . . and [she] swept into the kitchen, implying that a
dozen chefs awaited her orders there,” (Fitzgerald 32). She wants desperately to appear aristocratic and is invariably conscious of the fact that she is of a lower class. Thus when Mrs. McKee compliments Myrtle on
her dress, she replies, “‘I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.’ . . . ‘My dear . . . I’m going to give you this dress . . I’ve got to get another one tomorrow,’” (Fitzgerald 31-37). Her sister
also clearly places much value on appearances. Catherine’s eyebrows are unmistakably butchered from there natural form in an attempt to be seen as chic. Gatsby, too, considers presentation to be weighty. “Replacing the artificial lighting, is the light of the moon, primitive and elementary, which seems to have nothing in common with that moon that shone over Gatsby’s parties, ‘produced like a supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s
basket’ . . . the houses, with all the pretension and ostentation they imply ... ‘began to melt away’” (Johnson 113). The fact that Gatsby has a magnificent library, but hasn’t even opened the books is a criticism of
society’s obsession with appearances and trying to transform who we are (or appear to be) in order to fit a more accepted image.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the side-walk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house- the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (Fitzgerald 178) In the novel, individuals are unable to see each other for who they truly
are and thus everyone sees a distorted image of everyone else. “Any world in which the motions and rituals of existence are divorced from the emotions is a wasteland,” (Gallo 48) The eye doctor’s billboard lacks dimension which is a comment on the characters depicted and the society in general. Although the characters are drinking alcohol and therefore losing their inhibitions, we never see any true emotions or deep feelings which makes us wonder if there is anything under those shells of superficiality. There is a flatness to the characters specifically at the parties which is a statement about the superficiality of relationships in American society in the 1920’s. “Daisy is a vacuous creature whose self-identity is defined by externals. She is so empty that Fitzgerald can only portray her through the qualities of another” (Gallo 45). The eyes on the billboard only give the illusion of seeing, which represents society’s superficial relationships. The illusion of sight symbolizes drunkenness and the lack of personal connections (and the lack of a desire for such connections).
An example of this is Myrtle’s party when they are all in a drunken stupor (particularly Nick). “By 1923, ‘their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will
take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began.’ It was ‘a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,’” (Gallo 40).
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby, set in “jazz-age New York City and its glorious adjacent playground, Long Island” (Gallo 40) to criticize aspects of American society in the 1920’s. Through the symbolism of the valley of ashes and Gatsby’s discarded fruit, Fitzgerald criticized the American tendency to waste. Myrtle and her sister, Catherine, are employed along with most of the characters, to convey the American obsession with appearances. The billboard in the valley of ashes introduces the theme of
advertising, which is found in society and throughout the novel. It expresses not only society’s reliance upon and worshipping of advertising, but also the tendency towards self advertising (which is also expressed in
the New York City party scene). As the narrator moral commentator of the novel “. . . ultimately concludes that the conduct of the world of the east falls short of even the minimum standards of behavior . . . The novel
dramatizes the reckless profligacy of the Jazz Age” (Gallo 40-43).
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