Aspects of Narrative in The Great Gatsby

THE GREAT GATSBY – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Setting:

The Great Gatsby suggests rather than develops the era of the twenties, it does evoke a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again. The loss of an ideal, the disillusionment that comes with the failure to compromise, the efforts of runaway prosperity and wild parties, the fear of the intangibility of that moment, the built-in resentment against the new immigration, the fear of a new radical element, the latent racism behind half-baked historical theories, the effect of Prohibition, the rise of a powerful underworld, the effect of the automobile and professional sports on post-war America – these and a dozen equally important events became the subject of The Great Gatsby, a novel that evokes both the romance and the sadness of that strange and fascinating era we call the twenties.

The Great Gatsby is a novel that is set against the ending of the war. Both Nick and Gatsby have participated in the war, although like much of the historical background in the novel, these events are more implied than developed. When Nick first meets Gatsby, Gatsby asks, “Your face is familiar... Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?” Nick tells him, “Yes... The ninth machine-gun battalion,” to which Gatsby responds, “I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen eighteen.”

Imagery:

Fitzgerald has described events such as European immigrants bringing with them socialist ideas, or the growing resentment of “foreigners” among Americans in The Great Gatsby. He speaks of the streets of New York filling up with people with “the tragic eyes and short upper lips of South-Eastern Europe,” an illusion that gets picked up with Meyer Wolfsheim and his “gonnegtions”.  Fitzgerald also described blacks coming from the South to cities like Chicago and New York. As Gatsby and Nick enter the city over the Queensboro Bridge, they see a panorama of ethnic faces outlined against the skyline of the new city, itself one of the unstated forces at work in the novel. The Tom Buchanans control the legal institutions of this city, and the Meyer Wolfsheims control the underworld.

Imagery and Foreshadowing:

-          The owl-eyed man steps from a car “violently shorn of one wheel” – next chapter, we find out that Tom Buchanan was involved in an automobile accident outside of Santa Barbara where he “ripped a front wheel off his car.” – Myrtle Wilson killed by an automobile

-          Rain falls on the reunion of Daisy and Gatsby – Rain falls on Gatsby’s funeral

-          Daisy and Jordan sit on a couch that seems to float to the ceiling – in Chapter 7 they sit on the same couch oppressed of the heat, as if the airiness of their being has finally come down to earth

-          The carnival gaiety of Gatsby’s parties disintegrates under Daisy’s disapproving eye

-          The city that Nick sees in its “wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” gives way to the reality of death in chapter 4 where, “A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms.”

-          The copy of Clay’s “Economics” that Gatsby reads while waiting for Daisy is apt for a woman whose voice is “full of money”

-          The “out-of-date timetable” that Nick uses to write down the names of Gatsby’s guests proves the obsolescence of Gatsby’s dream

-          The words that Myrtle speaks when she first meets Tom, “You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever,” reverberate with irony

Themes:

A thematic subcurrent of The Great Gatsby involves a sense of a new, urban public manipulated by power brokers, and Nick’s sudden awareness that a World Series can be fixed gives him insight into the corruptibility of this vast world.

Fitzgerald was working within terms of several broad themes in this novel. One involves the theme of America, the initial sense of promise of the New World as it was played out by the Frontier and transformed by the new megalopolis. A second involves the theme of love and romance, embodied in Daisy Fay and played out and transformed in her five years of marriage with Tom Buchanan. A third, of course, involves Gatsby himself, his internalising these themes - first, by modelling himself on Dan Cody and second, by making his reunion with Daisy inseparable from the idea of self.

When one lost the sense of life or promise, which Fitzgerald characteristically predicated on youth – then life lost its sense of wonder, its splendour, and its romantic promise. To desire was, ironically, more important than to have. The man who had great wealth, Tom Buchanan, or the man who was beaten by life, George Wilson, lacked the intensity of experience of a Gatsby who was a “son of God” and who “sprang from the Platonic conception of himself,” as the novel tells us. To lose the romantic conception of oneself is to move to hellish world, which in the novel is embodied by the valley of ashes and incarnated by George Wilson, who appropriately becomes the agent of Gatsby’s death when Gatsby loses his sense of wonder and “romantic readiness”, when his world becomes “material without being real” and a rose becomes “grotesque.”

Theme of Lost Past:

-          Over wound clock

-          Declining seasons of the year: Novel begins in late spring and ends in late autumn

                                                     

Theme of romantic exhaustion and lost promises:

-          Intensified by ash heaps and dust imagery

-          “Mingled her dark thick blood with the dust” – language infuses both religious and romantic meaning.

-          Tom’s remark, Gatsby “threw dust into your eyes,” not only picks up the dust/ashes imagery but connects it with the theory of seeing/misseeing.

-          The custodian of the Valley of Ashes, an “ashen and fantastic figure,” George Wilson murders the green dreamer, Gatsby is ironic

-          Violence of Myrtle’s death is attached to the many references to bad driving and moral carelessness

-          ‘Green light’ at the dock suggests Gatsby’s fertile dreams and money

Absence of God:

-          Except for Gatsby’s godlike sense of the potentiality of self, God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, and embodied by the equally blind eyes of the owl-eyed man who appears at Gatsby’s party and reappears at his funeral, bridging the connection between the two, just as the end product of Gatsby’s parties are embodied in the orange pulps and lemon rinds and by that other symbol of romantic waste and emotional exhaustion – the valley of ashes. This is a blind world because there is no source of moral vision.

Symbolism:

Gatsby and Moon Symbolism:

-          The ‘moon’ that bathes Gatsby’s house at the start of the novel

-          Same moon shines on Gatsby when he waves goodbye at the party

-          Stands vigil at Daisy’s house after the fatal accident

Gatsby and God Symbolism:

-          “She blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” Note the word ‘incarnation’.

-          Called a “son of God.”

Structure of the Novel:

Both structurally and chronologically, The Great Gatsby builds towards Chapter 5, the scene in which Gatsby again meets Daisy after their long separation. In a nine-chapter novel, this is the exact halfway point; the first four chapters build toward this moment, while the last four chapters lead away from it.

Chapter 5 is the static centre of the novel. Here, past and present fuse; the dream comes as close to “incarnation” as it is possible for it to come. Fitzgerald infuses this section with time images and references.

Jay Gatsby:

What Fitzgerald did in The Great Gatsby was to raise his central character to a mythic level, to reveal a man whose intensity of dream partook a state of mind that embodied America itself. Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his personal grail.

Gatsby brought his Western intensity East and found a “frontier” equivalent in the New York underworld, the world of professional gamblers, bootleggers, financial schemers and a new breed of exploiters that the East bred differently from the West. Such a man will stand out in “respectable” company because he will lack social credentials.

The romantic intensity that the pioneers brought to a new world, Gatsby now brings to a beautiful, but also rather superficial, self-involved, self-protecting, morally empty young woman. The power of this novel ultimately comes from the structured relationships between these narrative elements. We have two kinds of seeing in this novel: a visionary whose vision has been emptied and a moral observer who is initially unsympathetic to what he sees in the visionary. “Gatsby... represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn,” but who is eventually won over by what is compelling and poignant in Gatsby’s story. Nick comes to see that Gatsby’s fate cannot be separated from his own or from the destiny of America.

Gatsby’s Father Figure – Meyer Wolfsheim:

Meyer Wolfsheim becomes Gatsby’s second father figure and introduces him to the New York underworld. It is thus with money that comes from bootlegging, gambling and bucket shops that Gatsby makes the fortune that allows him to buy his mansion on West Egg. When Nick confronts Wolfsheim after Gatsby’s death, he asks him if he had started Gatsby in business. “Start him! I made him!” “I raised him out of nothing, right out of the gutter.”

To Gatsby, money is money, and he never understands the difference between East Egg or West Egg. That is why Daisy is “appalled by West Egg.”

Gatsby - “Son of God”:

In one of the biographical recollections that Nick Carraway gives, he tells us that Gatsby “was a son of God” and that “he must be about His Father’s business.” The “Father’s business” turns out to be the pursuit of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Gatsby’s resolve comes at the moment he invents himself – “so he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent.” – And this moment comes simultaneously with Gatsby’s meeting Dan Cody. Once this equation is in place, Dan Cody takes on godlike proportions, and his business – the exploitation of America – becomes Gatsby’s business as well, even to the extent that Gatsby creates the kind of self necessary for such a pursuit.

Wilson goes out and kills the wrong man. Not only is God blind, but Wilson, his agent, is blind as well, and Wilson becomes an incarnate inversion of Gatsby. Pale of face, with yellow strawlike hair, he seems to leave a trail of ashes behind him, a possibility of death, the death of a godlike vision.

George Wilson:

The function of the exhausted apostles is taken over by George Wilson, who also sits in front of his garage – between the railroad and the road, watching the traffic go by. He is described as “one of those worn-out men” who “sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road.” Wilson and his wife live in “a small block of yellow brick,” surrounded by a “waste land” which locates them among the middle class. Their failed sense of wonder and disbelief in God makes their world an equivalent of hell, which is like the “impenetrable cloud” of dust that is prevalent in the Valley of Ashes.