Gatsby Fitzgerald Jazz
THE GREAT GATSBY
The Great Gatsby has become such a classic of American fiction that its literary merits easily obscure those qualities that also made it a favorite among readers. While critics have been quick to dismiss its thin plot and shallow characters as less important than Fitzgerald's brilliant depiction of the Jazz Age and his indictment of its shabby values, most readers take a different view. They praise the book because its plot is thin and its characters are shallow. These readers believe that this is precisely Fitzgerald's point, that the age itself could do no better than to produce shallow people living superficial lives. Academic critics speculated about the probable causes of this phenomenon, attributing it to the disillusionment brought on by World War I and the extreme measures taken to escape it. The aftermath of the war had brought, “a state of nervous stimulation…the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War had now produced… a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure…wherefore eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Readers saw a culture wallowing in hedonism, high on jazz and bathtub gin, and living life as if it were one long party and there was no tomorrow. More importantly, they saw the heroic and sympathetic figure of Nick Carraway, the outside observer, whose function it was to observe and report on the American Dream within Fitzgerald's novel.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway becomes the outside observer that readers come to identify with. Nick has the sort of blessed innocence and shining ambition associated with heroes. There is a freshness about him, a basic goodness that appeals to that part of human nature that envies or craves or is irresistibly attracted to innocence. Beyond that, however, is the fact that, in the tradition of the hero, Nick goes forth into the world to encounter corruption and disillusionment and has to come to terms with this in reality. It is through Nick that we see the American Dream, as epitomized by Jay Gatsby, come crumbling down under the amoral pursuit of wealth. We, also, get a glimpse of the roles of class in distinguishing between the wealthy East and West Egg socialites, as well as, the stark contrast between two wealthy but different men, Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan. The following paragraphs will attempt to examine and analyze these issues more carefully as seen through the eyes of Nick Carraway.
It is Nick's idealization of Jay Gatsby and his dreams that endear him to the minds of the readers. Gatsby on his own is not an easy character for readers to sympathize with without the special insight of the young and sympathetic Nick. If Nick can see the good in Gatsby, then the reader can dismiss the corrupt side as Gatsby's victimization by the system and dwell on the charming side, that side made all the more intriguing by the mystery surrounding this handsome, rich, and devastatingly detached personality. As Nick says of Gatsby, “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.” Perhaps the best way to grasp the perspective of the American Dream in the twenties is to imagine Gatsby standing alone in the second-story bedroom of his gorgeous mansion in West Egg, looking out at the pool and the tent and the lavish party going on, at his expense, beneath his window; listening to the jazz band playing, seeing the shadows of the flappers against the sides of the tent, quietly watching--aloof, detached, amused, and powerful. This illumination of what the American Dream had become was seen by many as the new idealism that, “Prosperity in the twenties had come to mean a rate of advance rather than an actual state of affairs…more and more Americans were inclined to explain their society in terms of productivity, profits and stock quotes.” Not Gatsby, however. In recounting Gatsby's dream, Nick remembers vividly coming home and seeing Gatsby standing in front of his mansion, looking intently at East Egg across the bay. His American Dream extended just across the bay and always seemingly beyond his reach, wrapped up in the beautiful idea of Daisy Buchanan.
Daisy Buchanan was Nick's cousin, a lovely, exciting, but shallow young woman who had once had an affair with Gatsby before the war. While Gatsby was away in the war, she married Tom Buchanan. He was a handsome, wealthy man, but cruel and insensitive. Gatsby wanted Daisy back and thought that his wealth, accumulated through shady transactions, would make Daisy admire him, but he overestimated her and underestimated himself. Unfortunately for Gatsby, the American dream was only possible through materialism as the Roaring Twenties saw, “Americans easily assumed that spiritual satisfaction would automatically accompany material success.” Gatsby thought this, as well. He felt that by accumulating worldly possessions he could give Daisy the life she had dreamed. At one point, Gatsby goes so far as to show her all his valuable belongings, throwing shirts into the air, “shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange.” Daisy, crying at this point to indicate the materialistic values that had consumed America, exclaims, “It makes me sad because I‘ve never seen-such beautiful shirts before.” This remarkable scene is the whole embodiment of the twenties era. It is characterized as an age of excess, overindulgence, consumerism, materialism, and individualism. It is Gatsby's dream of Daisy Buchanan that will lead him from poverty to riches and finally to his death as his amoral pursuit of wealth will give rise to the shattering of his American Dream.
In one sense Gatsby is the manifestation of a new prosperous society. His mysterious past an opportunistic illusions of a dream work to his favor in the new era of prosperity and abundance.
Daisy is Gatsby's one dream, and the reason he bought his house and gives his parties is to get her back. He persuades Nick to bring him and Daisy together again, but he is unable to win her away from Tom. Nick can see this, but he is powerless to stop the chain of events that, for all their melodrama, seem necessary to act out the denouement of shallow lives lived recklessly, of shallow dreams shattered pointlessly. Daisy, driving Gatsby's car, runs over and kills Tom's mistress, Myrtle, unaware of her identity. Myrtle's husband traces the car and shoots Gatsby, who has remained silent in order to protect Daisy. Gatsby's friends and associates have all deserted him, and only Gatsby's father and one former guest attend the funeral.
Jay Gatsby may be a bootlegger and a fraud, but he is only defrauding a system that is a bigger fraud, a system that advocates a farce like prohibition, that adores glittering surfaces, that cares only for the trappings of success and not for how the gains were got. But in the American tradition of trying to have your cake and eat it too, cult readers get to envy Gatsby while respecting Nick. Nick has his head on straight; Nick learns from what he sees; Nick acquires wisdom from his experiences and thus tells us a cautionary tale. Ah, but for one brief, shining moment, Gatsby illuminates the sky, and if his death is all a silly mistake, its sordidness is redeemed by his nobility. He dies, after all, for love, but it is a love that is unrequited. The success behind Jay Gatsby according him was
"Rise from bed. . . . Study electricity. . . . Work. . . . Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it. . . . Study needed inventions."
For example, their youth is an essential quality of them both. Nick talks about Tom
“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced -- or seemed to face -- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished -- and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.”
Again, Gatsby and Tom are alike in the possession of certain sentimentality, but Tom Buchanan's is based on depraved self-pity. He is never more typical than when coaxing himself to tears over a half finished box of dog biscuits that recalls a drunken and illicit day from his past, associated in memory with his dead mistress. His self-pity is functional. It is sufficient to condone his most criminal acts in his own eyes as long as the crimes are not imputable. But Gatsby's sentimentality exists in the difficulty of expressing, in the phrases and symbols provided by his decadent society, the reality that lies at the heart of his aspiration. Gatsby's sentimentality is as innocent as that. It has nothing of self-pity or indulgence in it -- it is all aspiration and goodness; and it must be remembered that Fitzgerald himself is outside Gatsby's vocabulary, using it with great mastery to convey the poignancy of the situation.
Tom Buchanan and Gatsby represent antagonistic but historically related aspects of America. They are related as the body and the soul when a mortal barrier has risen up between them. Tom Buchanan is virtually Gatsby's murderer in the end, but the crime that he commits by proxy is only a symbol of his deeper spiritual crime against Gatsby's inner vision. Gatsby's guilt, insofar as it exists, is radical failure -- a failure of the critical faculty that seems to be an inherent part of the American dream -- to understand that Daisy is as fully immersed in the destructive element of the American world as Tom himself. After Daisy, while driving Gatsby's white automobile, has killed Mrs. Wilson and, implicitly at least, left Gatsby to shoulder the blame, Nick Carraway gives us a crucial insight into the spiritual affinity of the Buchanan couple, drawing together in their callous selfishness in a moment of guilt and crisis.
There is little point in tracing out in detail the implications of the action any further, although it could be done with an exactness approaching allegory. That it is not allegory is owing to the fact that the pattern emerges from the fullness of Fitzgerald's living experience of his own society and time. In the end the most that can be said is that The Great Gatsby is a dramatic affirmation in fictional terms of the American spirit in the midst of an American world that denies the soul. Gatsby exists in, and for, that affirmation alone.
It was Gatsby's dream that conferred reality upon the world. The reality was in his faith in the goodness of creation, and in the possibilities of life. That these possibilities were intrinsically related to such romantic components limited and distorted his dream, and finally left it helpless in the face of the Buchanans, but it did not corrupt it. When the dream melted, it knocked the prop of reality from under the universe, and face to face with the physical substance at last, Gatsby realized that the illusion was there -- there where Tom and Daisy, and generations of small-minded, ruthless Americans had found it -- in the dreamless, visionless complacency of mere matter, substance without form. After this recognition, Gatsby's death is only a symbolic formality, for the world into which his mere body had been born rejected the gift he had been created to embody -- the traditional dream from which alone it could awaken into life. When his dream broke
“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.”
Critics of Scott Fitzgerald tend to agree that The Great Gatsby is somehow a commentary on that elusive phrase, the American dream. The assumption seems to be that Fitzgerald approved. On the contrary, it can be shown that The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream that our literature affords. Read in this way, Fitzgerald's masterpiece ceases to be a pastoral documentary of the Jazz Age and takes its distinguished place among those great national novels whose profound corrective insights into the nature of American experience are not separable from the artistic form of the novel itself. That is to say, Fitzgerald -- at least in this one book -- is in a line with the greatest masters of American prose. The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience -- not of manners, but of a basic historic attitude to life -- more radical than anything in James's own assessment of the deficiencies of his country. The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream.
Essentially, this phrase represents the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused. As such, it led inevitably toward the problem that has always confronted American artists dealing with American experience -- the problem of determining the hidden boundary in the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins. Historically, the American dream is anti-Calvinistic, and believes in the goodness of nature and man.
The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than the reality itself. Embodied in the subordinate characters in the novel, they threaten to invade the whole of the picture. On the other hand, the reality is embodied in Gatsby; and as opposed to the hard, tangible illusions, the reality is a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the possession of a vision, a faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood, possibilities of life. In Gatsby's America, the reality is undefined to itself.
This is not pretentious phrase-making performing a vague gesture towards some artificial significance. It is both an evocative and an exact description of that unholy cruel paradox by which the conditions of American history have condemned the grandeur of the aspiration and vision to expend itself in a waste of shame and silence. But the reality is not entirely lost. It ends by redeeming the human spirit, even though it lives in a wilderness of illusions, from the cheapness and vulgarity that encompass it. In this novel, the illusions are known and condemned at last simply by the rank complacency with which they are content to be themselves. On the other hand, the reality is in the energy of the spirit's resistance, which may not recognize itself as resistance at all, but which can neither stoop to the illusions nor abide with them when they are at last recognized. Perhaps it is really nothing more than ultimate immunity from the final contamination, but it encompasses the difference between life and death. Gatsby never succeeds in seeing through the sham of his world or his acquaintances very clearly. It is of the essence of his romantic American vision that it should lack the seasoned powers of discrimination. But it invests those illusions with its own faith, and thus it discovers its projected goodness in the frauds of its crippled world. The Great Gatsby becomes the acting out of the tragedy of the American vision. It is a vision totally untouched by the scales of values that order life in a society governed by traditional manners; and Fitzgerald knows that although it would be easy to condemn and place the illusions by invoking these outside values, to do so would be to kill the reality that lies beyond them, but which can sometimes only be reached through them.
For example, Fitzgerald perfectly understood the inadequacy of Gatsby's romantic view of wealth. But that is not the point. He presents it in Gatsby as a romantic baptism of desire for a reality that stubbornly remains out of his sight. It is as if a savage islander, suddenly touched with Grace, transcended in his prayers and aspirations the grotesque little fetish in which he imagined he discovered the object of his longing. The scene in which Gatsby shows his piles of beautiful imported shirts to Daisy and Nick has been mentioned as a failure of Gatsby's, and so of Fitzgerald's, critical control of values. Actually, the shirts are sacramental, and it is clear that Gatsby shows them, neither in vanity nor in pride, but with a reverential humility in the presence of some inner vision he cannot consciously grasp, but toward which he desperately struggles in the only way he knows.
Students of American literature are given to speculating about the American Dream--what it is, how ardently people pursue it, and how invariably they fail. The blame is usually laid rather vaguely at the feet of society, the convenient scapegoat for everybody's woes ever since the people seized control of the government from the privileged few. Cult readers enjoy indictments of society because such indictments reinforce their own sense of disaffection and protect them against taking blame for their own failures. However, there is more to it than that. Cult readers enjoy flirting with the demimonde, and if they can idealize a shady character, they will.
In this sense Gatsby is a "mythic" character, and no other word will define him. Not only is he an embodiment (as Fitzgerald makes clear at the outset) of that conflict between illusion and reality at the heart of American life; he is a heroic personification of the American romantic hero, the true heir of the American dream.
East egg/west egg
What Fitzgerald has done here is to add the idea of class to the idea of place. The kind of class that he attributes to Nick Carraway's family suggests that of the one great American cultural component that had its origin in its ideal of a comfortable, cultivated, stable existence, drawing sustenance, generation after generation, from a family business, and living out its generations in the same spacious but unostentatious house. Midwestern idealism then is the hard solid moral core of America, and it produces a Nick Carraway, whose virtues are tolerance and honesty. These are precisely the two virtues that Fitzgerald needs in his hero: the tolerance to thus become involved with the Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby, all of whom he mistrusts in varying degrees -- but the honesty never to be deceived by them and, more importantly, never to be corrupted by them.
Opposed to this specific virtuous Middle West is a rather indefinite degenerate East, although it is particularized in the one small section in which most of the novel takes place: West Egg and East Egg, New York City, and the axis-the valley of ashes, Wilson's garage, and the great staring signboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg -- that connects them.
Both Eggs represent corruption, but it is a corruption of different orders, connected with inherited wealth on the one hand and with occupation on the other. East Egg is the home of inherited wealth, whose deeply tainted character Fitzgerald manages to suggest in Tom and Daisy. It is in this community that Tom, as if by instinct, settled, and when asked by Nick if he intends to stay in the East, he replies, in his best bit of self-analysis in the book,
'I'd be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.' West Egg is populated by nouveau riche, all of whom have acquired their gains in shady or marginal activities: politicians, moving picture people, fight promoters, gamblers, and bootleggers." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1995)
Farther reaches of Long Island, beyond the Eggs, are briefly suggested in the same manner. According to the legend, the Easterner inherits his money, while the Westerner works for his, but the West Eggers earn their money by gambling or bootlegging. If the essence of Nick Carraway, the essence of the East is summed up in the respective characters of those two expatriates, Tom and Daisy, who between them -- in his intolerance and her dishonesty. In Daisy further is embodied the beauty of the East, Tom the power, and in their union a vast irresponsibility that smashes the dream of Gatsby and finally murders the dreamer himself.
Tom Buchanan then is power and intolerance, Daisy beauty and dishonesty. His financial power is mountainous, and his physique corresponds: you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his coat. It was a body capable of enormom leverage -- a cruel body. But this power, financial and physical, does not extend to his mind, whose powerful limitations are compensated for by a thick-skulled inflexibility. For while a libertine in action, he is in opinion a prig, faintly nourished by the thinnest pap that twentieth-century knowledge has produced, popular "scientific explanations.
This powerful stupidity has as its soul mate the beauty and dishonesty of Daisy. Both these characteristics of the feminine side of the equation are repeated, reemphasized, and exaggerated
But money for Gatsby is a kind of metaphysical mystery as well, and certainly it is a synonym for beauty. It was the mysterious beauty of Daisy and her life that cast the original spell.
Bibliography
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Gatsby. Publisher: Scribner (1995)
- Jack Clayton directed movie, The Great Gatsby. (1974)
- John Braeman, Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America: The 1920'S. Ohio State University Press (1968).
- Harold Bloom, Gatsby. Publisher: Chelsea House Publishers. Place of Publication: New York. (1991).
- Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. Perennial Library (1989).
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