he chooses to leave the East and return to the Midwest. By that choice he seems
to be saying to us that he has tried the East and found it missing something he
needs: a basic set of values. So he goes home, where values still exist. Think
about the two worlds–the Midwest and the East and what they represented for
Nick (and by extension, Fitzgerald) and what they might represent for you.
The title of this novel is The Great Gatsby. If you like paradoxes, start
with this one: he is neither great nor Gatsby (his real name was Gatz). He is a
crook, a bootlegger who has involved himself with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who
fixed the 1919 World Series. He has committed crimes in order to buy the house
he feels he needs to win the woman he loves, who happens to be another man’s
wife. Thus a central question for us as readers is, why should we love such a
man? Or, to put it in other word, what makes Gatsby great? Why, despite all
these things, does Fitzgerald invite us to cry out with Nick, “’They’re a
rotten crowd’… ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.’”? We are
asked to love Gatsby, even admire him to a point, because of his dream. That
dream is what separates Gatsby from what Nick calls the “foul dust [that]
floated in the wake of his dreams…” It is not merely what is known as the
American Dream of Success–the belief that every man can rise to success no
matter what his beginnings. It is a kind of romantic idealism, “some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” Nick calls it. It is a
belief in fairytales and princesses and happy endings, a faith that life can be
special, remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby is not interested in power for its own
sake or in money or prestige. What he wants is his dream, and that dream is
embodied in Daisy. He must have her, and, as the novel’s epigraph on the title
page suggests, he will do anything that is required in order to win her. But
dreams don’t always show on the outside. The Great Gatsby is a kind of mystery
story with Gatsby as the mystery. Who is he? All the way through the novel
people keep asking that question and answering it falsely. They answer it
falsely because they aren’t really interested in who Gatsby is. They have heard
things about him–that he killed a man, that he was a German spy in World War
I–and they pass these bits of gossip on to other people. So the myth of
Gatsby–the collection of false stories about him–hides the Gatsby that we come
gradually to know through the efforts of Nick Carraway. Nick genuinely cares who
Gatsby is, and in Chapters IV, VI, VIII, and IX he presents us with the story of
Gatsby’s past as he has learned it from Jordan Baker, from Gatsby himself, and
eventually, from Gatsby’s father. No one else but Nick knows or understands
Gatsby’s background except maybe his father and Owl Eyes–and they,
significantly, are the only ones present at his funeral. Fitzgerald invites us
to share Nick’s understanding of Gatsby as we read the novel. He makes us see
behind the surface of the man who at first glance looks like a young roughneck.
And he forces us to ask, as we finish the book, what this dream is that Gatsby
has dedicated himself to. Is it a worthwhile dream? Is it our dream, too? Can we
love Gatsby and be critical of his dream at the same time? Fitzgerald makes us
ask these questions and then lets us find our own answers.
Tom Buchanan, Nick tells us, “had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven–a national figure in a way, one of those
men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anticlimax.” He is also very wealthy, having brought a
string of polo ponies from Lake Forest to Long Island. This double power–the
size of his body and his bankroll–colors our feelings about Tom Buchanan.
Because he is both very strong and very rich, Tom is used to having his own way.
Nick describes him as having “a rather hard mouth” and “two
shining arrogant eyes.” When we first meet him in Chapter I, he reveals his
crude belief in his own superiority by telling Nick that he has just read a book
called The Rise of the Colored Empires. The book warns that if white people are
not careful, the black races will rise up and overwhelm them. Tom clearly
believes it. Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George
Wilson, who runs a garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle seems to have a dark
sexual vitality that attracts Tom, and he keeps an apartment for her in New
York, where he takes Nick in Chapter II. Here he again shows how little he
thinks of anyone beside himself when he casually breaks Myrtle’s nose with the
back of his hand, because she is shouting “Daisy! Daisy!” in a vulgar
fashion. Between Chapters II and VII we see little of Tom, but in Chapter VII he
emerges as a central figure. It is Tom who pushes the affair between Gatsby and
Daisy out into the open by asking Gatsby point blank, “’What kind of a row
are you trying to cause in my house anyway?” It is Tom who verbally
outduels Gatsby to win his wife back and deflate his rival’s dream. And it is
Tom who, after the death of Myrtle Wilson, tells George Wilson that Gatsby was
the killer and then hustles Daisy out of the area until the affair blows over.
Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy as careless people who break things and then
retreat into their wealth and let other people clean up their messes. It’s a
particularly apt metaphor for Tom, who cannot understand why Nick should have
any ill feelings about Gatsby’s death. After all, Tom was only protecting his
wife. Nick shakes hands with Tom in the final chapter because “…I saw
that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” Yet Tom’s behavior
was not justifiable, and when Nick refers to the “foul dust” that
floated in the wake of Gatsby’s dream, he seems to be speaking of Tom Buchanan
more than anyone else. It is Tom as much as anyone who sends Nick back to the
Midwest, where there are still values one can believe in.
She was born Daisy Fay in Louisville, Kentucky, and her color is white. When
Jordan Baker, in Chapter IV, tells Nick about the first meeting between Gatsby
and Daisy in October 1917, she says of Daisy, “She dressed in white, and
had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house
and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of
monopolizing her that night.” Throughout The Great Gatsby Daisy is
described almost in fairytale language. The name Fay means “fairy” or
“sprite.” “Daisy,” of course, suggests the flower, fresh and
bright as spring, yet fragile and without the strength to resist the heat and
dryness of summer. Daisy is the princess in the tower, the golden girl that
every man dreams of possessing. She is beautiful and rich and innocent and pure
(at least on the surface) in her whiteness. But that whiteness, as you will
notice, is mixed with the yellow of gold and the inevitable corruption that
money brings. Though Daisy seems pure and white, she is a mixture of things,
just like the flower for which she was named (see Schneider in
“Critics”). Fitzgerald suggests the nature of this mixture beautifully
in the famous passage from Chapter VII about her voice: “She’s got an
indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of-” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never
understood it before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm
that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in
a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…. Like money, Daisy
promises more than she gives. Her voice seems to offer everything, but she’s
born to disappoint. She is the sort of person who is better to dream about than
to actually possess. Fitzgerald–with that double vision we discussed in The
Author and His Times section of this guide–knew very well both the attractions
and the limitations of women like Daisy, who is modeled in many ways upon his
wife Zelda. Gatsby worships Daisy, and Nick distrusts her–just as Scott both
worshipped and distrusted Zelda. Gatsby loves Daisy too much to see what is
wrong with her. Nick stands back and sees the way Daisy lets other people take
care of her in crises. If you want to study the nature of Daisy’s weakness, look
especially at her behavior on the night before her wedding and on the night of
Myrtle Wilson’s death. Daisy, unlike Tom, uses her money rather than her body or
her personality to bully others. She uses her money to protect her from reality,
and when reality threatens to hurt her, she cries and goes inside the protective
womb her money has made. Be careful not to identify Daisy with the green light
at the end of her dock. The green light is the promise, the dream. Daisy herself
is much less than that. Even Gatsby must realize that having Daisy in the flesh
is much, much less than what he imagined it would be when he fell in love with
the idea of her.
Jordan Baker’s most striking quality is her dishonesty. She is tough and
aggressive–a tournament golfer who is so hardened by competition that she is
willing to do anything to win. At the end of Chapter IV, when Nick is telling us
about Jordan, he remembers a story about her first major tournament. Apparently
she moved her ball to improve her lie (!), but when the matter was being
investigated, the caddy and the only other witness to the incident retracted
their stories and nothing was proved against her. The incident should stay with
you throughout the novel, reminding you (as it reminds Nick) that Jordan is the
smart new woman, the opportunist who will do whatever she must to be successful
in her world. In many ways Jordan Baker symbolizes a new type of woman that was
emerging in the Twenties. She is hard and self-sufficient, and she adopts
whatever morals suit her situation. She has cut herself off from the older
generation. She wears the kind of clothes that suit her; she smokes, she drinks,
and has sex because she enjoys them. You may wish to explore Jordan as the new
woman of the Twenties by looking at the manners and character traits she
reveals. Note such things as her name (a masculine name), her body (hard,
athletic, boyish, small-breasted), her style (blunt, cynical, bored), and her
social background (she is cut off from past generations by having almost no
family). Another important aspect of Jordan is her function in the novel.
Fitzgerald needs her to get the story told. Because she is Daisy’s friend from
Louisville, she can supply Nick with information he would not have otherwise.
She also serves as a link between the major characters, moving back and forth
between the world of East Egg (Tom and Daisy’s house) and West Egg (Gatsby’s and
Nick’s houses). She is rich enough to be comfortable among the East Eggers but
enough of a social hustler to appear at Gatsby’s parties. Jordan serves still
another purpose: Nick’s girlfriend during the summer of 1922. The Nick-Jordan
romance serves as a nice sub-plot to the Gatsby-Jordan relationship, and allows
you to compare and contrast a romantic-idealistic love with a very practical
relationship made on a temporary basis by two worldly people of the time. If you
want to explore the Nick-Jordan relationship and the possible reasons why Nick
becomes involved with her and then breaks the relationship off, you’ll need to
look particularly at three passages: Nick’s comments toward the end of Chapter
III; the phone call between Nick and Jordan in Chapter VIII; and their final
conversation in Chapter IX. We’ll take a close look at these passages later
on.
The setting in The Great Gatsby is very important because in Fitzgerald’s
world setting reveals character. Fitzgerald divides the world of the novel into
four major settings: 1. East Egg; 2. West Egg; 3. the valley of ashes; and 4.
New York City. Within these major settings are two or more subsettings. East Egg
is limited to Daisy’s house, but West Egg incorporates both Gatsby’s house and
Nick’s. The valley of ashes includes the Wilson’s garage, Michaelis’ restaurant,
and the famous sign with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. New York City includes
the offices where people work, the apartment Tom Buchanan has rented for Myrtle
Wilson, and the Plaza Hotel, where the final showdown between Gatsby and Tom
Buchanan takes place. Each of these settings both reflects and determines the
values of the people who live or work there. East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live,
is the home of the Ivy League set who have had wealth for a long time and are
comfortable with it. Since they are secure with their money, they have no need
to show it off. Nick lives in new-rich West Egg because he is too poor to afford
a home in East Egg; Gatsby lives there because his money is “new” and
he lacks the social credentials to be accepted in East Egg. His house, like the
rest of his possessions (his pink suit, for example), is tasteless and vulgar
and would be completely out of place in the more refined and understated world
of East Egg. No wonder that Gatsby is ruined in the end by the East, and that
Nick decides to leave. The valley of ashes in contrast to both eggs is where the
poor people live–those who are the victims of the rich. It is characterized
literally by dust, for it is here that the city’s ashes are dumped (in what is
now Flushing, Queens), and the inhabitants are, as it were, symbolically dumped
on by the rest of the world. The valley of ashes, with its brooding eyes of Dr.
T. J. Eckleburg, also stands as a symbol of the spiritual dryness, the emptiness
of the world of the novel. New York City is a symbol of what America has become
in the 1920s: a place where anything goes, where money is made and bootleggers
flourish, and where the World Series can be fixed by a man like Meyer Wolfsheim.
New York is a place of parties and affairs, and bizarre and colorful characters
who appear from time to time in West Egg at Gatsby’s parties. The idea of
setting as moral geography is reinforced by the overriding symbolism of the
Ñòðàíèöû: < ïðåäûäóùàÿ ñëåäóþùàÿ >1 2 3 4 Ñìîòðåòü âñå