Annotation #4

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

    Prior to this reading, my only exposure to Fitzgerald had been sometime in high school, probably with Tender is the Night or The Last Tycoon, and all I can remember is a distaste for having to read about the lives of the rich and shameless in the "Roaring Twenties." It's a fascinating time in history, but the illicit affairs of upper-class twits really didn't jibe with my interests, then or now. However, having become a close reader now, it's plain to me that Fitzgerald's Gatsby is a more complex work than my adolescent mind had thought.

     Before starting, I couldn't help but catch some of the blurbs about the book, on its cover and on the internet, and I must say they were quite useless to me. The book goes much deeper than the simple story of class conflict and greed that it is made out to be. (If that's all there were to the novel, I wouldn't have completed reading it.) When people ask me what the novel is about, I'll simply have to recommend reading it, and leave it at that, for the characters and the plot in themselves sound bland and boring. This novel's strength is its portrayal of the inner worlds of its characters.

     There are three kinds of characters in Gatsby: those that harbor no illusions (or think they don't) and live accordingly, doing as they please with no real concern for others; those that are naive and build up a fantasy world in an attempt to protect themselves; and there is Nick Carraway, the narrator, whose tendency to reserve judgment makes him the ideal storyteller, a filter through which the reader may siphon perceptions of the fictional world. Though not immediately apparent, the characters in Gatsby eventually are revealed to be terribly lonely, and their means of seeking solace only worsens their collective condition. Nick, himself a young bachelor, remarks one night in New York: "At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life" (57). The same could be said of most of the novel's characters, who in search of pleasure miss out on the simplest and best parts of life, obsessed as they are with the possessions of others, particularly others' spouses.

     Jay Gatsby, who has gained a fortune under mysterious circumstances and holds gigantic parties on his new estate, parties in which he is scarcely noticed by partygoers, is the novel's prime example of tragic loneliness. He has built his fortune and his fake past all in hopes of wooing Daisy, the girl he had briefly fallen in love with many years before, a girl he truthfully didn't know very well and who is now married to another man. He holds the parties in hopes she will one day show up, and moves among the crowd unconcerned with making their acquaintance or becoming friends. Once he uses Nick to meet her, Gatsby puts an end to the parties, and Nick begins to see what kind of fantasy drives his neighbor Gatsby:

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart (97).

Gatsby may be the lightning rod, the character who draws the rest around him to form a story, but he's not the only one to suffer from his illusions. Daisy, who has been unhappy with her husband Tom, tries to convince herself that she never once loved him. Tom has cheated on Daisy for some time, seemingly because he felt she would do it to him if she could. The list goes on. What strikes me is the moral decadence running through the novel, the way it could apply to anyone, of any class. The rich do not have a monopoly on callousness.

Fitzgerald's choice of first-person narration is a logical one, since the world he portrays is an exclusive one and needs to be seen from a relative outsider's perspective. For the most part, Nick's narration moves along smoothly, guiding the reader on a journey unbroken by shifts in attention from one subject to another. However, there are several significant points in the novel that involve pulling the reader from the fictional dream and drawing attention to the author at work. As is with the entire work, Fitzgerald handles this skillfully, and its effect is pronounced from its seldom being used, but I wonder if these instances are necessary. The following instance of Nick reminding us that this is a memoir of sorts feels out of place; the point could have been made without interrupting the fictional dream:

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of the three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs (56).

On another occasion, Fitzgerald gives unnecessary explanation of Gatsby's phony story:

'After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.'
With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned 'character' leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne (66).

That Gatsby's story seems trite and false should be apparent from Gatsby's own style of storytelling. This is one of Fitzgerald's gaffes, albeit one of few. Perhaps it was so noticeable to me because of the rarity of these kinds of mistakes in the book.

The point of view stays firmly planted with Nick's narration, so rather than take us into their heads, Fitzgerald gives his characters personality through their actions and primarily through their dialogue, as evidenced by Gatsby's affected, nouveau-riche way of addressing Nick, calling him "old sport," and Nick's typically non-committal evasions. Fitzgerald aims squarely for the realistic approach, not delving into his characters' minds, except for the narration from an older, wiser Nick. And nothing remotely magical, mystical, or fantastic happens in the course of the story. That is, if you can believe in towns named East and West Egg.

I think I am about ready to stop even trying to look at works in terms of realism, or magic realism, or whatever literary terms strikes me. There is so much more to be taken from fiction than simple classification. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald takes foolish, namby-pamby lives and renders them poignantly, in his own fictional style. From this point, ordinary literary terms be damned. What drives me most is to dig deep and find what it is about particular novels that fascinates me, and to find out how the authors have gone about it. Nothing more. Gatsby may be steeped in what interested Fitzgerald--lifestyles of the rich and shameless--but it's a very human drama, one of illusory goals and existential loneliness. Let's see high school English teachers explain that to their students.

All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.

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