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" (TGG 50).
After
the war the American Economy went into a slight recession that was followed by
an era of almost uninterrupted prosperity culminating with the stock market
crash of 1929. For Fitzgerald Jazz Age began in 1918 and ended in 1929—dates he
would later personalize; his flapper comes into being at the age of eighteen,
and the illusions of youth fade at 29. Even in The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, these dates take on a kind of
prescient significance: Gatsby and Daisy consummate their love when she is
eighteen, and Nick turns thirty the day Gatsby's dream dies.
The
1920s seen through the prism of Fitzgerald's fiction becomes a strange
distillation of unlimited wonder and opportunity foundering on human excess and
waste, a heightened and yet insubstantial carnivalesque emptiness; indeed the
twenties may in many ways be thought of as Gatsby's America.
There
is a moment in any real authors career when he suddenly becomes capable of doing
his best work. He has found a fable that express his central truth and
everything falls into place around it, so that his whole experience of life is
available for use in his fiction. Something like that happened to Fitzgerald
when he invented the story of Jimmy Gatz, otherwise known as Jay Gatsby, and it
explains the amazing richness and scope of a very short novel.
To
put facts on record, The Great Gatsby
is a book of about fifty thousand words, a small structure build to nine
chapters like big blocks. The fifth chapter—Gatsby's meeting with Daisy
Buchanan—is the center of the narrative, as is proper; the seventh chapter is
the climax. Each chapter consists of one or more dramatic scenes, sometimes
with intervening passages of straight narration. The scenic method is one that
Fitzgerald probably learnt from Edith Wharton, who in turn learnt from Henry
James; at any rate the book is technically in the Jamesian tradition.
Part
of the tradition is the device of having the story told by a single observer,
who stands somewhat apart from the action and whose vision "frames"
it for the reader. In this case the observer plays the special role.
Although Nick Carraway doesn't save or ruin Gatsby, his personality in itself
provides an essential comment on all the other characters. Nick stands for the
older values that prevailed in the middle west before the first world war. His
family is not tremendously rich, like the Buchanan's, but it has a long
established and sufficient fortune, so that Nick is the only person in the book
who hasn't been corrupted by seeking or spending money. He is so certain of his
values that he hesitates to criticize others, but when he does pass
judgement—on Gatsby, on Jordan Baker, on the Buchanan's—he speaks as if for
ages to come.
All
the other characters belong to their own brief era of confused and dissolving
standards, but they are effected by the era in different fashions. "Each
of them, we note on reading the book a second time, represents some particular
variety of moral failure" (Cowley XIX). Lionel Trilling says that they are
"treated as if they were ideographs". Tom Buchanan is wealth
brutalized by selfishness and arrogance; he looks for a mistress in the valley
of ashes and finds an arrogant women, Myrtle Wilson, whose raw vitality is like
his own. Daisy Buchanan is the spirit of wealth and offers a continual promise
"that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there
were gay, exciting thing hovering in the next hour" (TGG 18); but it is a false promise, since at heart she is as
self-centered as Tom and even colder. Jordan Baker apparently lives by the old
standards, but she uses them only as a subterfuge.
All
these, except Myrtle Wilson, are East Egg people, that is they are part of a
community where wealth takes the form of solid possessions. Set against them
are the West Egg people, whose wealth is fluid income that might cease
overnight. The West Egg people, with Gatsby as their archetype and tragic hero,
have worked furiously to rise in the world, but they will never reach East Egg
for all the money they spend; at most they can sit at the waters edge and look
across the bay at the green light that shines and promises at the end of the
Buchanan's dock. The symbolism of place has a great part in Fitzgerald's novel,
as has that of motor cars. The characters are visibly represented by the cars
they drive: Nick has a conservative old Dodge, the Buchanan's, too rich for
ostentation, have an "easy-going blue coupe" while Gatsby's car is
"a rich cream colour, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its
monstrous length with triumphant hat boxes and super-boxes and tool-boxes, and
terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns" (TGG 63-64). A description of an
expensive and fashionable 1920s car could represent not only Gatsby's vehicle,
which plays a key role in the plot of the novel, but also the materialistic
values of American society, which held such objects in high esteem. When Daisy
drives through the valley of ashes in Gatsby's car, she causes two deaths that
end the story.
There
is probably no writer who is more identified with a decade than Fitzgerald is
identified with the 1920s. His short stories defined the flapper and the new
morality, and his novels caught the essence of the historical moment. While The Great Gatsby suggests rather than
develops the era of the twenties, it does evoke the haunting mood of a
glamorous, wild time that seemingly will
never come again. Richard Lehan writes about the subject of The Great Gatsby:
The loss of
an ideal, the disillusionment that comes with the failure to compromise, the
efforts of run away prosperity and wild parties, the fear of the intangibility
of that moment, the built-in resentment against the new immigration, the fear
of new radical element, the latent racism behind half-backed historical
theories, the effect of prohibition, the rise of 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 (Lehan 2).
Fitzgerald
described the Jazz Age, in his "Echoes of the Jazz Age", as an age of
miracles, an age of art, an age of excess and an age of Satire (qtd. in Bush
171). Fitzgerald's use of the term satire in his comment on the Jazz Age draws
attention to what is clearly part of his intention in The Great Gatsby—to subject the value of the society in which he
lived. His intention in writing the novel was to draw attention to the defects
of society as he perceived them.
Since
the Fitzgeralds' lived a life not very far removed from those of his
characters, Fitzgerald himself felt well qualified to explore the theme of
wealth and its effect. In his brief career Fitzgerald tested in imaginative
terms the occupations of gilded youth, of the impressively rich, of the
socially elite, and found them "sterile" (Quinn 889). Although in
terms of biographical detail Fitzgerald resembles Gatsby less than the heroes
of his earlier novels, there is a strong sense of identification with him, both
as the romantic idealist and for the difficulties Gatsby faced as a penniless
young man who wanted to be successful. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. "That was
always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town, a poor boy in a rich boy's
school, a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. I have never been able to
forgive the rich for being rich and it has coloured my entire life and work. This
theme comes again and again because I lived it" (qtd. in Bush 171). In
writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
also wanted to break new ground as a writer and an artist. He wished to produce
"something new–something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and
intricately patterned" (171).
The Great Gatsby asserts the value of
human order in defiance of all which defeats it. My effort in this study has
been to expose the defects of the society which Fitzgerald has presented in the
novel. Fitzgerald's world in The Great
Gatsby is loveless, commercial, mechanized, and immoral in many respects.
What Fitzgerald wants is moral world with traditional values which he implies
in the person of Nick Carraway. So I have analyzed Nick Carraway's retreat to
the West in the final unit of textual analysis.
