The Great Gatsby

           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.