The Great Gatsby
It’s difficult to write on a book that’s been elevated as highly as The Great Gatsby. So much has been said, by so many people that to move in the direction of exploring a greater, newer meaning would be akin to Gatsby pursuing Daisy Buchanan— an unrealistic goal, a delusion. Gatsby will never have Daisy. I will never have a unique view of the novel.
To that end, I pursue a basic thesis: Fitzgerald manifests the hopes and dreams of his primary characters to demonstrate the consequences of an unceasing individual focus on realizing them.
For Gatsby, the dream is Daisy. Gatsby was infected with the concept of Daisy when he was a young man and he’s wanted her—or perhaps the infinite hope she represented—ever since. The mansion, vehicles, and parties have become an outlet for “the colossal vitality” of Gatsby’s illusion— if only Daisy would notice them, she would be his again. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan.
Tom is a peremptory alpha male. Fitzgerald describes him as having “two shining, arrogant eyes” that “gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward… his speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor” contained a touch of “paternal contempt in it.” Fitzgerald includes a passage where he “compels” someone from a room “as though he were moving a checker to another square.”
The stage is set for a duel between Tom and Gatsby. Gatsby believes he can pry Daisy from Tom’s clutches by turning the clock back and resurrecting the past to “just the way it was before.” Meanwhile, to lose Daisy would be an affront to Tom’s vise-grip over the world that he has labored to maintain.
The consequences of the clash between Gatsby and Tom shed light on the destructive consequences of undertaking excessive means to realize one’s self-inflicted expectations. As the lies compound and the body count mounts, Fitzgerald conveys to the reader that the seeds of dishonesty, malconduct, and injustice find cozy quarters among the crystalline structures of our delusions.
If we assume Fitzgerald’s voice mirrors that of Nick Carraway, the narrator, he condemns the culture of consumption central to “Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
When it comes to Gatsby, Fitzgerald displays a greater degree of sympathy as he makes a note about Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” The dream of reviving a lost love is nothing sinister, it’s romanticism at it’s finest. It’s the culture, the “foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams” that Fitzgerald condemns for Gatsby’s demise. The opulent wealth and empty materialism created a culture whereby strength of character and “internal wealth” became insignificant currency in the market for social vows. He fashions an allegorical scene to better explain the inhuman dynamic of the East:
I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
Only Nick comes to terms with the consequences of the commodification of human worth. He grows and comes to understand the disingenuousness of undertaking pernicious behavior for the “short-winded elations of man.” He remarks, “I’m thirty… I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” The ability to wonder and hope dies a slow death when focus turns from the majestic gift of life, but to the jewels one wears, or perhaps the daisies they carry.