The Great Gatsby

“I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the war center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man.”

Nick frames his decision to move to New York as a consequence of having fought in the war. This may reflect some of Fitzgerald’s broader attitudes toward the Roaring Twenties. For example, many soldiers saw the brutality of World War I as having effectively annihilated the old Victorian morals of the 19th century, leading to the hedonism of the Jazz Age.

“‘Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.’ Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’”

Daisy’s corruption is made clear the moment she is introduced in the novel. “Scorn” contradicts the usual connotations of “sophisticated,” suggesting that Daisy is frustrated or trapped by her high position and its expectations. The shallowness of her lifestyle and marriage is reinforced by her husband abandoning her as little as an hour after their child is born. Daisy herself is the “beautiful little fool,” a model high society woman to both Gatsby and Tom.

“I decided to call to [Gatsby]. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

The first time Nick encounters Gatsby is in a moment of extreme vulnerability. Nick acts as the voyeur as Gatsby tries to symbolically embrace the light that is impossibly far away. The “unquiet darkness” suggests a sense of foreboding around the green light and what it represents, foreshadowing Gatsby’s downfall as he pursues Daisy.

“The fact that [Tom had a mistress] was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew.”

Tom’s infidelity is an open secret, one he delights in sharing so much that he annoys his friends. His mistress is a social good to flaunt to indicate his wealth and social position. His willingness to show off his infidelity while being furious about Daisy’s affair with the “nobody” Gatsby later in the novel is an indictment of The Illusion of the American Dream, as the rich use extramarital affairs as social credit.

“I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.”

Gatsby’s house shares his attributes as a person and reflects his internal state. Gatsby does not truly know any of the people who visit him, indicating the extreme isolation brought about by pursuing the American dream. Gatsby, like his home, is treated by others as an “amusement park”—a commercial space for entertainment with no deeper meaning like a home or person usually has.

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

Nick describes the awe he feels at seeing Gatsby for the first time. The notion that Gatsby reflects what an individual wants to see plays into the character’s ability to epitomize the American dream. To Fitzgerald, the American dream in the 1920s is entirely aspirational and therefore an illusion—a mere projection of an individual’s needs, insecurities, and jealousies.

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

Spoken by Nick Carraway, this quote provides more support for the character’s suitability as a narrator. He brings an unbiased, almost journalistic eye to the narrative, bringing readers the unvarnished truth. This is perhaps ironic, given that those same qualities make it easy for morally repugnant individuals to share their secrets with him—secrets which he then shares with the reader.

“Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.”

This quote refers to the differences between Nick’s lover—Jordan—and Daisy. Gatsby and Tom both view Daisy as more of a fantasy than a real person, albeit for different reasons and in different formulations. Nick, on the other hand, has no such illusions about Jordan. While this realistic approach may come at the sacrifice of passion, it does allow Nick to escape the potential ruin that Gatsby and George face because of their love for a woman.

“He saw me looking with admiration at his car. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport?’ He jumped off to give me a better view. ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’ I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream colour, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.”

Flashy cars, like big homes, are classic symbols of the American dream. “Swollen,” “monstrous,” and “labyrinth” all give the impression of a machine that is larger than life and potentially dangerous. That this height of luxury and the American dream becomes a tool of murder later in the novel is highly ironic and helps build the text’s pessimism towards consumerism.

“‘Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.’ Gatsby hesitated, then added, coolly: ‘He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.’ […]

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

‘How did he happen to do that?’ I asked after a minute.

‘He just saw the opportunity.’

‘Why isn’t he in jail?’

‘They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.’”

Wolfshiem is a fictionalized version of Arnold Rothstein, a crime boss who rigged the real-world 1919 World Series. Much like Tom’s infidelity, Wolfshiem’s amoral (and illegal) behavior is an ill-kept secret. Fitzgerald uses numbers—“one man” compared to “fifty million”—to emphasize the extreme power of the wealthy. Gatsby’s use of “just” makes Wolfshiem’s actions seem quotidian in the world of the rich.

“There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the ‘period’ craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

Nick references Immanuel Kant, a German Enlightenment philosopher known for his explorations of ethics and aesthetics. Kant is said to have spent his time staring at a church’s steeple through his window as he worked through his ideas. Nick’s juxtaposition of serfs to peasantry in the last line suggests that Americans abhor appearing poor and indebted to another person—regardless of whether they actually are. Gatsby’s “enormous house” and its founder suggest that the American dream is ultimately an obsession with illusory aesthetics.

“‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby [to Daisy]. ‘You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

Now that Gatsby has begun an affair with Daisy, the green light on the dock has lost all significance. Nick presents this as a loss of wonder, as Gatsby has lost an “enchanted object.” The reality of the affair is less lofty than Gatsby’s passion for something far away across the water. The diminishment of wonder in Gatsby’s life foreshadows his impending disillusionment as the affair crumbles later in the novel.

“His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

Fitzgerald frequently toys with the idea throughout the novel that abstract ideals are better than the realities they produce. The Greek philosopher Plato believed that a realm of ideas existed where perfect versions, or “Platonic ideals” of each object existed; the versions or copies of those objects here on Earth were lesser versions of their perfect selves. While Gatsby illustrates the extreme Capacity to Reinvent One’s Identity within the novel, his frequent association with ideals shows that “Gatsby” is less a real person than an ideal of the American dream.

“‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see.’ He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.”

Gatsby’s tragic flaw is that he believes he can re-do the past with enough wealth and extravagance. Gatsby believes in The Capacity to Reinvent One’s Identity so much that he thinks he can undo the past five years of his and Daisy’s separate lives. As is typical with tragic heroes, this flaw leads to Gatsby’s death.

“Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

Nick seems to lament his own lack of sentimentality. He gestures at his own lapsed passions as if they exist solely in the past. While Nick’s lack of passion allows him to avoid personal ruin at the end of the novel, it also suggests a profound emptiness, the source of which is never clearly identified.

“It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away.”

Gatsby’s home is an extension of him. The lack of lights and his usual weekend party indicates his crumbling mental state. This change in the status quo marks the beginning of Chapter 7 and the start of the last third of the novel, building tension for the climactic confrontation at the end of the chapter. Trimalchio is a new-money party host from the first century work of Roman fiction, Satyricon. Like Gatsby, Trimalchio throws incredibly lavish parties to ingratiate himself into old-money society. A working title for The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio in West Egg.

“In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar—it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.”

Nick is often a voyeur of other characters’ most vulnerable moments, often when they don’t realize they are being watched. This vantage point allows him to see through the veneers of the respectable high society around him, much like when Nick first sees Gatsby watching the green light. While Tom treats Myrtle like a trophy to indicate his success as a man, Myrtle feels “jealous terror” towards Tom’s wife. Myrtle’s private emotional wounds suggest the damage caused by Love and Relationships in a Culture Defined by Wealth and Hedonism.

“‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. […] Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

After the extremely hot day and the climactic confrontation between Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby, Nick finds himself ruminating on aging and the finite nature of time. Nick’s grim prospects suggest that his society is not fulfilling the needs of anybody, regardless of wealth, as he has loneliness and hair loss to look forward to. This contemplation of death and mortality parallels the “cooling twilight,” a symbol for the falling action of the novel.

“They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”

For all their toxicity and dysfunction, Daisy and Tom are the only lovers who make it out of this story intact. A cynical view would suggest that in the wealth-obsessed era of the Roaring Twenties, the pair’s aristocratic emphasis on socioeconomic status is a more powerful binding force than true love. Moreover, the use of the term “conspiring” suggests that while Daisy and Tom did not intentionally collude to ruin and ultimately end the lives of Gatsby, Myrtle, and George, their selfish actions when taken in concert all precipitated that result.

“His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions, and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches—once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere, and the rooms were musty, as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table, with two stale, dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room, we sat smoking out into the darkness.”

The last time Nick sees Gatsby alive, Gatsby’s house has become too big to navigate and is falling into disuse. The enormity of the house and the signs of death and disuse indicate Gatsby’s imminent death. The house, no longer a party venue, seemingly has no use, much like Gatsby who is losing his purpose in life now that his fantasies of running away with Daisy have been dashed.

“Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night. ‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson. ‘That's an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him.”

The eyes of T. J. Eckleburg symbolize different things for different people. For Nick, they represent the economic decay of the valley of ashes. Yet George takes a more spiritual interpretation, imbuing the eyes with symbolic import that transform them into the eyes of God. As Michaelis’s nonchalant reply illustrates, symbols may only contain meaning when individuals invest meaning into them.

“No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

Fitzgerald uses foreboding language (grotesque, unfamiliar, ghosts, frightening, etc.) to show the moment of Gatsby's disillusionment with the American dream and resignation to his fate. The contradiction of "material without being real" suggests the instability Gatsby's identity, as he built the persona of Jay Gatsby around pursuing the American dream and obtaining his ideal high-society woman. George, approaching to kill Gatsby, is made into a supernatural figure. The surrealness of Gatsby's death and the fearful connotations of the language used show the limits of The Capacity to Reinvent Oneself.

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, 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.”

Ultimately, Tom and Daisy’s greatest sin is their carelessness. This total disregard for morality is even more objectionable to Nick than the willful immorality of Jordan. It lacks self-awareness because it doesn't need self awareness; they can simply throw money at any problem, like when they buy a new house because they don’t want to be made uncomfortable by Gatsby’s funeral.