BARRON'S BOOK NOTES (tm) on CD-ROM Windows (tm) Ver. 2.

0
Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
---------------------------------------------------------
1925

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S
THE GREAT GATSBY

by Anthony S. Abbott
Professor of English
Davidson College

SERIES EDITOR
Michael Spring, Editor,
Literary Cavalcade, Scholastic Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the many painstaking hours of work Holly
Hughes
and Thomas F. Hirsch have devoted to making the Book Notes series a
success.

(C) Copyright 1984 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc.

Electronically Enhanced Text (C) Copyright 1993, World Library, Inc.

CONTENTS
CONTENTS
SECTION.......................... SEARCH ON

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES................. FGREAUTH

THE NOVEL
The Plot................................. FGREPLOT
The Characters........................... FGRECHAR
Other Elements
Setting............................. FGRESETT
Themes.............................. FGRETHEM
Style............................... FGRESTYL
Point of View....................... FGREVIEW
Form and Structure.................. FGREFORM
THE STORY................................ FGRESTOR

A STEP BEYOND
Tests and Answers........................ FGRETEST
Term Paper Ideas......................... FGRETERM
Glossary................................. FGREGLOS
The Critics.............................. FGRECRIT

Advisory Board........................... FGREADVB

Bibliography............................. FGREBIBL

AUTHOR_AND_HIS_TIMES
THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES (FGREAUTH)
-
Have you ever felt that there were two of you battling for control
of the person you call yourself? Have you ever felt that you weren't
quite sure which one you wanted to be in charge? All of us have at
least two selves: one who wants to work hard, get good grades, and
be successful; and one who would rather lie in the sun and listen to
music and daydream. To understand F. Scott Fitzgerald, the man and the
writer, you must begin with the idea of doubleness, or twoness.
Fitzgerald himself said in a famous series of essays called The
Crack Up, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still
retain the ability to function." Everything about Fitzgerald is
touched by this idea. For example, he both loved and hated money. He
was attracted to the life of the very rich as an outsider who had very
little, and at the same time he hated the falseness and hypocrisy
and cruelty of their lives. He was disciplined, knowing that he had to
have great mental and physical self-control to succeed as a writer,
but he was often unable to exercise those very qualities he knew he
would need in order to succeed. He loved his wife Zelda more than
anything in his life, and yet he hated her for destroying his
talent. Part of him lived a dazzling life full of parties, gaiety, and
show; and part of him knew that this sort of life was a complete sham.
All of this doubleness Fitzgerald puts into the novel you are
about to read: The Great Gatsby. As you begin reading think about Nick
Carraway, the narrator of the novel, and Jay Gatsby, the hero of the
novel, as the two sides of Fitzgerald. Think of Fitzgerald as
putting into his two main characters both of the people that he knew
he had within him. As you read, ask yourself whether or not you have
these two people within you: Nick, the intelligent and disciplined
observer; and Gatsby, the passionate and idealistic dreamer who
wants his dream so much that he will sacrifice everything for it.
Fitzgerald himself seemed genetically destined for doubleness. His
mother's father, P. F. McQuillan, went to St. Paul, Minnesota, in
1857, at the age of twenty-three. In twenty years he built up-
literally from nothing- an enormously successful wholesale business.
He was a totally self-made man, and from him Scott inherited a sense
of self-reliance and a belief in hard work. The Fitzgeralds, on the
other hand, were an old Maryland family. Scott himself- Francis
Scott Key Fitzgerald was his full name- was named for his great,
great, great grandfather's brother, the man who wrote "The Star
Spangled Banner." And Edward Fitzgerald, Scott's father, was a
handsome, charming man, but one who seemed more interested in the
family name than in hard work.
The McQuillan and the Fitzgerald in Scott vied for control
throughout his childhood. He was a precocious child, full of energy
and imagination, but he liked to take short cuts, substituting flights
of fantasy for hard work. On his seventh birthday in 1903 he told a
number of the older guests that he was the owner of a yacht (perhaps
the seeds of Gatsby's admiration for Dan Cody's yacht in the novel).
As an adolescent he loved to play theatrical games- pretending to be
drunk on a streetcar or telephoning an artificial limb company to
discuss being fitted for a false limb. He was an excellent writer
and a vivid satirist of his classmates, but his marks were not good;
so, like so many Midwestern boys, he was shipped East to boarding
school, where he would be taught discipline and hard work.
In September of 1911, with the words and music of Irving Berlin's
new song "Alexander's Ragtime Band" uppermost on his mind, he enrolled
at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, a popular Roman
Catholic school among Midwestern families. Here he was to have two
years to ready himself for a good Ivy League College, preferably
Princeton or Yale. Scott chose Princeton, but Princeton very nearly
didn't choose him.
The doubleness in Scott is beautifully illustrated by the way in
which he maneuvered himself into Princeton. An avid writer and reader,
Fitzgerald tended to read what he liked and ignore his school work,
and therefore he failed his entrance exams during his senior year.
After a "summer of study," he took them again and failed them again.
Finally on September 24, 1913, his seventeenth birthday, he appeared
before the Admissions Committee and convinced them to accept him.
Personal magnetism was able to achieve what hard work had not.
One of the things Scott inherited from his Grandfather McQuillan was
ambition. Scott was a fierce competitor, and if he wanted something
badly enough he could work like a demon. What Scott wanted were
women and popularity, and the way to win women and be popular, he
had learned at Newman, was with money, good looks, and athletics. He
didn't have the first, but he had the second, and he worked very, very
hard at the third by trying out for freshman football. His problem was
that he was only 5' 6" and weighed only 130 pounds, which doesn't
get one very far in football. So he scrapped the football pads and
found another outlet for his energy and his ambition: writing
musical comedies. One of the most prestigious organizations at
Princeton was and still is the Triangle Club, a group that writes
and produces a musical comedy every year. (Among its graduates are the
actors Jimmy Stewart and Jose Ferrer.)
Fitzgerald devoted most of his energies at Princeton to the Triangle
Show, writing the book and lyrics in his freshman year and the
lyrics in his sophomore year. He was elected secretary of the club,
and was in line to become its president- something he wanted more than
anything in his life. But it was not to be. In December of 1915, the
fall of his junior year, he was sent home with malaria. He was told
when he returned in March that he would have to fall back a year and
that he was academically ineligible for the Triangle presidency. In
the spring of 1917 his class graduated, and Scott was left behind to
complete his senior year. He never did; instead, he enlisted in the
army.
Why? Perhaps because he wanted to be a hero, and the United States
was about to make the world safe for democracy. Perhaps because
college was no fun anymore. Perhaps because beautiful women love young
men in uniform. Whatever the reason, Fitzgerald left Princeton in
November and found himself in the summer of 1918 stationed at Camp
Sheridan, outside Montgomery, Alabama. Here 2nd Lieutenant Scott
Fitzgerald met Miss Zelda Sayre, who was to become his wife and the
single most important influence on his life. Zelda was seventeen,
and a combination of tomboy and Southern belle. She was used to having
her own way with her traditional parents, and she very much enjoyed
being courted by the officers from Camp Sheridan, just as Daisy in The
Great Gatsby is courted by the young officers at Camp Taylor.
It was love at first sight. Just as Jay Gatsby, an outsider with
no money and no respectable family, falls utterly in love with Daisy
Fay, so the Midwestern outsider Scott Fitzgerald fell head over
heels in love with the Montgomery belle Zelda Sayre. He loved her
beauty, her daring, her originality. He loved her crazy, romantic
streak which matched his own. He proposed to her, and she turned him
down. Like Jay Gatsby, he was too young and he had no money, and she
could not be sure he would ever amount to anything.
So he went off to war but, unlike Gatsby, he never got to Europe. By
the time his regiment had been sent overseas, the Armistice had been
signed and his dreams of military glory had to be set aside with the
football pads and the presidency of the Triangle Club. But Scott was
determined to be famous, and in March of 1919- this time like Nick
Carraway- he went to New York to learn his trade. Scott's trade was
writing and he had written, during his long, lonely months in the
army, a novel about life at boarding school and at Princeton. But no
one would publish it and Zelda, who had finally promised to marry him,
changed her mind. In what he called his "long summer of despair," he
went home to St. Paul, rewrote his novel, and submitted it to
Charles Scribner's Sons. Maxwell Perkins, a young editor who was to
become Fitzgerald's friend and supporter for life, accepted the
book. In March of 1920, Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of
Paradise, was published.
This Side of Paradise made Fitzgerald famous. It also made Zelda
change her mind again. On April 3, 1920, in the Rectory of St.
Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, they were married. Within two
years they became the most notorious young couple in America,
symbolizing what Fitzgerald called The Jazz Age.
The Jazz Age began, Fitzgerald tells us in his short story, "May
Day," in May of 1918. It ended with the stock market crash of 1929.
The Jazz Age brought about one of the most rapid and pervasive changes
in manners and morals the world has ever seen, changes that we are
still wrestling with today. It was a period when the younger
generation- men and women alike- were rebelling against the values and
customs of their parents and grandparents. After all, the older
generation had led thousands of young men into the most brutal and
senseless war in human history. People of Fitzgerald's age had seen
death, and when they came back, they were determined to have a good
time. "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, now that they've
seen Paree" was one of the most popular songs of the day.
And have a good time they did. The saxophone replaced the violin;
skirt hemlines went up; corsets came off; women started smoking; and
Prohibition, which was supposed to stop drinking, only reshaped it
into secret fun. The public saloon, now illegal, was replaced by the
private cocktail party, and men and women began drinking together.
Parties like the ones given by Gatsby began to thrive, and hoodlums
became millionaires in a few months by controlling the bootleg
liquor business.
Scott and Zelda not only chronicled the age, they lived it. They
rode down Fifth Avenue on the tops of taxis; they dove into the
fountain in front of New York's famous Plaza Hotel. Scott fought
with waiters, and Zelda danced on tabletops. They drank too much and
passed out in corners; they drove recklessly and gave weekend parties,
which were not too different from the ones Gatsby gives in the novel
and which lasted until the small hours of Monday morning.
In the midst of all this, Fitzgerald tried to write. Part of him
believed in work and tried repeatedly to discipline himself, to go "on
the wagon," to give up parties.
Many years later in a beautiful letter to his daughter Scottie, he
talked about the tension of those years: "When I was your age I
lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned to speak of
it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I
decided to marry your mother... I was a man divided- she wanted me
to work too much for her and not enough for my dream."
The dream, of course, was his dream of being a great writer. This
Side of Paradise had made him famous because it was the first novel
that honestly described the life-style of the new generation, but
his work during the first three years of his marriage was not nearly
what he knew it could have been, and so in 1923 he set out to write
a book that he could be proud of. In July 1923, Zelda wrote a
friend: "Scott has started a new novel and retired into strict
seclusion and celibacy." The new novel of course was The Great Gatsby,
and the ten months he devoted to that novel was artistically the
most disciplined ten months of his life. The novel was published in
the spring of 1925. Though sales were disappointing, the criticism was
very positive. Great writers like the novelist Edith Wharton and the
poet T. S. Eliot wrote Fitzgerald letters of congratulations. And
Gertrude Stein, who called Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway members
of a "lost generation," gave great praise to the book. Hemingway
himself, a new friend of Fitzgerald's in 1925, loved The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald was never again to reach the success of Gatsby. Until
1925 the Nick Carraway in him had sustained him enough to keep him
writing well, but just as Gatsby's love for Daisy drove him to
tragedy, so Fitzgerald's love for Zelda occupied more and more of
his time. To maintain the social style she loved, he wrote stories for
the popular magazines of the time, like Cosmopolitan, Smart Set, and
the Saturday Evening Post. Maintaining a dizzying social life,
Scott, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie moved from New York City to
Great Neck, Long Island (the model for West Egg in Gatsby), eventually
on to Paris and the Riviera, and finally back to the United States. He
could not finish another novel, and he could not make Zelda happy. She
became more and more depressed, and finally in April 1930, Zelda had a
complete breakdown and had to be hospitalized.
The great stock market crash of 1929 had ended America's decade of
prosperity, and Zelda's breakdown in 1930 ended the Fitzgerald's
decade as the symbol of The Jazz Age. The party was over.
From 1930 until his death in Hollywood in 1940, Scott struggled to
regain the stature he had earned with The Great Gatsby, but he never
could. He wrote Tender is the Night, which is a beautiful novel,
during the early '30s, but when the book was published in 1934,
America was not interested in a story about rich Americans partying on
the French Riviera. This was the Depression, and the novelists in
demand were Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck, writers who talked
about the plight of poor people. Scott continued to care for Zelda,
who was to spend the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums. He
also kept writing. But during 1935 and 1936 he had his own
breakdown, which he recorded brilliantly in the series of essays for
Esquire called "The Crack Up."
Desperate for money, he took a job as a script writer for M-G-M in
1937, where he worked on and off for the next two years. With the
support of his friend the columnist Sheilah Graham, in 1939 he began a
new novel. Called The Last Tycoon, this book was based on the career
of the legendary Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg, whom Fitzgerald
greatly admired. But Fitzgerald's years of dissipation caught up
with him, and he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. Even
unfinished, The Last Tycoon is a fine novel, almost as good as Gatsby.
But for a long time the world didn't know that. At the time of his
death all of Fitzgerald's books were out of print. Scott who? Oh, that
guy that used to write about the '20s.
Well, he was much more than that, and during the 1950s and 1960s
people started reading Scott Fitzgerald again. Today he is
considered one of America's great novelists. The Great Gatsby, along
with The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, has become a book we
can't do without if we want to understand ourselves. Fitzgerald asks
us to read this book with that same double vision with which he
wrote it. He asks us to participate emotionally in the lives of its
characters, especially Gatsby. And he asks us to stand back from
them as Nick does and see what is wrong with them. He asks us to
love and to evaluate at the same time, perhaps in the say way that
Nick both loves and criticizes Gatsby.

THE_PLOT
THE NOVEL
-
THE PLOT (FGREPLOT)
-
Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a young Midwesterner who, having
graduated from Yale in 1915 and fought in World War I ("The Great
War"), has returned home to begin a career. Like others in his
generation, he is restless and has decided to move East to New York
and learn the bond business. The novel opens early in the summer of
1922 in West Egg, Long Island, where Nick has rented a house. Next
to his place is a huge mansion complete with Gothic tower and marble
swimming pool, which belongs to a Mr. Gatsby, whom Nick has not met.
Directly across the bay from West Egg is the more fashionable
community of East Egg, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan live. Daisy is
Nick's cousin and Tom, a well-known football player at Yale, had
been in the same senior society as Nick in New Haven. Like Nick,
they are Midwesterners who have come East to be a part of the
glamour and mystery of the New York City area. They invite Nick to
dinner at their mansion, and here he meets a young woman golfer
named Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy's from Louisville, whom Daisy
wants Nick to become interested in.
During dinner the phone rings, and when Tom and Daisy leave the
room, Jordan informs Nick that the caller is a "woman of Tom's from
New York."
The woman's name is Myrtle Wilson, and she lives in a strange,
fantastic place half way between West Egg and New York City that
Fitzgerald calls the "valley of ashes." The valley of ashes consists
of huge ash heaps and a faded yellow brick building containing an
all-night restaurant and George Wilson's garage. Painted on a large
billboard nearby is a fading advertisement for an optician: the eyes
of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, gazing out over this wasteland through a
pair of enormous yellow spectacles.
One day Tom takes Nick to meet the Wilsons. Myrtle joins them on the
next train to Manhattan, and the threesome ends up, along with a dog
Myrtle buys at Pennsylvania Station, at the apartment Tom has rented
for his meetings with Myrtle. Myrtle's sister Catherine and an
unattractive couple from downstairs named McKee join them, and the six
proceed to get quite drunk. The party breaks up violently when
Myrtle starts using Daisy's name in a familiar fashion and Tom, in
response, breaks her nose with a blow of his open hand.
Some weeks later Nick finally gets the opportunity to meet his
mysterious neighbor Mr. Gatsby. Gatsby gives huge parties, complete
with catered food, open bars, and orchestras. People come from
everywhere to attend these parties, but no one seems to know much
about the host. Legends about Jay Gatsby abound. Some say he was a
German spy during the war, others, that he once killed a man. Nick
becomes fascinated by Gatsby. He begins watching his host and
notices that Gatsby does not drink or join in the revelry of his own
parties.
One day Gatsby and Nick drive to New York together. Gatsby tells
Nick that he's from a wealthy family in the Midwest, that he was
educated at Oxford, and that he won war medals from many European
countries. Nick isn't sure what to believe. At lunch Gatsby introduces
Nick to his business associate, Meyer Wolfsheim, "the man who fixed
the World Series in 1919."
At tea that afternoon Nick finds out from Jordan Baker why Gatsby
has taken such an interest in him: Gatsby is in love with Daisy
Buchanan and wants Nick to arrange a meeting between them. It seems
that Gatsby, as a young officer at Camp Taylor in 1917, had fallen
in love with Daisy, then Daisy Fay. He had been sent overseas, and she
had eventually given him up, married Tom Buchanan, and had a daughter.
When Gatsby finally returned from Europe he decided to win Daisy back.
His first step was to buy a house in West Egg. From here he could look
across the bay to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He
expected her to turn up at one of his parties, and when she didn't, he
asked Jordan to ask Nick to ask Daisy. And so Nick does.
A few days later, in the rain, Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first
time in five years. Gatsby is at first terrified, then tremendously
excited. He takes Nick and Daisy on a tour of his house and grounds
and shows them all his possessions, even his beautiful shirts from
England. He shows Daisy the green light that he has been watching, and
he insists that Klipspringer, "the boarder," play the piano for
them. Klipspringer plays "Ain't We Got Fun," and Nick leaves.
Now, halfway through the book, Nick gives us some information
about who Gatsby really is. He was originally James Gatz, the son of
farm people from North Dakota. He had gone to St. Olaf College in
Minnesota, dropped out because the college failed to promote his
romantic dreams about himself, and ended up on the south shore of Lake
Superior earning room and board by digging clams and fishing for
salmon. One day he saw the beautiful yacht of the millionaire Dan Cody
and borrowed a rowboat to warn Cody of an impending storm. Cody took
the seventeen-year-old boy on as steward, mate, and secretary. When
Cody died, he left the boy, now Jay Gatsby, a legacy of $25,000, which
the boy never got because of the jealousy of Cody's mistress.
The story of Gatsby's past breaks off, and Nick resumes his
narration of Gatsby's renewed courtship of Daisy during the summer
of 1929. Daisy and Tom come to one of Gatsby's parties, but Tom is put
off by the vulgarity of Gatsby's world, and Daisy does not have a good
time. Though Gatsby has been seeing Daisy, he's increasingly
frustrated by his inability to recreate the magic of their time
together in Louisville five years before.
The affair between Daisy and Gatsby now comes out into the open.
Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, Nick, and Jordan- the five major characters- all
meet for lunch at the Buchanans and then decide to drive to New
York. Daisy and Gatsby end up going together in the Buchanans' blue
coupe, Tom, Nick, and Jordan drive in Gatsby's yellow Rolls Royce. The
couple stop for gas at Wilson's garage, and Myrtle Wilson, watching
from her window over the garage, thinks the car belongs to Tom.
The five arrive in the city and engage the parlor of a suite at
the Plaza Hotel. Tom, drunk and agitated by now, starts ragging Gatsby
about his past and attacking him for his phony English habit of
calling people "old sport." Gatsby retaliates by telling Tom that
Daisy is going to leave him. Tom calls Gatsby a cheap bootlegger. Like
cowboys in the Old West, they duel back and forth for Daisy until
Tom wins. Daisy will not go away with Gatsby, and the five-year
dream is over. Tom sends Daisy and Gatsby home together in the
yellow Rolls Royce, knowing that he has nothing more to fear. A couple
of hours later Tom follows with Nick and Jordan. When they reach the
valley of ashes, they see crowds of people in police cars. Someone was
struck by a car coming from New York. That someone, they discover, was
Myrtle Wilson, and the car had to be Gatsby's yellow Rolls Royce. When
Nick gets back to East Egg, he finds Gatsby hiding in the shrubbery
outside the Buchanans' house, unwilling to leave for fear that Tom
might hurt Daisy. Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, but
that- of course- he will take the blame. Nick leaves Gatsby
"watching over nothing."
Nick goes to work the next morning, but is too worried about
Gatsby to stay in New York. He takes an early train back to West Egg
but arrives at Gatsby's too late. His friend's body is floating on
an inflated mattress in the swimming pool, and George Wilson's dead
body, revolver in hand, lies nearby on the grass. The crazed husband
had spent the entire morning tracking down the driver of the yellow
Rolls Royce. He found Gatsby before Nick did.
Nick tries to phone Daisy and Tom, but is told they've left town
with no forwarding address. Calls to Meyer Wolfsheim produce similar
results. Nick, it seems, is Gatsby's only friend.
News of Gatsby's murder is printed in a Chicago newspaper, where
it is read by his father, Mr. Henry C. Gatz, now of Minnesota. Mr.
Gatz arrives for the funeral, which is attended only by Nick, Owl Eyes
(who loved Gatsby's books), and a smattering of servants. Meyer
Wolfsheim, of course, has refused to get involved. Even Mr.
Klipspringer, "the boarder," has sent his excuses.
Mr. Gatz, who loves his son very much, shows Nick a book which Jimmy
owned as a boy. In the flyleaf Gatsby had written a schedule for
self improvement: exercise, study, sport, and work. How far Gatsby had
come from that dream, to this meaningless death!
Disgusted and disillusioned by what he has experienced, Nick decides
to leave New York and return to the Midwest. He ends his
relationship with Jordan Baker and learns from Tom Buchanan that it
was he, Tom, who told Wilson where Gatsby lived. Before Nick leaves
the East, he stands one more time on the beach near Gatsby's house
looking out at the green light that his friend had worshipped. Here he
pays his final tribute to Gatsby and to the dream for which he
lived- and died.

THE_CHARACTERS
THE CHARACTERS (FGRECHAR)
-
NICK CARRAWAY
Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby; he is also a
character in the novel. When you think about him, you have to think
about what Fitzgerald is using him for. You also have to look at him
as a person.
Nick, is first of all, Fitzgerald's means of making his story more
realistic. Because Nick is experiencing events and telling us about
them in his own words, we're more likely to believe the story. After a
while we almost begin to experience the events as Nick does; the I
of each of us as readers replaces the I of Nick. (For more details,
see "Point of View.")
Nick is a narrator whose values you should have no trouble
identifying or at least sympathizing with. He's not mad or blind to
what's going on around him. He's a pretty solid young man who has
graduated from Yale University, served his country in the First
World War, and decided to go into the bond business. He comes from a
solid Midwestern family, from whom he has learned some pretty basic
values. He is honest, but not Puritanical or narrow minded. He is
tolerant, understanding, and not hasty to judge people. He is the sort
of person you might talk to if you wanted a sympathetic ear. But his
toleration has limits. He doesn't approve of everything.
These are some of the qualities that make Nick a reliable
narrator, someone whose story we are likely to believe. It seems often
that his values are pretty close to those of the author.
Nick is in a perfect position to tell the story. He is a cousin of
Daisy Buchanan's, he was in the same senior society as Tom Buchanan at
Yale, and he has rented, during the summer of 1922, a house right next
to Jay Gatsby. He knows all the characters well enough to be present
at the crucial scenes in the novel. The information he doesn't have
but needs in order to tell his story, he gets from other characters
like Jordan Baker, the Greek restaurant owner Michaelis, and Gatsby
himself. Nick knows things because people confess to him, and people
confess to him because he is tolerant, understanding, and sympathetic.
Nick has that capacity, which Fitzgerald felt was so terribly
important (see The Author and His Times), of holding two contradictory
opinions at the same time. He both admires Gatsby and disapproves of
him. He admires Gatsby both because of his dream and because of his
basic innocence; and he disapproves of Gatsby for his vulgar
materialism and his corrupt business practices. (Nick does not want to
become involved with Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's underworld
"connection.")
One of the things that makes Nick special is that he understands
Gatsby. Nobody else in the novel-not even Daisy-really understands
him. Nick is, at the novel's end, Gatsby's only friend, even though he
disapproves of many things which Gatsby stands for. Almost nobody
comes to Gatsby's funeral, and if it weren't for Nick, there would
probably not even have been a funeral. Would you have gone?
Some readers think Nick is too sympathetic to Gatsby. They think
that Nick ought to be mature enough to see what is wrong with Gatsby's
dream. They feel that Nick should be more critical of Gatsby, and
force us as readers to be more critical, too. They believe that Nick
in the closing pages, is too sentimental and that his judgment is
not as reliable as we might think. There's no critical agreement on
this issue, so you'll have to make up your own minds as you read the
book.
As you're deciding about Nick's powers of judgment- particularly
in the opening and closing pages where he talks about himself- keep in
mind that Nick is a Midwesterner and his values are colored by the
values of the world in which he grew up.
Many readers have remarked that the novel is based on a contrast
between the solid, traditional, conservative Midwest and the
glamorous, glittering, fast-paced world of the East. Nick (like
Scott Fitzgerald, his creator) is from Minnesota. He comes East to
experience the new and exciting world of New York that is very
different from Minneapolis-St. Paul. At the end, he chooses to leave
the East and return to the Midwest. By that choice he seems to be
saying to us that he has tried the East and found it missing something
he needs: a basic set of values. So he goes home, where values still
exist. Think about the two worlds- the Midwest and the East and what
they represented for Nick (and by extension, Fitzgerald) and what they
might represent for you.
-
JAY GATSBY
The title of this novel is The Great Gatsby. If you like
paradoxes, start with this one: he is neither great nor Gatsby (his
real name was Gatz). He is a crook, a bootlegger who has involved
himself with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.
He has committed crimes in order to buy the house he feels he needs to
win the woman he loves, who happens to be another man's wife. Thus a
central question for us as readers is, why should we love such a
man? Or, to put it in other word, what makes Gatsby great? Why,
despite all these things, does Fitzgerald invite us to cry out with
Nick, "'They're a rotten crowd'... 'You're worth the whole damn
bunch put together.'"?
We are asked to love Gatsby, even admire him to a point, because
of his dream. That dream is what separates Gatsby from what Nick calls
the "foul dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams..." It is
not merely what is known as the American Dream of Success- the
belief that every man can rise to success no matter what his
beginnings. It is a kind of romantic idealism, "some heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life," Nick calls it. It is a belief in
fairytales and princesses and happy endings, a faith that life can
be special, remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby is not interested in power
for its own sake or in money or prestige. What he wants is his
dream, and that dream is embodied in Daisy. He must have her, and,
as the novel's epigraph on the title page suggests, he will do
anything that is required in order to win her.
But dreams don't always show on the outside. The Great Gatsby is a
kind of mystery story with Gatsby as the mystery. Who is he? All the
way through the novel people keep asking that question and answering
it falsely. They answer it falsely because they aren't really
interested in who Gatsby is. They have heard things about him- that he
killed a man, that he was a German spy in World War I- and they pass
these bits of gossip on to other people. So the myth of Gatsby- the
collection of false stories about him- hides the Gatsby that we come
gradually to know through the efforts of Nick Carraway. Nick genuinely
cares who Gatsby is, and in Chapters IV, VI, VIII, and IX he
presents us with the story of Gatsby's past as he has learned it
from Jordan Baker, from Gatsby himself, and eventually, from
Gatsby's father.
No one else but Nick knows or understands Gatsby's background except
maybe his father and Owl Eyes- and they, significantly, are the only
ones present at his funeral. Fitzgerald invites us to share Nick's
understanding of Gatsby as we read the novel. He makes us see behind
the surface of the man who at first glance looks like a young
roughneck. And he forces us to ask, as we finish the book, what this
dream is that Gatsby has dedicated himself to. Is it a worthwhile
dream? Is it our dream, too? Can we love Gatsby and be critical of his
dream at the same time? Fitzgerald makes us ask these questions and
then lets us find our own answers.
-
TOM BUCHANAN
Tom Buchanan, Nick tells us, "had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven- a national figure in a way,
one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at
twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax." He is also
very wealthy, having brought a string of polo ponies from Lake
Forest to Long Island. This double power- the size of his body and his
bankroll- colors our feelings about Tom Buchanan.
Because he is both very strong and very rich, Tom is used to
having his own way. Nick describes him as having "a rather hard mouth"
and "two shining arrogant eyes." When we first meet him in Chapter
I, he reveals his crude belief in his own superiority by telling
Nick that he has just read a book called The Rise of the Colored
Empires. The book warns that if white people are not careful, the
black races will rise up and overwhelm them. Tom clearly believes it.
Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George
Wilson, who runs a garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle seems to have
a dark sexual vitality that attracts Tom, and he keeps an apartment
for her in New York, where he takes Nick in Chapter II. Here he
again shows how little he thinks of anyone beside himself when he
casually breaks Myrtle's nose with the back of his hand, because she
is shouting "Daisy! Daisy!" in a vulgar fashion.
Between Chapters II and VII we see little of Tom, but in Chapter VII
he emerges as a central figure. It is Tom who pushes the affair
between Gatsby and Daisy out into the open by asking Gatsby point
blank, "'What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house
anyway?" It is Tom who verbally outduels Gatsby to win his wife back
and deflate his rival's dream. And it is Tom who, after the death of
Myrtle Wilson, tells George Wilson that Gatsby was the killer and then
hustles Daisy out of the area until the affair blows over.
Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy as careless people who break
things and then retreat into their wealth and let other people clean
up their messes. It's a particularly apt metaphor for Tom, who
cannot understand why Nick should have any ill feelings about Gatsby's
death. After all, Tom was only protecting his wife. Nick shakes
hands with Tom in the final chapter because "...I saw that what he had
done was, to him, entirely justified." Yet Tom's behavior was not
justifiable, and when Nick refers to the "foul dust" that floated in
the wake of Gatsby's dream, he seems to be speaking of Tom Buchanan
more than anyone else. It is Tom as much as anyone who sends Nick back
to the Midwest, where there are still values one can believe in.
-
DAISY FAY BUCHANAN
She was born Daisy Fay in Louisville, Kentucky, and her color is
white. When Jordan Baker, in Chapter IV, tells Nick about the first
meeting between Gatsby and Daisy in October 1917, she says of Daisy,
"She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day
long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from
Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night."
Throughout The Great Gatsby Daisy is described almost in fairytale
language. The name Fay means "fairy" or "sprite." "Daisy," of
course, suggests the flower, fresh and bright as spring, yet fragile
and without the strength to resist the heat and dryness of summer.
Daisy is the princess in the tower, the golden girl that every man
dreams of possessing. She is beautiful and rich and innocent and
pure (at least on the surface) in her whiteness. But that whiteness,
as you will notice, is mixed with the yellow of gold and the
inevitable corruption that money brings. Though Daisy seems pure and
white, she is a mixture of things, just like the flower for which
she was named (see Schneider in "Critics").
Fitzgerald suggests the nature of this mixture beautifully in the
famous passage from Chapter VII about her voice:
-
"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of-" I
hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood it before. It was full of money-
that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the
jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.... High in a white palace the
king's daughter, the golden girl....
-
Like money, Daisy promises more than she gives. Her voice seems to
offer everything, but she's born to disappoint. She is the sort of
person who is better to dream about than to actually possess.
Fitzgerald- with that double vision we discussed in The Author and His
Times section of this guide- knew very well both the attractions and
the limitations of women like Daisy, who is modeled in many ways
upon his wife Zelda.
Gatsby worships Daisy, and Nick distrusts her- just as Scott both
worshipped and distrusted Zelda. Gatsby loves Daisy too much to see
what is wrong with her. Nick stands back and sees the way Daisy lets
other people take care of her in crises. If you want to study the
nature of Daisy's weakness, look especially at her behavior on the
night before her wedding and on the night of Myrtle Wilson's death.
Daisy, unlike Tom, uses her money rather than her body or her
personality to bully others. She uses her money to protect her from
reality, and when reality threatens to hurt her, she cries and goes
inside the protective womb her money has made.
Be careful not to identify Daisy with the green light at the end
of her dock. The green light is the promise, the dream. Daisy
herself is much less than that. Even Gatsby must realize that having
Daisy in the flesh is much, much less than what he imagined it would
be when he fell in love with the idea of her.
-
JORDAN BAKER
Jordan Baker's most striking quality is her dishonesty. She is tough
and aggressive- a tournament golfer who is so hardened by
competition that she is willing to do anything to win. At the end of
Chapter IV, when Nick is telling us about Jordan, he remembers a story
about her first major tournament. Apparently she moved her ball to
improve her lie (!), but when the matter was being investigated, the
caddy and the only other witness to the incident retracted their
stories and nothing was proved against her. The incident should stay
with you throughout the novel, reminding you (as it reminds Nick) that
Jordan is the smart new woman, the opportunist who will do whatever
she must to be successful in her world.
In many ways Jordan Baker symbolizes a new type of woman that was
emerging in the Twenties. She is hard and self-sufficient, and she
adopts whatever morals suit her situation. She has cut herself off
from the older generation. She wears the kind of clothes that suit
her; she smokes, she drinks, and has sex because she enjoys them.
You may wish to explore Jordan as the new woman of the Twenties by
looking at the manners and character traits she reveals. Note such
things as her name (a masculine name), her body (hard, athletic,
boyish, small-breasted), her style (blunt, cynical, bored), and her
social background (she is cut off from past generations by having
almost no family).
Another important aspect of Jordan is her function in the novel.
Fitzgerald needs her to get the story told. Because she is Daisy's
friend from Louisville, she can supply Nick with information he
would not have otherwise. She also serves as a link between the
major characters, moving back and forth between the world of East
Egg (Tom and Daisy's house) and West Egg (Gatsby's and Nick's houses).
She is rich enough to be comfortable among the East Eggers but
enough of a social hustler to appear at Gatsby's parties.
Jordan serves still another purpose: Nick's girlfriend during the
summer of 1922. The Nick-Jordan romance serves as a nice sub-plot to
the Gatsby-Jordan relationship, and allows you to compare and contrast
a romantic-idealistic love with a very practical relationship made
on a temporary basis by two worldly people of the time.
If you want to explore the Nick-Jordan relationship and the possible
reasons why Nick becomes involved with her and then breaks the
relationship off, you'll need to look particularly at three
passages: Nick's comments toward the end of Chapter III; the phone
call between Nick and Jordan in Chapter VIII; and their final
conversation in Chapter IX. We'll take a close look at these
passages later on.

SETTING
OTHER ELEMENTS
-
SETTING (FGRESETT)
-
The setting in The Great Gatsby is very important because in
Fitzgerald's world setting reveals character. Fitzgerald divides the
world of the novel into four major settings: 1. East Egg; 2. West Egg;
3. the valley of ashes; and 4. New York City. Within these major
settings are two or more subsettings. East Egg is limited to Daisy's
house, but West Egg incorporates both Gatsby's house and Nick's. The
valley of ashes includes the Wilson's garage, Michaelis' restaurant,
and the famous sign with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. New York
City includes the offices where people work, the apartment Tom
Buchanan has rented for Myrtle Wilson, and the Plaza Hotel, where
the final showdown between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan takes place.
Each of these settings both reflects and determines the values of
the people who live or work there. East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live,
is the home of the Ivy League set who have had wealth for a long
time and are comfortable with it. Since they are secure with their
money, they have no need to show it off. Nick lives in new-rich West
Egg because he is too poor to afford a home in East Egg; Gatsby
lives there because his money is "new" and he lacks the social
credentials to be accepted in East Egg. His house, like the rest of
his possessions (his pink suit, for example), is tasteless and
vulgar and would be completely out of place in the more refined and
understated world of East Egg. No wonder that Gatsby is ruined in
the end by the East, and that Nick decides to leave.
The valley of ashes in contrast to both eggs is where the poor
people live- those who are the victims of the rich. It is
characterized literally by dust, for it is here that the city's
ashes are dumped (in what is now Flushing, Queens), and the
inhabitants are, as it were, symbolically dumped on by the rest of the
world. The valley of ashes, with its brooding eyes of Dr. T. J.
Eckleburg, also stands as a symbol of the spiritual dryness, the
emptiness of the world of the novel.
New York City is a symbol of what America has become in the 1920s: a
place where anything goes, where money is made and bootleggers
flourish, and where the World Series can be fixed by a man like
Meyer Wolfsheim. New York is a place of parties and affairs, and
bizarre and colorful characters who appear from time to time in West
Egg at Gatsby's parties.
The idea of setting as moral geography is reinforced by the
overriding symbolism of the American East and the American Midwest.
This larger contrast between East and Midwest frames the novel as a
whole. Nick comes East to enter the bond business, and finds himself
instead in the dizzying world of The Jazz Age in the summer of 1922.
He is fascinated and disgusted with this world, and he eventually
returns home to the Midwest, to the values and traditions of his
youth.

THEMES
THEMES (FGRETHEM)
-
A good novel has a number of themes. The following are important
themes of The Great Gatsby.
-
1. THE CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
The American Dream- as it arose in the Colonial period and developed
in the nineteenth century- was based on the assumption that each
person, no matter what his origins, could succeed in life on the
sole basis of his or her own skill and effort. The dream was
embodied in the ideal of the self-made man, just as it was embodied in
Fitzgerald's own family by his grandfather, P. F. McQuillan.
The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American
dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance
to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. The
characters are Midwesterners who have come East in pursuit of this new
dream of money, fame, success, glamour, and excitement. Tom and
Daisy must have a huge house, a stable of polo ponies, and friends
in Europe. Gatsby must have his enormous mansion before he can feel
confident enough to try to win Daisy.
What Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing in The Great Gatsby is not
the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream.
What was once- for Ben Franklin, for example, or Thomas Jefferson- a
belief in self-reliance and hard work has become what Nick Carraway
calls "...the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." The
energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been
channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy,
but fundamentally empty form of success.
How is this developed? I have tried to indicate in the
chapter-by-chapter analysis, especially in the Notes, that
Fitzgerald's critique of the dream of success is developed primarily
through the five central characters and through certain dominant
images and symbols. The characters might be divided into three groups:
1. Nick, the observer and commentator, who sees what has gone wrong;
2. Gatsby, who lives the dream purely; and 3. Tom, Daisy, and
Jordan, the "foul dust" who are the prime examples of the corruption
of the dream.
The primary images and symbols that Fitzgerald employs in developing
the theme are: 1. the green light; 2. the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg;
3. the image of the East and Midwest; 4. Owl Eyes; 5. Dan Cody's
yacht; and 6. religious terms such as grail and incarnation.
-
2. SIGHT AND INSIGHT
Both the character groupings and the images and symbols suggest a
second major theme that we can call "sight and insight." As you read
the novel, you will come across many images of blindness; is this
because hardly anyone seems to see what is really going on? The
characters have little self-knowledge and even less knowledge of
each other. Even Gatsby- we might say, especially Gatsby- lacks the
insight to understand what is happening. He never truly sees either
Daisy or himself, so blinded is he by his dream. The only characters
who see, in the sense of "understand," are Nick and Owl Eyes. The ever
present eyes of Dr. Eckleburg seem to reinforce the theme that there
is no all-seeing presence in the modern world.
-
3. THE MEANING OF THE PAST
The past is of central importance in the novel, whether it is
Gatsby's personal past (his affair with Daisy in 1917) or the larger
historical past to which Nick refers in the closing sentence of the
novel: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past." The past holds something that both
Gatsby and Nick seem to long for: a simpler, better, nobler time,
perhaps, a time when people believed in the importance of the family
and the church. Tom, Daisy and Jordan are creatures of the present-
Fitzgerald tells us little or nothing about their pasts- and it is
this allegiance to the moment that makes them so attractive, and
also so rootless and spiritually empty.
-
4. THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG MAN
In Chapter VII, Nick remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday.
He, like Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy, came East to get away from his
past; now that his youth is officially over, he realizes that he may
have made a mistake to come East, and begins a period of
reevaluation that leads to his eventual decision to return to the
Middle West.
The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick's initiation into life. His
trip East gives him the education he needs to grow up. The novel
can, therefore, be called a bildungsroman- the German word for a story
about a young man. (Other examples of a bildungsroman are The Red
Badge of Courage, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye.)
Nick, in a sense, writes The Great Gatsby to show us what he has
learned.

STYLE
STYLE (FGRESTYL)
-
Style refers to the way a writer puts words together: the length and
rhythm of his sentences; his use of figurative language and symbolism;
his use of dialogue and description.
Fitzgerald called The Great Gatsby a "novel of selected incident,"
modelled after Flaubert's Madame Bovary. "What I cut out of it both
physically and emotionally would make another novel," he said.
Fitzgerald's stylistic method is to let a part stand for the whole. In
Chapters I to III, for example, he lets three parties stand for the
whole summer and for the contrasting values of three different worlds.
He also lets small snatches of dialogue represent what is happening at
each party. The technique is cinematic. The camera zooms in, gives
us a snatch of conversation, and then cuts to another group of people.
Nick serves almost as a recording device, jotting down what he
hears. Fitzgerald's ear for dialogue, especially for the colloquial
phrases of the period, is excellent.
Fitzgerald's style might also be called imagistic. His language is
full of images- concrete verbal pictures appealing to the senses.
There is water imagery in descriptions of the rain, Long Island Sound,
and the swimming pool. There is religious imagery in the Godlike
eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and in words such as incarnation, and grail.
There is color imagery: pink for Gatsby, yellow and white for Daisy.
Some images might more properly be called symbols for the way they
point beyond themselves to historic or mythic truths: the green
light at the end of Daisy's dock, for instance, or Dr. Eckleburg's
eyes, or Dan Cody's yacht. Through the symbolic use of images,
Fitzgerald transforms what is on the surface a realistic social
novel of the 1920s into a myth about America.
Finally, we might call Fitzgerald's style reflective. There are
several important passages at which Nick stops and reflects on the
meaning of the action, almost interpreting the events. The style in
such passages is dense, intellectual, almost deliberately difficult as
Nick tries to wrestle with the meanings behind the events he has
witnessed.

VIEW
POINT OF VIEW (FGREVIEW)
-
Style and point of view are very hard to separate in a novel that is
told in the first person by a narrator who is also one of the
characters. The voice is always Nick's. Fitzgerald's choice of Nick as
the character through whom to tell his story has a stroke of
genius. He had been reading Joseph Conrad and had been particularly
struck by the way in which Conrad uses the character of Marlow to tell
both the story of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and the story of Jim in
Lord Jim. In those novels, Fitzgerald learned, we never see the
characters of Kurtz or Jim directly, but only through the eyes of
other people. And when we come to think of it, isn't that how we get
to know people in real life? We never get to know them all at once, as
we get to know characters described by an omniscient novelist; we
learn about them in bits and pieces over a period of time. And so,
Fitzgerald reasoned, someone like Gatsby would be much more
understandable and sympathetic if presented through the eyes of a
character like ourselves. Rather than imposing himself between us
and the action, Nick brings us closer to the action by forcing us to
experience events as though we were Nick. The I of the novel becomes
ourselves, and we find ourselves, like Nick, wondering who Gatsby
is, why he gives these huge parties, and what his past and
background may be. By writing from Nick's point of view, Fitzgerald is
able to make Gatsby more realistic than he could have by presenting
Gatsby through the eyes of an omniscient narrator. He is also able
to make Gatsby a more sympathetic character because of Nick's decision
to become Gatsby's friend. We want to find out more about Gatsby
because Nick does. We care about Gatsby because Nick does. We are
angry that no one comes to Gatsby's funeral because Nick is.
The use of the limited first person point of view gives not only the
character of Gatsby but the whole novel a greater air of realism. We
believe these parties really happened because a real person named Nick
Carraway is reporting what he saw. When Nick writes down the names
of the people who came to Gatsby's parties on a Long Island Railroad
timetable, we believe that these people actually came to Gatsby's
parties.
Nick is careful throughout the novel never to tell us things that he
could not have known. If he was not present at a particular
occasion, he gets the information from someone who was- from Jordan
Baker, for example, who tells him about Gatsby's courtship of Daisy in
Louisville; or from the Greek, Michaelis, who tells him about the
death of Myrtle Wilson. Sometimes Nick summarizes what others tell
him, and sometimes he uses their words. But he never tells us
something he could never know. This is one of the reasons the novel is
so convincing.

FORM
FORM AND STRUCTURE (FGREFORM)
-
Form and structure are closely related to point of view. Before
writing a novel, an author has to ask himself: who is to tell the
story? And in what order will events be told? The primary problem in
answering the second question is how to handle time. Do I tell the
story straight through from beginning to end? Do I start in the middle
and use flashbacks?
As many critics have pointed out, the method Fitzgerald adopts in
The Great Gatsby is a brilliant one. He starts the novel in the
present, giving us, in the first three chapters, a glimpse of the four
main locales of the novel: Daisy's house in East Egg (Chapter I);
the valley of ashes and New York (Chapter II); and Gatsby's house in
West Egg (Chapter III). Having established the characters and
setting in the first three chapters, he then narrates the main
events of the story in Chapters IV to IX, using Chapters IV, VI, and
VII to gradually reveal the story of Gatsby's past. The past and
present come together at the end of the novel in Chapter IX.
The critic James E. Miller, Jr., diagrams the sequence of events
in The Great Gatsby like this: "Allowing X to stand for the straight
chronological account of the summer of 1922, and A, B, C, D, and F
to represent the significant events of Gatsby's past, the nine
chapters of The Great Gatsby may be charted: X, X, X, XCX, X, XBXCX,
X, XCXDXD, XEXAX."
Miller's diagram shows clearly how Fitzgerald designed the novel. He
gives us the information as Nick gets it, just as we might find out
information about a friend or acquaintance in real life, in bits and
pieces over a period of time. Since we don't want or can't absorb much
information about a character until we truly become interested in him,
Fitzgerald waits to take us into the past until close to the middle of
the novel. As the story moves toward its climax, we find out more
and more about the central figure from Nick until we, too, are in a
privileged position and can understand why Gatsby behaves as he does.
Thus the key to the structure of the novel is the combination of the
first person narrative and the gradual revelation of the past as the
narrator finds out more and more. The two devices work extremely
effectively together, but neither would work very well alone.
Note that the material included in the novel is highly selective.
Fitzgerald creates a series of scenes- most of them parties- but
does not tell us much about what happens between these scenes. Think
of how much happened in the summer of 1922 that Fitzgerald doesn't
tell us! He doesn't tell us about Gatsby and Daisy's relationship
after they meet at Nick's house in Chapter V, because Nick would
have no access to this information. What the technique of extreme
selectivity demands from the reader is close attention. We have to
piece together everything we know about Gatsby from the few details
that Nick gives us. Part of the pleasure this form gives us is that of
drawing conclusions not only from what is included but from what is
left out.

CHAPTER_I
THE STORY (FGRESTOR)
-
CHAPTER I
-
The opening paragraphs teach us a lot about Nick and his attitude
toward Gatsby and others. Nick introduces himself to us as a young man
from the Midwest who has come East to learn the bond business. He
tells us that he's tolerant, inclined to reserve judgment about
people, and a good listener. People tell him their secrets because
they trust him; he knows the Story of Gatsby.
If you read closely, you'll see that Nick has ambivalent feelings
toward Gatsby. He both loves Gatsby and is critical of him. Nick is
tolerant, but that toleration has limits. He hates Gatsby's crass
and vulgar materialism, but he also admires the man for his dream, his
"romantic readiness," his "extraordinary gift for hope."
Nick makes the distinction between Gatsby, whom he loves because
of his dream, and the other characters, who constitute the "foul dust"
that "floated in the wake of his dreams." Nick has such scorn for
these "Eastern" types that he has left the East, returned to the
Midwest, and, for the time being at least, withdraws from his
involvement with other people.
Having told us about his relationships, Nick now introduces us to
the world in which he lived during the summer of 1999: the world of
East Egg and West Egg, Long Island.
Fitzgerald designed The Great Gatsby very carefully, establishing
each of the locations in the novel as a symbol for a particular
style of life. West Egg, where Nick and Gatsby live, is essentially
a place for the nouveau riche. There are two types of people living
here: those on the way up the social ladder who have not the family
background or the money to live in fashionable East Egg; and those
like Gatsby, whose vulgar display of wealth and connections with
Broadway or the New York underworld make them unwelcome in the more
dignified world of East Egg. Nick describes his own house as an
eyesore, but it is a smaller eyesore than Gatsby's mansion, which
has a tower on one side, "spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy."
Words like new, thin, and raw describe some of the reasons Gatsby's
house is a monstrosity.
By contrast, East Egg is like a fairyland. Its primary color is
white, and Nick calls its houses "white palaces" that glitter in the
sunlight. The story actually opens in East Egg on the night Nick
drives over to have dinner with Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Since Daisy is
his cousin and Tom, a friend from Yale, Nick has the credentials to
visit East Egg. Their house is "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian
Colonial Mansion" overlooking the bay. And the owner is obviously
proud of his possessions.
Our first view of Tom Buchanan reveals a very powerful man
standing in riding clothes with his legs apart on his front porch.
He likes his power, and like the potentates of Eastern kingdoms, he
expects the obedience of his subjects. We are ushered into the
living room with its "frosted wedding cake" ceiling, its
wine-colored rug, and its enormous couch on which are seated two
princesses in white: Jordan Baker and Tom's wife, Daisy Buchanan.
Fitzgerald controls the whole scene through his use of colors- white
and gold mainly- that suggest a combination of beauty and wealth.
Yet underneath this magical surface there is something wrong. Jordan
Baker is bored and discontented. She yawns more than once in this very
first scene. There is something cool and slightly unpleasant about the
atmosphere- something basically disturbing. Tom talks about a book
he has read, The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard. It is a piece
of pure Social Darwinism, advocating that the white race preserve
its own purity and beat down the colored races before they rise up and
overcome the whites. Daisy, who seems not to understand what Tom is
talking about, teases him about his size and about the big words in
the book. The telephone rings, and Tom is called from the room to
answer it. When Daisy follows him out, Jordan Baker confides to Nick
that the call is from Tom's woman in New York.
The rest of the evening is awkward and painful as Tom and Daisy
try unsuccessfully to forget the intrusion. Daisy's cynicism about
life becomes painfully clear when she says about her daughter's birth:
"'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.'"
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Under the veneer of the white world, there is hollowness.
Nick has said at the very beginning that "Gatsby turned out all
right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust
floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."
Even in this opening chapter, we are getting hints that Tom and
Daisy are part of this foul dust.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
In Nick's eyes, Tom and Daisy belong to "a rather distinguished
secret society," whose members have powers the outside world can
neither understand nor control. Nick finds both of them smug and
insincere.
The evening ends early, around ten o'clock. Jordan Baker, a
competitive golfer, wants to go to bed since she's playing in a
tournament the next day. Before Nick leaves for West Egg, Tom and
Daisy hint that they would welcome his attention to Miss Baker
during the summer.
Nick arrives home, and (in the final paragraph of the chapter)
gets his first glimpse of Gatsby. Gatsby is standing on the lawn,
stretching out "his arms toward the dark water in a curious way."
Nick, from his own house, believes that he can see Gatsby trembling.
As Nick looks out at the water, he can see "...nothing except a single
green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a
dock."
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: THE GREEN LIGHT AS SYMBOL This is the first use of one of the
novel's central symbols, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.
What Fitzgerald seems to be doing is merely introducing a symbol
that will gain in meaning as the story progresses. At this point, we
don't even know that the light is on Daisy's dock, and we have no
reason to associate Gatsby with Daisy. What we do know- and this is
very important- is that Nick admires Gatsby because of his dream and
this dream is somehow associated with the green light. The color green
is a traditional symbol of spring and hope and youth. As long as
Gatsby gazes at the green light, his dream lives.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER_II
CHAPTER II
-
The opening description of the valley of ashes, watched over by
the brooding eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, has been analyzed again
and again. Fitzgerald's friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins, wrote to
Scott on November 20, 1924: "In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various
readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a
superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes,
expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It's
magnificent." Later in the same letter Perkins concludes, "...with the
help of T. J. Eckleburg... you have imported a sort of sense of
eternity."
How should you approach this famous symbol? Remember, a wide variety
of interpretations have been made and defended over the years.
It's best to begin by placing Eckleburg in his geographical context:
the valley of ashes, located about halfway between West Egg and New
York City. The valley of ashes is the home of George and Myrtle
Wilson, whom we'll meet later on in this chapter. The valley is also a
very important part of what we might call the moral geography of the
novel. Values are associated with places. In Chapter I we were
introduced to East and West Egg, the homes of the very rich, the
nouveau riche, and the middle class. The valley of ashes is the home
of the poor, the victims of those who live in either New York or the
Eggs. Men, described by Fitzgerald as "ash-gray," move through the
landscape "dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."
Apparently the city's ashes are dumped in the valley, and the men
who work here have the job of shoveling up these ashes with "leaden
spades."
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: On a more symbolic level, these men are inhabitants of what
might be called Fitzgerald's wasteland. T. S. Eliot's famous poem "The
Waste Land" had been published in 1922, and Fitzgerald had read it
with great interest. There is no doubt that he had Eliot's poem in
mind when he described the valley of ashes. Eliot's wasteland- arid,
desertlike- contains figures who go through the motions of life with
no spiritual center. Eliot's imagery seemed to express the anxiety,
frustration, and emptiness of a post-war generation cut off from
spiritual values by the shock of the First World War.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Read the following passage carefully:
-
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic- their
retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead,
from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a
non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them
there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank
down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.
But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and
rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
-
Some readers interpret this passage as a description of the god of
the modern world- the god of the wasteland. Keep this description in
mind in Chapter VIII when the crazed and jealous Wilson looks at the
giant eyes and says, "God sees everything." For now, early in
Chapter II, it is still too early to make any kind of direct
correlation between the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and the eyes of God.
At this point we have only hints: the size of the eyes, the missing
face, the departure of the original creator of the sign, all of
which transform the eyes into something mythic, something suggesting a
superior being who no longer cares, who is no longer involved with the
petty lives of the pathetic creatures below. The eyes "brood on over
the solemn dumping ground," offering no help or solace to its
inhabitants. The oculist has forgotten the eyes which he left
behind, just as God has forgotten the inhabitants of the valley of
ashes. Many interpretations are possible; you'll want to think about
them as the novel develops.
The action of the second chapter begins as Tom Buchanan brings
Nick to George B. Wilson's garage. Both the garage and the all-night
restaurant of the Greek Michaelis border the valley of ashes. Wilson's
wife, Myrtle, is Tom's mistress. Pay close attention to these first
descriptions of Wilson and his wife, and you'll learn a lot about
who they are and what they stand for. Wilson is described as "a blond,
spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome." He is the embodiment
of the valley of ashes: dead inside, a living ghost. The key words are
spiritless and anaemic. He has no energy and no faith. He believes
somehow that doing business with Tom will help him; but he understands
neither the power nor the cruelty of the man he is dealing with.
Myrtle Wilson is a sensuous woman in her middle thirties who has the
energy her husband lacks. "There was an immediate perceptible vitality
about her," says Nick. The fire inside her has drawn her to Tom
Buchanan as a lover who can take her away from the gray and empty
prison of the valley of ashes.
Note that Tom takes Myrtle to New York, the fourth major location in
the moral geography of the novel. If the valley of ashes is the home
of death-in-life- the place where the spiritless and downtrodden live-
New York is the center of the corruption, or, more appropriately,
the place where wealth, corruption, and self-gratification openly
meet. Myrtle must ride into New York on the train in a separate car in
deference to the "East Eggers." Why? Because it is important to keep
up a facade of respectability. In New York, however, where anything is
permitted, Tom can flaunt his relationship with Myrtle.
The group goes to the apartment in Morningside Heights that Tom
Buchanan has rented for his liaisons with Myrtle. What goes on there
and how Nick reacts to what goes on tell us something very important
about how Fitzgerald wants us to view New York.
The party consists of Nick, Tom, Myrtle, Myrtle's sister
Catherine, and a couple named McKee who live downstairs. Nick is
really more of an observer than a participant. He tells us that he has
been drunk just twice in his life, and the second time was that
afternoon. Whether he drinks in order to lose his self-control and
join the others or simply to escape this disordered world is something
you'll have to decide for yourself. Perhaps both interpretations are
correct. In any case, all the guests at the party seem to have
something unnatural or wrong with them. Catherine, the sister, has
"a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky
white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more
rakish angle." Mr. McKee is a pale, feminine man who has just shaved
and left a spot of lather on his cheek. His wife is "shrill,
languid, handsome and horrible." Myrtle Wilson becomes more and more
"violently affected moment by moment." The conversation is absurd
and pretentious; everyone tries to impress each other, and lies flow
as freely as the liquor.
Nick tries to leave, part of him wants to be somewhere else, but
part of him- that part that makes him the narrator of this novel- is
fascinated by "the inexhaustible variety of life." He is both repelled
and attracted toward these people. The appearance of Myrtle Wilson's
new puppy, "groaning faintly," is like the entire scene, both funny
and sad. Then a crisis erupts. Myrtle crudely insists that she can
say, "Daisy!" any time she wants, and Tom Buchanan, making a short
deft movement, breaks her nose with his open hand. So this is what
happens to those who become entangled with the Buchanans! Tom, we see,
is strong and brutal and absolutely selfish. He is perfectly happy
to enjoy Myrtle in bed, but at other times she must know when to
keep her place. For challenging the purity of his Daisy, she is
punished. Later, in Chapter VII during the second New York party,
we'll see what happens when Gatsby tries to cross Tom Buchanan.
In two chapters, Fitzgerald has shown us two different symbolic
landscapes: one, a dinner party in East Egg with Daisy, Jordan, Tom
and Nick; the other, a drunken brawl in New York with Tom, Nick,
Myrtle, Catherine and the McKees. The contrast between the two parties
tells us much about these two worlds and about the people who
inhabit them. Now to complete his introduction to the world of the
novel, Fitzgerald gives us in Chapter III a third party- at the West
Egg Home of Jay Gatsby.

CHAPTER_III
CHAPTER III
-
Though the novel is called The Great Gatsby, we have neither seen
Gatsby (except for a glimpse of him at the end of Chapter I) nor
been given any idea of why he should be called "Great." Fitzgerald's
method is to introduce Gatsby to us gradually, as a kind of mystery to
be solved. We see Gatsby first through the eyes of others. Catherine
Wilson told Nick (in Chapter II) that she had heard that Gatsby was
a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. Lucille, a friend of
Jordan Baker, thinks that Gatsby was a German spy during the war. A
man sitting nearby agrees with her. The world is full of rumors
about Gatsby because no one really knows who he is, where his money
comes from, and why he gives these magnificent parties every
weekend. Our job as readers is to separate fact from rumor and to
discover, with Nick, who Gatsby really is and why he behaves the way
he does. Our job will be to probe behind the vulgar, violent surface
of his world to reveal the man beneath. We are able to do that- as
in real life- only gradually, for it is never possible to know someone
all at once. The process begins in Chapter III with a portrait of
the public Gatsby, seen through the eyes of his guests. It's not until
Chapter IV that we'll begin to discover the man beneath.
Brightness, confusion, magnificence, daring, vulgarity, excess,
excitement- these are the words that describe Gatsby's parties. They
also describe one side of life in America during the 1920s, in the
years before the Great Depression. Gatsby has a Rolls, a station
wagon, two motor boats, aquaplanes, a swimming pool, and a real beach.
People come to his parties and use these things. Everything is real.
Crates of oranges and lemons are delivered to his door. Beneath canvas
tents in the garden are buffet tables glittering with spiced hams
and turkeys "bewitched to a dark gold." Gatsby's bar is stocked with
gin, liquors, and "cordials so long forgotten that most of his
female guests were too young to know one from another." The world of
Gatsby's parties has an aura of magic about it- not the magic of
East Egg, with its fairytale imagery of princesses in ivory towers,
but the magic of the amusement park, with the promise of fast rides
and expensive prizes. Gatsby's world is a world of infinite hope and
possibility. Young girls with laughter like gold wait for the right
man. Middle-aged women, tired of their husbands, search for lovers.
And ambitious men search for the right contact that will bring them
instant fame and fortune.
Nobody knows the host. Nick is "one of the few guests who had
actually been invited." Fitzgerald builds suspense by making us wonder
when we'll meet Gatsby and what he'll be like when we do. Nick runs
into Jordan Baker and the twins, who talk about Gatsby, but have
only false information about him. Nick and Jordan go off in search
of Gatsby, but discover Owl Eyes instead.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: OWL EYES Owl Eyes is "a stout middle-aged man, with
enormous owl-eyed spectacles." He is overwhelmed by the fact that
Gatsby's Gothic library is stocked not with the fake, cardboard
backs of hooks, but with the works themselves. He knows that Gatsby
has never read the books, however, because the pages have never been
cut. "'This fella's a regular Belasco,'" Owl Eves tells Nick and
Jordan. "'It's a triumph.... Knew when to stop, too- didn't cut the
pages.'"
The reference to David Belasco, the great
playwright-producer-director of realistic plays, is not accidental.
Owl Eyes, as Nick refers to him, is the first to realize the
essentially theatrical quality of Gatsby's world. Just as Belasco
was a technician who wanted to get everything right, so Gatsby
spares no expense to build the material world necessary to fulfill his
dream. He has created an extraordinary stage set complete with real
books. Owl Eyes, as his name suggests, is one of the few to really see
and, in some way, understand Gatsby.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Nick and Jordan go back outside to watch the entertainment at
midnight. Even the moon cooperates, floating over Long Island sound
like the cardboard moon on a stage set. In a scene that Nick calls
"significant, elemental, profound," Gatsby appears:
-
"I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly.
"What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I be your pardon."
"I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good
host."
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 as 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. Precisely at that point it vanished- and I was looking at
an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate
formality of speech just missed being absurd.
-
Gatsby is a series of paradoxes. He is both a "roughneck" and one
who practices "elaborate formality in speech." He calls people "old
sport," apparently a habit picked up at Oxford, though at this point
we're still uncertain whether Oxford is just part of the myth. Has
he really gone to Oxford? We, like Jordan Baker, may not believe it.
But then why is he picking his words with care? And how did he earn
the money to give these parties? As Nick points out: people don't just
"drift cooly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound."
A millionaire who gives parties conjures up an image of a "florid
and corpulent person in his middle years." But Gatsby is none of
these.
Gatsby is- quite simply- not like anyone else in the world of the
novel. Young, handsome, excessively polite, he seems not to belong
to the world he has created. His smile radiates an inner warmth that
his guests don't have. Nick alone senses it. "Anyway, he gives large
parties," says Jordan Baker, because the party, not Gatsby, is what
interests her. But now Nick watches Gatsby as much as he watches the
party. He notices Gatsby standing "alone on the steps and looking from
one group to another with approving eyes." Here Gatsby is like a
director admiring his play or a religious leader blessing his
disciples. He alone is not drinking. As the party grows more frenzied,
he becomes increasingly separate from it. He is untouched by the
corruption of the world.
The party goes on. People become more drunk and irritable.
Husbands and wives fight over whether to stay or leave. Some wives are
lifted, kicking into their cars. Gatsby goes to answer a telephone
call from Philadelphia at 2 A.M. As Nick leaves to walk home, he
encounters Owl Eves, who is unable to get his car out of the ditch.
Neither Owl Eyes nor the car's driver- "a pale, dangling
individual"- seems to be able to manage. Nick returns to his own home,
leaving the guests to struggle with their problem.
Nick shifts the focus of the chapter from Gatsby back to himself. He
wants us to know that he's done more with his summer than go to
parties. To correct that false impression, he tells us how he
usually occupies his time. As he tells us about his work, his walks
through New York City, and his fascination for women, he gives us a
sense that, in some way he is as hollow as the characters he
describes. He seems to need adventure as an escape from loneliness,
and perhaps that is what draws him to Jordan Baker. He is also
sexually attracted to her. He became involved with Jordan around
midsummer, he tells us, after a short affair with a girl from Jersey
City. He knows that Jordan is dishonest- she cheated in her first golf
tournament by moving her ball to improve her lie. Whatever Nick's
reason for being with her, we're made to feel that somehow Jordan is
not the kind of woman Nick ought to like.
At the end of the chapter Nick says, "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." This is one of the most
talked about lines in the novel, and it is a hard one to interpret,
coming as it does right after Nick's statement that "dishonesty in a
woman is a thing you never blame deeply." Is Nick using a double
standard, arguing that it's all right for women to be dishonest
because they can't help it? How do we reconcile our view of Nick as
a reliable and sympathetic narrator when he allows himself to get
involved with such a morally unattractive woman? These are questions
raised by the troubling last pages of this chapter- questions that are
answered in a variety of ways by different readers. If you want to
question Nick's judgment, you can certainly find evidence to support
that point of view. Yet most readers have not been too hard on Nick
for his relationship with Jordan. The question is very much an open
one.

CHAPTER_IV
CHAPTER IV
-
One of the extraordinary things about The Great Gatsby is that the
action of the novel (call it the plot, if you want) doesn't start
until Chapter IV. We have had three parties, and we have been
introduced to all the major characters. Finally, we are allowed to
find out why they have been brought together and what the nature of
the story is in which they all share. But before Fitzgerald begins
that story, he has one more set of details to give us: a list of the
people who came to Gatsby's parties during the summer of 1922.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: THE GUESTS AT GATSBY'S PARTIES Why does Fitzgerald give us
a list of guests nearly three pages long? Perhaps he wants to lend
an air of reality to the parties by listing the guests as they would
appear in a newspaper report. The names seem to come from social
registers, movie magazines, businessmen's directories, and club
rosters. Names, as you know, can reveal many things about a person,
such as his religion, his ethnic background, and his social class.
Judging by Fitzgerald's list, just about every type of person is
represented at Gatsby's parties. Names like Flink, Hammerhead, Beluga,
Muldoon, Gulick, Fishguard, and Snell suggest humorously that many
of these people have no backgrounds at all but belong to a vast vulgar
crowd of self-made men, all hungering for success. Fitzgerald's long
list of names also makes fun of a technique used in epics such as
The Iliad and The Odyssey. In these heroic poems, we are given lists
of warriors. In The Great Gatsby we are given lists of guests at
parties. Our world of knights and ladies has become much smaller and
much less noble.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The story continues with Gatsby driving Nick to New York for
lunch. Gatsby has decided to use this trip to tell Nick something
about himself. Our first reaction, like Nick's, is one of disbelief.
Gatsby's words are so full of lies that it's difficult to know whether
anything he says is true. He tells Nick that he's the son of wealthy
people in the Midwest, "all dead now." He claims to have been educated
at Oxford. When Nick asks him where in the Midwest he's from, Gatsby
answers, "San Francisco." The lie is so blatant that we don't know
what to make of it. Neither does Nick. Gatsby continues to describe
his life as that of a "young rajah in all the capitals of Europe,"
collecting jewels, hunting for big game. Then he speaks of his war
experience, his heroism, and the medals he was awarded by various
European governments, "even Montenegro." At this point, when Nick is
most incredulous, Gatsby produces from his pocket his medal from
Montenegro and a picture of himself with cricket bat standing in the
quad at one of the colleges at Oxford. There is thus a bizarre mixture
of truth and fantasy in Gatsby's self-description, and we are forced
both to hold him in awe and to reserve final judgment on him until
we can find out more. The car carrying Nick and Gatsby to New York
seems to fly- gliding through the valley of ashes, roaring through
Astoria. A policeman stops them for speeding, but apologizes to Gatsby
as soon as Gatsby shows him a white card. As the car enters New
York, Nick is struck anew by the appropriateness of that city as a
place for Gatsby, to do business. The suspense over Gatsby's true
identity and purpose is sustained throughout the chapter, first at
lunch, and then in the tea scene with Jordan Baker.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: MEYER WOLFSHEIM At lunch we are introduced to the business
side of Gatsby in the person of Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim is
modeled on the real-life figure of Arnold Rothstein, the man who
helped fix the 1919 World Series. Through Wolfsheim, "a small
flat-nosed Jew," we learn about Gatsby's connections with a shady
underworld, and we begin to understand for the first time where
Gatsby's money comes from. The discovery of Gatsby's unsavory business
dealings may taint his dreams for you and make you question his
"greatness." But you may also find that it lends him an air of mystery
and romance.
Wolfsheim is sentimental about friends but not about business-
something we will learn again at the end of the novel. He mistakes
Nick for one of Gatsby's business friends and asks him if he's looking
for a "gonnegtion." But when he finds out that Nick is merely a
personal friend, he changes the subject. Wolfsheim has neither
education nor class. When Gatsby leaves the room for a phone call
(Gatsby is always leaving rooms for important and mysterious phone
calls), Wolfsheim tells Nick that Gatsby has gone to "Oggsford College
in England." Oxford, as a point of fact, is a university; there is
no Oxford College. Wolfsheim is so uncultured that he's impressed with
Gatsby's breeding and considers Gatsby "the kind of man you'd like
to take home and introduce to your mother and sister." He's so bad
at judging other people that he describes Gatsby as someone who
would never so much as look at another man's wife. Nothing says more
about Wolfsheim's boorishness and his ruthless battle for money and
power than the fact that he wears cuff links made of human molars. The
scene is full of wonderful ironic touches such as this, which Nick
simply relates without commenting on.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
From Jordan Baker, Nick learns about Gatsby and Daisy. She begins as
though she were telling a fairytale. And indeed it is. The princess in
this case is Daisy Fay, an eighteen-year-old beauty, the most
popular girl in Louisville, Kentucky. All the officers from nearby
Camp Taylor are competing for the honor of her company. On this
particular day, she is sitting in her white dress in her white
roadster (princesses must wear white) with a young lieutenant who is
speaking to her with the kind of romantic intensity that princesses
adore. His name is Jay Gatsby. Daisy apparently loves him as much as
he adores her, for she's ready to go to New York to say good-bye to
him when he's sent overseas. And even though she decides to marry
Tom Buchanan, she drinks herself into a state of near stupor on the
night before her wedding after having received a letter from Gatsby.
Jordan goes on to describe the three years of marriage: Daisy's
devotion to Tom and Tom's affairs with a chambermaid in a Santa
Barbara hotel. Since we already know that Tom is having an affair with
Myrtle Wilson, it doesn't surprise us that Tom has been unfaithful
before. What may surprise us is that Daisy seems to have been
faithful. Is it because of Gatsby? Does she still love him? Has she
thought about him during the five years between their time together in
Louisville and the day that she hears his name on Jordan Baker's lips?
As Jordan Baker describes it, Daisy has not given Gatsby a thought
until the mention of his name jarred her memory. It's hard to say.
In the case of Gatsby, it's not hard to say at all. As Jordan
explains, "'Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just
across the bay.'" And Nick responds in a moment of powerful
illumination: "Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had
aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly
from the womb of his purposeless splendor."
What Nick realizes suddenly is that Gatsby's house and his lavish
life-style are not an ostentatious display of wealth, but a
necessary means to the fulfillment of his dream. Until now Gatsby
was a mystery, misunderstood by many, used by others, reviled as a
criminal by still others. Now the truth is unveiled, and we can
understand his desperate yearning for Daisy, and for everything-
youth, love, and so on- that is symbolized by the green light at the
end of dock.
Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby had taken her aside at one of his
parties and had asked her to ask Nick to ask Daisy to Nick's house for
a meeting. This indirection was deliberate, for Gatsby was terrified
of seeing Daisy again.
Though Gatsby loves Daisy with an almost unbearable intensity, he
doesn't want to offend her or Tom. He's afraid to ask Nick directly,
so he uses Jordan as a go-between. Afraid, also, that Daisy will
refuse to come to see him, Gatsby arranges for Nick to invite Daisy
for tea and makes sure Daisy doesn't know he'll be there, too.
Gatsby's elaborate plans show us just how long he has thought about
this moment. His plans also reveal the heart of an innocent
romantic, a novice at love, who is obviously unused to dealing with
women or with situations such as this. We are ready for the central
chapter, where the actual meeting takes place.

CHAPTER_V
CHAPTER V
-
Nick arrives in West Egg to find all the lights in Gatsby's house
blazing and Gatsby himself walking toward him across the lawn.
Gatsby invites Nick to go to Coney Island. When Nick turns him down,
Gatsby suggests a swim in the pool, which he hasn't used all summer.
He never does use the pool until the very last day of his life- but
that's getting ahead of ourselves.
Nick agrees to invite Daisy over. Gatsby suggests waiting a few days
so that he can get Nick's grass cut. Then he offers Nick some money,
not a free handout, but a "little business on the side." Here Nick's
Midwestern sense of morality helps him make a decision, and he turns
Gatsby down.
The day arrives, and it is raining. (Rain in novels is not usually
accidental. Notice, as you read this chapter, how the rain stops
conveniently at just the right moment.) Gatsby is so nervous that he
can hardly function. He has not slept. He is as pale as a high
school boy on his first date. Life with Daisy in Louisville had been
so wonderful five years before; now he is terrified that even should
Daisy agree to renew their relationship, it won't be the same.
Daisy arrives looking absolutely beautiful in a three-cornered
lavender hat, "with a bright, ecstatic smile." She is dying to know
why Nick has invited her over. Nick takes Daisy inside, thinking
that Gatsby is waiting for her, but the living room is empty.
Gatsby, either unable to face the encounter or anxious to pretend that
he has just dropped over, has gone out into the rain and walked around
the house. Now he knocks on the front door. Nick opens it and sees
Gatsby, "pale as death," standing in a puddle of water. Both his
paleness and the rain reinforce our sense of his fear, his terrible
insecurity, and his gloom. Gatsby goes into the living room, leaving
Nick in the hall with us to imagine what the first moment must have
been like. Apparently it was dreadful, because when Nick does come
in the room he finds Gatsby in a state of nerves. Gatsby knocks over
Nick's clock (some readers see this as a symbol of his attempt to stop
time) and then catches it. The scene has an air of desperate comedy
about it; it's funny and not funny at the same time. The characters
try to get through tea, and they try to make conversation. When Nick
excuses himself, Gatsby rushes into the hall after him, whispering,
"This is a terrible mistake."
Nick sends Gatsby back and goes off by himself for half an hour.
When Nick returns, the rain has stopped, the sun is out, and Daisy and
Gatsby are radiantly happy. Fitzgerald's choice of words to describe
Gatsby- "glowed," "new well-being," "radiated," "exultation"-
suggest that Gatsby has come alive again. He has rediscovered his
dream. He walks Daisy and Nick over to his house and shows them his
possessions.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: DAISY AND GATSBY'S SHIRTS Suddenly in this scene the
meaning of the novel's epigraph becomes clear: the four-line poem of
Thomas Park d'Invilliers that Fitzgerald quotes on the title page
describes exactly what Gatsby has done. He has symbolically worn the
gold hat; he has bounced high, accumulating possessions for this
moment, so that when Daisy sees them she will cry out, like the
lover in the poem, "I must have you." And Daisy does. She admires
the house, the gardens, the gigantic rooms, the colors of pink and
lavender, the sunken baths. The princess is astounded. Gatsby
overwhelms her with these tangible signs of his affection and when
he takes his shirts, ordered from England, out of his cabinet and
throws them on the bed, she bends her head into the shirts and
begins to cry. "They're such beautiful shirts," she sobs. "It makes me
sad because I've never seen such beautiful shirts before."
It seems silly of course to cry over shirts. But it is not the
shirts themselves that overwhelm her but what they symbolize: Gatsby's
extraordinary dedication to his dream. Wouldn't you be moved to
tears to find yourself the object of so much adoration?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
In the next scene Gatsby tells Daisy about how he has watched the
green light that burns at the end of her dock. For so long that
light has been a symbol of his dream- of something he has wanted
more than life itself. Gazing at it that night when Nick first saw
him, and throughout the summer, Gatsby must have believed that if only
he could have Daisy he would be happy for ever. Now suddenly he has
her, the light is just a light again, and Nick wonders if this
person could ever be as wonderful or as magical as Gatsby's idea of
her. No matter what we think of Gatsby or of his dream, we are drawn
to him by the sad knowledge that dreams themselves are often-
perhaps always- more beautiful than dreams fulfilled.
Nick realizes this, too, when he says: "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."
Nick leaves the couple as dusk comes and the lights come on in
West Egg. Klipspringer, "the boarder," is summoned from his room to
play the piano. As he plays "Ain't We Got Fun?"- one of the most
popular songs of the day- we sense a strange irony. What the song is
describing is terribly different from what Gatsby and Daisy have at
that moment. What they have is so much more than fun: it's
beautiful, more intense, and finally more painful. There is both a joy
and sadness in a love as great as theirs. Klipspringer plays on,
unaware of their feelings. Because Nick is aware, he is wise to
leave them alone.

CHAPTER_VI
CHAPTER VI
-
This chapter is as important for what it doesn't do as for what it
does. In a letter to his friend Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald confessed
about The Great Gatsby: "The worst fault in it, I think, is a BIG
FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of)
the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of
their reunion to the catastrophe." Now since the reunion takes place
in Chapter V and the catastrophe, in Chapter VII, the logical place
for this account is Chapter VI. Why doesn't it occur?
One reason is that the novel is told in the first person by Nick,
and he can describe only what he sees or what he is told by others.
What happens between Gatsby and Daisy is private; Nick would have no
knowledge of it.
Another reason might be that Fitzgerald wants to emphasize not the
actual relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, but Gatsby's dream,
and therefore he decided to focus on the past rather than the present.
That may explain why in Chapter VI Fitzgerald tells the story of
Gatsby's life before he met Daisy- not all of it, but enough for us to
begin to understand him.
He was born James Gatz, the son of a North Dakota farmer. He had
been sent to St. Olaf College, a small Lutheran school in Minnesota,
but had left after two weeks, humiliated by the janitor's job he had
been given to pay for his room and board. Having worked in the
summer as a clam digger and salmon fisher on Lake Superior, he
returned to find a job. It was a decision that changed his life. On
Little Girl Bay one day he saw the yacht of copper millionaire Dan
Cody in danger of being broken up by a storm, and rowed out to warn
him. Cody was impressed by this boy, who called himself Jay Gatsby,
and took him on as steward, mate, and later as skipper and personal
secretary. In this way, Jay Gatsby was born.
Why did he change his name? In one of the most difficult and
important passages in the novel Nick tells us:
-
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.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: HIS PLATONIC CONCEPTION OF HIMSELF As a boy Gatsby (still
Gatz) had been a dreamer, and as he grew older, his dreams became more
vivid. He dreamed, as many children do, of a bright, gaudy world where
all his fantasies would be fulfilled. On the day that he saved Dan
Cody's yacht, he must have seen an embodiment of everything he wanted.
In a strange sort of way Gatsby never believed that he was just
James Gatz. He had an idea of what he wanted to be. And just as
Plato believed that our material bodies are not our real selves, but
only physical images of our ideal or perfect selves. Gatsby had an
image of himself, to which he gave the name Gatsby. From the day
that he met Dan Cody he decided to dedicate his life to the
development of the idea of himself that existed in his head. And
just as Jesus left his family to be about his heavenly Father's
business, so Gatsby left his earthly parents to enter the service of
his God- a "vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"- in this case
symbolized by millionaire Dan Cody. Gatsby wanted of course not only
to serve Cody but to be Dan Cody- one of those remarkable self-made
men to come along in America between the 1890s and the years before
World War I.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Gatsby, sails with Cody to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast. He
learns to avoid alcohol when he sees what it does to the older man,
and he learns how wonderful the "good life" can be. He decides to
devote himself to the pursuit of this life, but Cody dies and his
mistress Ella Kaye uses some legal device to steal Gatsby's share of
the inheritance. Young Gatsby is once again left penniless. But he has
had his "education," and he knows what he wants to be.
At this point Nick's narrative of Gatsby's youth breaks off
(notice how we get the story of Gatsby's past in bits and pieces), and
we return to the present. It is later in the summer and Nick hasn't
seen Gatsby for several weeks. He drops by Gatsby's house and finds
Tom Buchanan there. It's the first time these two have been
together, and the tension between them, though not as great as it will
become, is already strong. Tom has been out riding with a Mr. and Mrs.
Sloane. Gatsby invites them to stay for dinner. Mrs. Sloane, who is
giving a dinner party herself, invites Nick and Gatsby to join them.
Nick politely refuses, but Gatsby accepts- obviously a breach of
etiquette, because the invitation was meant as a polite gesture, not
as a real offer. Gatsby lacks the social grace to know this; he also
wants to be with Daisy. Tom is offended by Gatsby's poor taste. He
also doesn't like the idea that Daisy has been coming to Gatsby's
house without him. "Women run around too much these days to suit
me," he says. "They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Once again we see
Tom's double standard (he can do anything he wants) and the snobbery
of the East Eggers, who turn their noses up at someone as unrefined as
Gatsby.
Even though he disapproves of Gatsby, Tom agrees to visit Gatsby's
house the following Saturday night rather than let Daisy go there
alone. The rest of Chapter VI describes a second evening at
Gatsby's, but this time seen through Daisy's eyes; and the mood is
clearly very different from that of the party described in Chapter
III.
The people Nick enjoyed only two weeks before now seem "septic" to
him. The word septic is very strong; it means "putrid" or "rotten."
Except for the time she spends alone with Gatsby sitting on Nick's
steps, Daisy doesn't have a good time either. The guests seem ill
humored, out of control, false. The characters- Doctor Civet, Miss
Baedeker, an unnamed movie star and her director, a small producer
with a blue nose- all seem part of a phony stage play. Nick compares
them to the stars who are here one season, gone the next.
Tom and Daisy argue. Tom is becoming more and more suspicious
about who Gatsby is and where he gets his money. Gatsby's nothing more
than a big bootlegger, he tells Daisy- which is true. Daisy defends
Gatsby with a lie, yet she captures the essence of Gatsby more
honestly than Tom's merciless truth.
The chapter ends with a very important scene between Gatsby and Nick
after Tom and Daisy have left. Gatsby feels sad because Daisy didn't
have a good time, but his sadness goes deeper than that. What really
upsets him is that he can't turn back time. "I wouldn't ask too much
of her," Nick says. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the
past?" Gatsby cries out in desperation. "Why of course you can!"
What Gatsby wants is to obliterate the five years since he last saw
Daisy. He wants life to be as wonderful and as beautiful as he
believed it could be. Like all of us, he wants to ignore the fact that
life is a process of change, and that time never stands still. If only
Daisy would tell Tom, "I never loved you!" If only he could take Daisy
back to Louisville, marry her, and begin their lives together as
though there had been no Tom, no daughter. He must win her to
satisfy his own Platonic image of himself, the ideal self which he
associates with his love for Daisy in Louisville in the autumn of
1917.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: INCARNATION Fitzgerald uses the word incarnation to make us
understand the meaning of that moment in Louisville. Incarnation means
made into flesh, as in the Christian notion that God became flesh in
Jesus Christ. In Louisville on the autumn night, Gatsby's dream became
incarnated in Daisy. Kissing her for the first time so overpowered him
that he knew he must give up everything for her. Gatsby at that moment
"wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath." Because he was
only human, he had narrowed his dream and embodied it in something
human, something tangible.
The tragedy of Jay Gatsby is his choice of Daisy as the person in
whom to embody his dream. This tragedy, as we saw in "The Author and
His Times," was not unlike Fitzgerald's own when he embodied his dream
in Zelda. Because of the impossibility of their dreams and the
nature of the women in whom they vested them, both Gatsby and Scott
Fitzgerald were doomed to tragic failure. But that may be why we
love them- whether we should or not.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER_VII
CHAPTER VII
-
Chapter VII joins all the major characters and geographical
locations of the novel together in a final catastrophe. In terms of
the action, it is the most important chapter in the novel.
Now that Gatsby has won Daisy, he has called off his parties,
fired his servants, and replaced them with friends of Meyer Wolfsheim.
His dealings with Wolfsheim reinforce our fears about what he is doing
to make his money. His retreat from a glittering nightlife shows us
how far his obsession with Daisy has gone. He has dismissed his
servants because Daisy has been coming to his house in the afternoons,
and he doesn't want anyone around who will gossip. The only reason
he gave parties was in the wild hope that Daisy, would come- and now
she is his.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: THE WEATHER Fitzgerald carefully orchestrates the weather
throughout the novel. The showdown between Tom and Gatsby, for
instance, takes place on the hottest day of the summer. The late
August heat is oppressive. There is nothing comforting about nature in
this modern wasteland; the sun is more a burden than a nourisher of
life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
On the appointed day, Nick arrives for lunch at Tom and Daisy's
house. Gatsby is there; so is Jordan Baker. All the major figures
are together if this were the final scene in a Shakespearean
tragedy. The nurse brings in the Buchanans' daughter. Gatsby is
stunned; he had never quite believed the child existed until this
moment. Drinks are served, and everyone tries to be well mannered,
avoiding the issue at hand. But Daisy and Gatsby cannot conceal
their love for one another, and Tom sees it.
Daisy has suggested that they go to New York for the afternoon,
and Tom now takes her up on it. Notice that they choose New York for
the confrontation to come- the same setting that Fitzgerald used for
the drunken party in Chapter II. There are close parallels between the
two parties, not only in the way the characters behave at them, but in
the fact that they have to pass through the valley of ashes to get
there.
Jordan, Tom, and Nick ride together in Gatsby's car and stop at
Wilson's garage to buy gas. Daisy and Gatsby drive by in Tom's blue
coupe, unnoticed by Myrtle Wilson. What Myrtle does notice from her
upstairs window is her lover Tom Buchanan, sitting in the yellow Rolls
Royce with Jordan. Jordan she takes for Daisy.
The whole scene at Wilson's garage has an eerie, mythic quality,
as though it were set in a world of its own. Wilson, described
literally as "green," has discovered that his wife has been having
an affair, but he doesn't know with whom. Myrtle thinks her husband
knows it's, Tom and watches, "terrified," from the window. Nick
realizes that Wilson and Tom are in identical positions- both having
just learned that their wives are unfaithful. Wilson wants to take
Myrtle away- out West- and Tom begins to feel his whole world
collapsing. Over all this, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg "kept their
vigil." The eyes seem to mock these characters' feeble attempts to
hide from the truth. The eyes alone seem to see the corruption and the
decadence beneath the gorgeous facade.
The yellow Rolls catches up with the blue coupe, and they decide
to engage a suite at the Plaza Hotel. It's four o'clock in the
afternoon and the heat is overwhelming. Tom, his ego battered by the
day's events, mocks Gatsby for calling people "old sport," insinuating
that Gatsby never went to Oxford. Gatsby, in a response that
delights Nick, simply tells the truth. He attended Oxford for five
months after the war through an opportunity offered to some of the
officers. Unwilling to let Gatsby get the upper hand, Tom asks him
point blank what his intentions are towards Daisy and starts attacking
Gatsby about his parties and his life-style. Gatsby, pushed into a
corner, responds, "'Your wife doesn't love you. She's never loved you.
She loves me.'"
The two men go after each other, begging Daisy to support them.
Gatsby wants Daisy to say she never loved Tom, never in all the
years of their marriage. It is this effort to deny the past- to
shape the world according to his dream- that brings about Gatsby's
downfall. Tom admits he has been less than an ideal husband, but
points out "'Why- there're things between Daisy and me that you'll
never know, things that neither of us can ever forget.'" Daisy has
tried up to this point to support Gatsby, but now she finds herself
turning to Tom. Now that Gatsby's dream has been pierced, Tom finds it
easy to tear it to pieces. He has done some investigating of
Gatsby's activities and has evidence about his "drug-store" fronts for
bootlegging operations. With each thrust, Gatsby's parries become
weaker and weaker, and we can feel Daisy slipping slowly but quietly
back into the protective camp of her husband. A romantic dream is
worth less to her than the security of a husband, unfaithful though he
may be. For Gatsby there is nothing left but "the dead dream," which
sustains him like a ghostly spirit that fights on after the body is
dead. The party is over. Tom has won. He is confident enough to send
Gatsby and Daisy home together in Gatsby's yellow car; Gatsby can do
no more harm to him. When they leave, Nick realizes that today is
his thirtieth birthday.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: NICK'S THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY Nick's birthday, like the green
light and the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, is one of those symbols that
gives the novel's action a deeper meaning. While we identify
emotionally with Gatsby, this is Nick's novel too, and his birthday
reminds us that it is a novel about Nick's growing up. He came to
New York, naive and inexperienced, having learned about life through
books. The summer's events have taught him about life in a way that no
book ever could- just as the years on Dan Cody's yacht educated
Gatsby. The final phase of his education is learning about death,
and death is just around the corner.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Fitzgerald lets us think about death before we know the victim.
The suspense works nicely; for a short time we know neither who is
dead nor how the person died. Michaelis, the young Greek who runs
the all-night restaurant next door to Wilson's garage, tells the story
as he experienced it: Myrtle Wilson, who had been locked indoors for
most of the day by her husband, had rushed out into the street shortly
after seven, frantically waving her arms, only to be struck by a car
coming from New York. The car had paused for a moment and then
driven on into the night. We are not told whose car it was, but we can
guess. Nick, piecing events together from Michaelis' and newspaper
accounts, pictures Myrtle Wilson kneeling in the road, her mouth
wide open, her "Left breast swinging loose like a flap." He wants to
emphasize her extraordinary vitality at the moment of her death and
the desperate agony with which she tries to hold on to life.
When Tom arrives with Nick and Jordan, his first thought is that
Wilson will remember the yellow car from that afternoon. His second
thought is that Gatsby was the driver. Tom has his dreams, small as
they may be, and he could never let himself believe that Daisy might
have been at the wheel.
As for Nick, he has had enough of all of these Easterners. When he
arrives with the others at Tom's house, he remains outside.
Suddenly, Gatsby calls to him from the bushes. He had been waiting for
them to get back, afraid that Tom might do something harmful to Daisy.
Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving and that he has decided to
take the blame for her. What other decision was possible by a man so
deeply in love? He is still afraid to leave and sends Nick to check on
Daisy. Nick looks in a window and sees Daisy and Tom sitting
opposite each other at the kitchen table, eating cold fried chicken
and talking. It is an ordinary domestic scene in sharp contrast to the
drama that surrounds them. They aren't happy, but they are not unhappy
either. Nick realizes that they have accepted each other again and
that Gatsby has lost Daisy irrevocably. She has returned to the
protection of Tom's money and influence. He will take care of her
and get her through the crisis. Nick goes home and leaves Gatsby
"standing there in the moonlight- watching over nothing."
The dream is over.

CHAPTER_VIII
CHAPTER VIII
-
Chapter VIII begins a few hours later. Nick has been unable to
sleep, and hearing Gatsby come in, he goes over to his friend's
house to talk. For the better part of the chapter Nick is alone with
Gatsby in his deserted mansion, listening to the story of Gatsby's
youth, his courtship of Daisy, and his experiences during the war. The
information helps Nick put together the final pieces of the puzzle
that is Gatsby. Now that the dream is over, the past is more real to
Gatsby than ever. Gatsby hopes that by talking about the Daisy he knew
in Louisville in 1917 he can keep the ghost of his dream alive.
All of us have wanted something we couldn't have, something that was
beyond our reach. And so, as Gatsby tells Nick about his courtship
of Daisy, we can't help but sympathize with him. We can understand how
he felt when he entered Daisy's home for the first time and fell in
love with everything about her. It was not only Daisy he hungered for,
it was her house and her possessions, too. The fact that everybody
wanted her merely increased her worth in Gatsby's eyes. He himself was
nothing but "a penniless young man without a past." She stood for
everything he was not- for everything he wanted to have and to become.
And so he "committed himself to the following of a grail," and made
marrying Daisy his ultimate goal in life.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: The grail- or the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper-
is what the knights of the round table were searching for. If they
found it, they would be saved. Fitzgerald uses the word grail to
suggest that for Gatsby, marrying Daisy was a kind of religious quest.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Daisy promised to wait for Gatsby until the war ended. What Gatsby
has not bargained for was Daisy's youth and her need for love and
the attention of society. She was too frivolous and insecure to stay
alone for long, and soon began going out to parties and dances. At one
of them, she met Tom Buchanan, who seemed safe and strong. She loved
Jay, but knew nothing about him- nothing about his past or his
practical plans for the future. And he wasn't there. So she married
Tom.
The previous chapter took place on the hottest day of the summer.
Now it is early morning. Autumn- symbol of change and of the
approach of death- is in the air. The gardener informs Gatsby that
he will drain the pool, because the falling leaves will clog the
pipes. Gatsby asks him to wait a day because he has never used the
pool and wants to take a swim.
Nick says good-bye to Gatsby, turns to walk away, then pauses, turns
back, and shouts "'They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn
bunch put together.'"
It's a very special moment that reveals to us why the novel is
called The Great Gatsby. Nick disapproves of Gatsby "from beginning to
end"- disapproves of his vulgar materialism; his tasteless pink suits;
his "gonnegtion" with Meyer Wolfsheim; his love of a woman as
shallow as Daisy; his pathetic efforts to win her back by showing
off what he has rather than who he is. And yet he is not part of the
"foul dust." His "incorruptible dream" has something pure and noble
about it, which sets him apart from the others. Tom, Daisy, Jordan-
they belong to the "rotten crowd" because they are selfish,
materialistic, and cruel. They are without spiritual values or
compassion. Gatsby, on the surface, seems just as far away from beauty
and grace. In reality he is nothing more than a thug. And yet in
Nick's eyes- and perhaps in ours- he is "worth the whole damn bunch
put together" because of his total dedication to his dream. When the
dream is gone, he has nothing left to live for.
Nick takes the train to New York, but he can't work. He keeps
thinking about Gatsby. Not even Jordan Baker can get his mind off
his friend. She tries to meet him in the city for a date, but Nick
turns her down- a fact that will contribute to their eventual break up
in the final chapter. Nick is tired of "the whole rotten bunch," and
that includes Jordan.
Unable to reach Gatsby by phone, Nick takes an early train back to
West Egg. As he passes the valley of ashes, he thinks about Myrtle
Wilson's death and tells us what George Wilson was doing from the time
of the accident to the present moment. Nick has gotten his information
from the Greek Michaelis and from newspaper reports.
Michaelis had sat up all night with George Wilson. At the very
moment that Nick and Gatsby were watching the dawn in West Egg,
Michaelis and Wilson were looking at the eyes of Dr. T. J.
Eckleburg, "which had just emerged, pale and enormous from the
dissolving night." To Wilson, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg are the
all-seeing, all-judging eyes of God. Wilson now believes that the
car that hit Myrtle was being driven by her lover. He has made up
his mind to play God himself and to revenge the murder of his wife. It
is simply a matter of finding out who owns the yellow car. His first
step is to find Tom Buchanan; Tom drove the car to New York the day
before and will know who was driving it back from New York when it hit
his wife.
By the time Nick gets to West Egg, Gatsby is lying dead in his pool.
The tragedy is complete. Wilson, having found out from Tom where
Gatsby lived, had gone to Gatsby's mansion and found him floating on
an air mattress in the pool. Wilson had shot Gatsby, then himself.
Nick wonders what Gatsby might have been thinking as he lay on the
mattress in the pool just before Wilson's arrival:
-
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. A new world,
material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams
like air, drifted fortuitously about...
-
One key to understanding this difficult passage is the phrase,
"material without being real." What Nick means is that for Gatsby, the
world is "material"- it is something he can touch and see and feel-
yet it is completely without meaning for him. Without Daisy- without
his dream- to sustain him he is like a child who wakes up one day
and finds himself in an utterly frightening and unfamiliar world.
Gatsby has lived "too long with a single dream"; without it life has
become absurd. A rose is beautiful because we feel its beauty, not
because it possesses beauty in itself. In the same way, the green
light at the end of Daisy's dock was special only because it meant
something special to Gatsby. In this new world, which Gatsby
encounters a rose is just a rose and a green light is not more than
a green light. Gatsby has been forced to grow up, or at least to
give up his childlike sense of wonder. Unlike the rest of the rotten
crowd, he cannot live without this private vision, and so he is, in
a sense, already dead when Wilson shoots him.

CHAPTER_IX
CHAPTER IX
-
Chapter IX covers the period from Gatsby's death to Nick's departure
for the Midwest later that autumn. It is a chapter which allows
Fitzgerald to tie together loose ends and to sum up the larger
significance of the novel in a final poetic passage that has become
one of the most famous in American literature.
Nick is still living in the East, but his heart is no longer
there. "I found myself on Gatsby's side, and alone," he says. He tries
to bring Gatsby's friends together for the funeral, but everyone has
conveniently disappeared. Tom and Daisy have gone away, leaving no
address. Meyer Wolfsheim does not want to be involved with Gatsby
now that the breath of scandal surrounds him. No one visits Gatsby's
house now except policemen, photographers, and newspapermen.
Finally, on the third day, a telegram arrives from Mr. Henry C. Gatz
of Minnesota, Gatsby's father. He has read of his son's death and is
on his way. (Is there any religious significance in the fact that
the father tries to reach Gatsby three days after his son's death?
Gatsby, like Christ, has been scorned by the world and only his father
seems to care.) Nick tries to convince Klipspringer, "the boarder," to
come to the funeral, but Klipspringer has a social engagement in
Westport. When he asks Nick to send his tennis shoes, which he had
left at Gatsby's, Nick hangs up on him.
No friends come to the funeral except Owl Eyes, the man who had
admired Gatsby's library back in the third chapter. Why he should care
enough to come makes for interesting speculation: your ideas are as
good as any.
As they stand there in the rain- Nick, Mr. Gatz, Owl Eyes, and a few
servants- we cannot help but be appalled by the way his so-called
friends have deserted him when he is no longer of any use to them. You
can look at their desertion, as Nick surely does, as proof of their
moral and spiritual bankruptcy. Or you can argue that Gatsby, in
pursuit of a false dream, has brought this fate down on himself.
Gatsby's father, of course, has loved his son all these years and
followed his career with special interest. He is proud of his boy
and totally unaware of the darker side of his life. He has saved a
picture of his son's house, which he apparently takes great pride in
showing to others as proof of his son's success. He has also brought
along a book, Hopalong Cassidy, which Jimmy owned as a boy. On the
flyleaf is a daily schedule of exercise, study, sports, "elocution,"
and work. The schedule, which reads like an excerpt from Ben
Franklin's Almanac, reminds us how deeply Gatsby believed- even as a
boy- in the American dream of success. Like millions of other young
Americans, he must have believed that life rewards those who work
hard, and that if he only stuck to his plan he could achieve
whatever he set out to accomplish. Whether Fitzgerald's novel
praises or condemns this dream is something you'll have to determine
for yourself.
With the account of Gatsby's funeral, Nick's story comes to an
end. In the novel's closing pages, Nick turns in on himself, and talks
about his own values and his preparations for a return to the Midwest.
 Before he leaves, Nick ends his relationship with Jordan Baker.
The scene with Jordan parallels the one at the end of Chapter III
where they discuss careless people and bad drivers. In both scenes
driving becomes a metaphor for life. Careless drivers stand for
those who hurt other people. Jordan is a careless driver, Nick is not.
Is this what drew them together and what ultimately pulled them apart?
Nick's feelings about Jordan are ambivalent throughout the scene, as
they are throughout the book. He is still in love with her, still
attracted to her, yet something in him wants to write an end to this
chapter in his life. She says she's engaged to another man; he doesn't
believe it. We sense that he could probably get her back if he
apologized for his behavior on the phone the day of Gatsby's death.
But he won't do that.
Nor will he, at first, shake hands with Tom Buchanan when he sees
him on Fifth Avenue. Although he blames Tom for Gatsby's death- it was
Tom who told Wilson that Gatsby owned the car- he can't really argue
with Tom or get mad at him. Why? Because Tom believes that Gatsby
was the driver and that his action was "entirely justified." Nick
probably realizes that his own moral standards will mean nothing to
Tom, and that the only way to deal with his type is to turn around and
walk away. Nick at this moment sees Tom and Daisy as careless people
who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into
their money... and let other people clean up the mess they had
made." He calls Jordan careless too- a "careless" driver. Nick's
decision to leave the East is tied up with his reaction of careless
people. He doesn't want to become that way himself. It's uncertain
when he finally shakes hands with Tom, whether he has finally
learned to accept others who are different from himself, thus
getting rid of what Tom calls his "provincial squeamishness"- or
whether he is doing only what is proper for a gentleman to do. In
any case, he is now rid of Tom and the world he represents, and can
return to a world of principles and traditions in the Midwest.
There's no way you can understand Nick's final thoughts without
having them in front of you. So, open your books and read Nick's words
again. The meaning of the novel is summed up here, and the novel is
transformed from a story of a small group of people at a moment of
time to a portrait of an entire nation.
It is Nick's last night in West Egg. He has walked over to
Gatsby's mansion and erased an obscene word someone has scrawled on
the deserted house. He walks down to the beach. As the moon rises
and the houses melt away in his imagination, he thinks of what this
island must have looked like to the Dutch sailors seeing it for the
first time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a new
world then- pure, unspoiled. Nick calls it "a fresh green breast of
the new world." Nick realizes that men have always been dreamers,
but that dreamers cannot simply dream. They must have some object or
person to fix their dreams upon. Such was this continent, he thinks,
in the early days of the Republic. The idea of America as a land of
infinite possibilities was so magnificent that man was "face to face
for the last time in history with something commensurate to his
capacity for wonder." The land- its physical beauty and its apparently
limitless horizons- were worthy of the dream.
We have come to call this idea "the American dream." Jefferson,
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were only a few of the spokesmen for
this dream who saw in America a hope for equality and
self-fulfillment. This was Gatsby's dream, too, Nick thinks. For
Gatsby the green light at the end of Daisy's dock symbolized the
same American dream that drove the Dutch sailors to the New World, the
Minutemen to Concord, and Thoreau to Walden Pond. Gatsby believed in
the dream, and Nick will always love him for it. But what Gatsby never
understood is that the dream was already behind him, "somewhere back
in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the
republic rolled on under the night." Unable to find an object or a
person commensurate with his capacity for wonder, Gatsby finds
Daisy, an unworthy and shallow substitute for the real dream.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Nick seems to suggest that America in the 1920s has lost its
way- deliberately or inevitably. American has become a shallow,
materialistic nation, and the dream for which people fought and
about which poets wrote has turned into a cheap and vulgar
substitute for the real thing.
Fitzgerald seems to be saying that what keeps Americans going as
individuals is the belief in that dream, and so they struggle like
Gatsby to attain it. But they are like "boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past." Americans row and row against
the current of time, trying to get back to that dream, bearing
themselves backward like Gatsby, who believed the past could be
repeated, but doomed by the hand of time to failure. Whether
Fitzgerald believes Americans can recapture that dream, or whether
it's part of their lost childhood- both as individuals and as a
nation- is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
The Great Gatsby is not, then, just a book about the 1920s. It is
a book about America- its promise, and the betrayal of that promise.
Throughout the book Fitzgerald has contrasted Gatsby the dreamer
with "the foul dust" that preyed on his dream. The tragedy of Gatsby
is that he still dreams the dream, but that he is not wise enough or
strong enough to see that Daisy is not worthy of his devotion, of
his sacrifice. He cannot step back to see where he has gone wrong.
Nick can. Nick loves Gatsby, but he knows what is wrong with
Gatsby's dream. And so, his education completed, he returns to the
Midwest to begin his own adult life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

TESTS_AND_ANSWERS
A STEP BEYOND
TESTS AND ANSWERS (FGRETEST)
-
TESTS
-
TEST 1
-
_____ 1. Nick Carraway was born
-
A. in the Northeast
B. in the Midwest
C. in the South
-
_____ 2. The character who first appears "in riding clothes...
standing with his legs apart on the front porch" is
-
A. Gatsby
B. Tom Buchanan
C. George Wilson
-
_____ 3. The pretentious expression, "I'm p-paralyzed with
happiness," is spoken by
-
 A. Jordan Baker
B. Daisy Buchanan
C. Gatsby
-
_____ 4. James Gatz is
-
A. Daisy's cousin
B. Gatsby's piano player
C. Gatsby's real name
-
_____ 5. Nick Carraway recalls a story which implied that Jordan
Baker once
-
A. betrayed a close friend
B. stole some money
C. cheated at golf
-
_____ 6. Gatsby shows a police officer
-
A. a fifty dollar bill
B. a Christmas card from the police commissioner
C. the damage done to the front fender of his car
-
_____ 7. The character who hangs up the phone in Nick's ear "with a
sharp click" is
-
A. Gatsby
B. Tom Buchanan
C. Jordan Baker
-
_____ 8. When Nick tells Gatsby, "You can't repeat the past,"
Gatsby replies
-
A. "Of course you can."
B. "After all I've done? That's nonsense."
C. "I'd never thought of that before, Old Sport."
-
_____ 9. Doctor T. J. Eckleburg becomes a symbol of
-
A. Gatsby's "romantic readiness"
B. Nick's friendship for Gatsby
C. the lack of morals prevalent in the East
-
_____ 10. Myrtle Wilson's nose is broken by
-
A. Gatsby
B. Tom Buchanan
C. George Wilson
-
11. Is Gatsby a "hero?" Discuss.
-
12. Describe Fitzgerald's attitude toward money in The Great Gatsby.
-
13. Discuss Nick Carraway as Narrator and Character.
-
14. Analyze Fitzgerald's use of setting as "moral geography."
-
15. Select one of the major symbols of the novel and show how
Fitzgerald uses it.
-
TEST 2
-
_____ 1. The expression "and the holocaust was complete" refers to
-
A. Myrtle's death
B. George Wilson's death
C. Gatsby's death
-
_____ 2. Nick left his home to come to New York in an effort to
-
A. make money
B. meet new people
C. locate Gatsby
-
_____ 3. The character who has "one of those rare smiles with a
quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come
across four of five times in life" is
-
A. Daisy Buchanan
B. Gatsby
C. Jordan Baker
-
_____ 4. The character who, according to Gatsby, "fixed the world
series" is
-
A. Wolfsheim
B. Klipspringer
C. Owl Eyes
-
_____ 5. Apparently, most of Gatsby's money, has come from
-
A. drug sales
B. bootlegging
C. bond investments
-
_____ 6. When Myrtle Wilson is killed, the car that hit her was
driven by
-
A. Gatsby
B. Daisy
C. Tom
-
_____ 7. "The promise of a decade of loneliness" is sensed by
-
A. Nick
B. Gatsby
C. Dan Cody
-
_____ 8. The most significant change in Daisy's life since before
the war is that she now
-
A. has a child
B. loves Gatsby
C. likes having money
-
_____ 9. "That ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through
the amorphous trees" is
-
 A. George Wilson
B. Gatsby
C. Tom Buchanan
-
_____ 10. A symbol of the human capacity for hope is
-
A. Gatsby's immense mansion
B. the green light at the end of Daisy's dock
C. Owl Eyes
-
11. Compare and contrast The Great Gatsby with Conrad's Heart of
Darkness.
-
12. Analyze the influence of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" on The
Great Gatsby.
-
13. Discuss Fitzgerald's handling of time in The Great Gatsby.
-
14. Show how Gatsby and Nick are really two sides of Fitzgerald.
-
15. Describe how The Great Gatsby is a commentary on the American
Dream.
-
ANSWERS
-
TEST 1
-
1. B 2. B 3. B 4. C 5. C 6. B 7. C
8. A 9. C 10. B
-
11. Everyone wants to admire someone. Do you admire Gatsby? Is he
a hero to you? If so, why? If not, why not? This essay gives you a
wonderful opportunity to take sides. From one point of view, Gatsby is
a crook, a bootlegger, a vulgar materialist. From another point of
view, he is a dreamer, faithful to his dream to the very end. Nick
sees him as "great," despite the fact that Gatsby stands for many
things that Nick doesn't believe in.
To write this essay you will want to look with particular care at
those passages where Nick talks about Gatsby- both near the middle
of Chapter VIII, and in the closing pages of the novel. If you think
that Gatsby is not a hero, you will want to pay special attention to
Meyer Wolfsheim and to Gatsby's association with him. Look at the many
strange phone calls from Philadelphia and Chicago and at Tom's
thoughts in Chapter VII on what Wolfsheim and Gatsby did to Walter
Chase.
For further details see the section on "Jay Gatsby" in The
Characters.
-
12. Most of us, like Fitzgerald, have ambivalent feelings about
money. We want it, we are excited by it, but we don't want it to
dominate our lives. What do you think Fitzgerald's attitude toward
money is in this novel? Does he treat all the rich characters in the
same way? Is money itself good or evil, or does it depend on who is
using it and for what purpose? These are all questions an essay
might explore.
You will want to look at the description of Tom and Daisy's house in
Chapter I and of Gatsby's house in Chapter III. Nick's comment about
Tom and Daisy's money near the end of the final chapter is helpful, as
is Nick's description of Tom as a character in Chapter I. Look at
the scene in Chapter V where Gatsby shows off his possessions to
Daisy. Why does Daisy cry in his shirts? What does this say about
her attitude toward money and about things money can buy?
There is no easy answer to this question, so don't feel that any one
answer is right. Fitzgerald, as you read in The Author and His
Times, said that he could hold two contradictory views at the same
time. Perhaps that is what you think he does in this book?
-
13. This is a good essay question for those who enjoy debating
with the critics. Most readers find Nick what is called a "reliable
narrator." They share his views and read the novel from his point of
view. A few critics disagree. They say Nick is immature and should
be more critical of Gatsby than he is. They argue that Nick is too
sentimental about Gatsby, and that it would be very dangerous for us
to adopt the same attitude that Nick adopts.
In writing this essay, you will want to understand clearly Nick's
attitudes toward this Eastern world and the characters who live in it.
Nick expresses his attitudes mainly in the first and last chapters.
Once you have explored his point of view, you should be prepared to
argue either that Fitzgerald shares Nick's views and wants us to share
them, too; or that we as readers are being asked to be more mature and
realistic than Nick is. Gary Scrimgeour's essay "Against The Great
Gatsby," (see The Critics section) makes a good case against Nick,
if you're looking for some help with your argument.
-
14. We have discussed this issue at length both in the section on
setting and in the places in the scene-by-scene discussion where
each of the settings is introduced for the first time. You will
particularly want to review the opening three chapters where East Egg,
West Egg, the valley of ashes, and New York City are each introduced
for the first time. Ask yourself what values is each place
associated with. Is Fitzgerald supporting one set of values against
the others? If so, with which of the places are we most asked to
identify? Why? Write about the fact that all of the characters are
originally from the Midwest- an important factor in this equation of
place with values. In writing your essay, you may want to compare
the locations in this novel with locations in your own community.
-
15. Be sure you know what a symbol is before you start. Hugh
Holman's A Handbook to Literature is very helpful. Then select the
symbol you want to write about and go through the novel, noting each
place it is mentioned. The green light is mentioned at the end of
Chapter I, the middle of Chapter V, and on the last page of the novel.
The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg are described in detail at the
beginning of Chapter II. They are also an important part of Michaelis'
description of George Wilson's state of mind in Chapter VIII.
Remember as you write that symbols don't mean just one thing.
Symbols are pointers that merely suggest other things beyond
themselves.
-
TEST 2
-
1. B 2. A 3. B 4. A 5. B 6. B 7. A
8. A 9. A 10. B
-
11. This is a particularly good essay topic if you have already
studied Heart of Darkness. Both novels are short, compact, intense. In
each case, an inexperienced young man who is the narrator (Nick in
Fitzgerald's novel, Marlow in Conrad's) goes on a journey and meets an
extraordinary character who has a profound influence on the young
man's life. In each case the young man comes to admire the
extraordinary character, even though that character is someone the
world might not admire. The heroes (Gatsby and Kurtz) die, and the
young narrators are moved by those deaths to tell their stories.
Fitzgerald modeled The Great Gatsby on Heart of Darkness, and a
study of the two books together would be most rewarding.
If the essay is a shorter one, then merely compare and contrast Nick
and Marlow or Gatsby and Kurtz.
-
12. If you have read Eliot's famous poem, published in 1922, you
cannot help but be struck by some of the ways in which Fitzgerald
learned from Eliot. Eliot's poem is full of barrenness, dryness, and
sterility. His "Waste Land" is a desert land, thirsty for the water of
spiritual rebirth. In Eliot's world the characters are shallow,
without lasting values, without deep feelings. Fitzgerald's
characters, even the minor ones who show up at Gatsby's parties,
suffer from the same emptiness, symbolized by "dust." Fitzgerald's
valley of ashes is a symbol that may have been inspired directly by
Eliot's masterpiece. Both Eliot and Fitzgerald were young men who
became spokesmen for their generation. Many young men in the 1920s who
read "The Waste Land" said that the poem expressed their own
feelings about life; many said the same about Fitzgerald's work.
-
13. How do we get to know people? We meet them, become interested in
them, start a friendship perhaps, and then take an interest in their
past lives. We get to know Gatsby in the same way. In the first
three chapters Fitzgerald explores the present- the summer of 1922. In
Chapters IV, VI, and VIII he takes us into the world of Gatsby's past.
Gatsby is a kind of mystery to be solved, and we are given more and
more clues as we go along. Our last piece of information about
Gatsby's past does not come until Chapter IX, only pages before the
end of the book. Discuss whether you find this movement back and forth
from past to present more interesting than being told a story
chronologically. (For more details, read comments on Form and
Structure.)
-
14. Fitzgerald often said that he had a romantic side that made
him throw himself passionately into parties, and into other intense
experiences with Zelda. That side didn't know when to say "no," and it
often drove Fitzgerald into situations that were dangerous and
destructive. The other side of Fitzgerald was hard working,
disciplined. This side of him wanted to be a famous writer and knew
how much self-restraint and hard work were required to do the job
well. You can argue in your paper that these two sides of Fitzgerald
are captured in turn, by Nick and Gatsby.
It will help you to reread the section of this guide called The
Author and His Times, and to read one of the fine Fitzgerald
biographies by Arthur Mizener or Andrew Turnbull. You may want to take
your essay a step afield by considering Gatsby and Nick as the two
sides of any human being including yourself.
-
15. This subject has been treated frequently throughout this
guidebook. See especially the comments under Themes, in the section
called Other Elements. Marius Bewley's excellent essay, "Scott
Fitzgerald's Criticism of America," is also very helpful. (see The
Critics section). You will need to think about what the phrase "the
American dream" means and whether or not it means the same thing as
"the American dream of success." If it is "American" for a young man
without money or family background to want to make it big, what is
wrong with Gatsby's dream?
Fitzgerald hints at an answer to this and related questions in the
extraordinary passage on the final page of the novel (see commentary
on Chapter IX). You will have to decide finally whether you think
Fitzgerald is criticizing the American dream itself or just the form
that the dream is taking during the 1920s.

TERM_PAPER_IDEAS
TERM PAPER IDEAS (FGRETERM)
-
1. Who is the central character of The Great Gatsby, Nick or Gatsby?
Why?
-
2. Examine Fitzgerald's use of Nick as narrator of the story. What
are the advantages and/or problems of telling the story in this way?
-
3. Examine Nick's values. How are these similar to or different from
the values of the other characters?
-
4. Analyze Jay Gatsby. What makes him "great"?
-
5. Analyze Gatsby's dream. What does he believe in? Is his dream
worthwhile?
-
6. Analyze Nick's attitude toward Gatsby's dream. Do you think
Nick is being too sentimental?
-
7. What is meant by the phrase "the American dream"? How is Gatsby a
novel about the American dream?
-
8. Study Gatsby's past: his family background, his education under
Dan Cody, his meeting with Daisy in Louisville in 1917. How does our
knowledge of his past help us to understand who he really is?
-
9. Analyze the symbolism of the green light at the end of Daisy's
dock.
-
10. Analyze the symbolism of the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.
-
11. Write an essay on the use of color symbolism in the novel,
especially the colors white and yellow.
-
12. Examine the symbolic use of names in the novel. Are the names
simply realistic or do they stand for something beyond themselves?
-
13. Examine the valley of ashes as a symbolic setting in the
novel. How is it related to T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land"?
-
14. Examine East Egg, especially the home of Tom and Daisy Buchanan,
as a "moral" setting. What values of the Buchanans are mirrored in
their life-style?
-
15. Examine the world of West Egg, especially Gatsby's mansion.
How is it different from East Egg. Why? What does it represent?
-
16. Examine New York City as a setting, especially through the two
parties which occur in New York in Chapters II and VII.
-
 17. Examine Tom Buchanan as a character. Is he sympathetic? If
not, why? How does he symbolize the world of the very rich?
-
18. Examine Jordan Baker as a character, looking at her name, her
honesty or dishonesty, her athletic career, her relationship with
Nick.
-
19. Examine Myrtle Wilson as a character. What makes us
sympathetic to her? How is she in some ways like Gatsby?
-
20. Look closely at the world of Gatsby's parties and the people who
come to them. Who are they and how do they feel about Gatsby?
-
21. Analyze the role of Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel. He is based on
Arnold Rothstein ("the man who fixed the 1919 World Series"). You
may wish to do some research on Rothstein.
-
22. Do some reading on prohibition in the 1920s. How did the
bootlegging business develop and who controlled it? How does our
knowledge of this affect our understanding of Gatsby?
-
23. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived in Great Neck, Long Island,
during the early 1920s and gave and went to parties similar to
Gatsby's. Do some reading on Scott and Zelda in Mizener or Turnbull
and analyze the similarities and/or differences between the two
worlds- Fitzgerald's and Gatsby's.
-
24. Fitzgerald admitted that Gatsby started out as a particular
person and ended up as part of himself. How is Fitzgerald like Gatsby?
What aspects of himself does Fitzgerald seem to be dramatizing in
Gatsby?
-
25. Fitzgerald put another part of himself in Nick Carraway. How
would you describe this aspect of Fitzgerald?
-
26. Compare and contrast Gatsby and Carraway as parts of yourself.
-
27. What is meant by the term "The Jazz Age"? How is The Great
Gatsby a portrait of the times?
-
28. What do you think of the morality of the characters? Is
Fitzgerald passing judgment on them? Are we being asked to?
-
29. Compare and contrast the parties in the first three chapters
(the one at Tom and Daisy's, the one in New York, and the one at
Gatsby's). What do we learn from an analysis of these three worlds?
-
30. Do a close analysis of the scenes in Chapter V where Gatsby
meets Daisy for the first time and takes her to see his house and
his possessions. Does this scene increase your sympathy for Gatsby?
-
31. Do a close analysis of the two parties at Gatsby's house
(Chapters II and VI). How are they similar? How different? Is the
difference important in the development of the novel's themes?
-
32. Do a close analysis of the last page of the novel. What is
Fitzgerald saying about the past? About American history?
-
33. Fitzgerald first thought of calling The Great Gatsby "Trimalchio
in West Egg" or "Trimalchio." Who is Trimalchio? (See Glossary.)
Compare and contrast Trimalchio and Gatsby.
-
34. The narrative technique of Gatsby is modeled on Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Compare and contrast the two works,
thematically and stylistically.
-
35. Compare and contrast Nick Carraway with Marlow in Conrad's Heart
of Darkness.
-
36. Compare and contrast Gatsby with Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness.
-
37. Read the sections in Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction on
the difference between reliable and unreliable narrators. Would you
consider Nick Carraway to be reliable?
-
38. Analyze Fitzgerald's style in Gatsby. What do you think he is
best at? Dialogue? Description? Narration of events? Reflection?
-
39 Examine The Great Gatsby as a tragedy. Who is the tragic hero?
-
40. Examine Daisy Buchanan as a character. What parallels do you see
between her and Zelda Fitzgerald?
-
41. Look at the people who attend Gatsby's funeral. Who are they?
Who does not come? What comment is Fitzgerald making through this
contrast?
-
42. There is a lot of talk about carelessness in the novel. What
does Fitzgerald mean by "carelessness"? Who is called careless and
why?
-
43. Is Gatsby just a book for rich people? If you are poor or
black or Hispanic, how do you react to this book? What does it say
to you about America?
-
44. Is Gatsby relevant to the late 20th century? If so, how?
-
45. Compare Rudolph Miller in the story "Absolution" with Jay
Gatsby. Fitzgerald originally intended to use "Absolution" as a
preface to Gatsby. What parallels do you see?
-
46. Compare Dexter Green in the story "Winter Dreams" with Jay
Gatsby. What relationships do you see between the characters?
-
47. As a college or high school student, you go to parties and
seek out members of the opposite sex in hopes of winning them. Does
Gatsby's seeking out of Daisy correspond to this aspect of your life?
-
48. Analyze the East and the Midwest as symbols of different
morals and life-styles in the novel. Does the contrast still hold?
-
49. The novel centers on three sexual relationships- Gatsby-Daisy,
Tom-Myrtle, Nick-Jordan. Write an essay comparing arid contrasting
these three affairs. Do you feel the same about all of them?
-
50. Fitzgerald himself said the greatest flaw of the novel was his
failure to develop the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy after
their reunion in West Egg. Do you agree? What other flaws are there?

GLOSSARY
GLOSSARY (FGREGLOS)
-
The Glossary is limited to proper nouns, the meaning of which
might not be clear in the context of the novel. Symbolic terms such as
grail or incarnation are explained in the chapter-by-chapter analysis.
-
"AIN'T WE GOT FUN" A very popular song of the day, Klipspringer
sings it to Gatsby and Daisy in Chapter VI.
-
BELASCO David Belasco (1853-1931) was a very successful American
actor, producer, playwright, and theater manager. Owl Eyes thinks of
Gatsby as a "regular Belasco," because of his magnificent library
and real books.
-
JAMES J. HILL American railroad tycoon and financier (1838-1916);
one of many rich Americans referred to in the novel.
-
KAISER WILHELM The Emperor of Germany in 1914 at the outbreak of
World War I. Gatsby is suspected of being a nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm.
-
KANT Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was famous German philosopher who
stared at a church steeple to help his concentration. Nick, in Chapter
V, stares at Gatsby's house, "like Kant at his church steeple."
-
LAKE FOREST A suburb of Chicago where very rich and socially
prestigious families live. Tom Buchanan comes East with a string of
polo ponies from Lake Forest.
-
MIDAS... MORGAN... MAECENAS The first was the legendary king who
was granted his wish that everything he touch change to gold. "Morgan"
refers to J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), the famous New York
financier. "Maecenas" was a wealthy Etruscan patron of the Roman poets
Horace and Virgil. All three are examples of Fitzgerald's
fascination with wealth and the very wealthy.
-
MONTENEGRO Once a small country on the Adriatic Sea, now part of
Yugoslavia. Gatsby says he has a medal from "little Montenegro."
-
NEW HAVEN The city in Connecticut where Yale University is located.
"New Haven" in this novel means Yale, where Tom and Nick went to
college.
-
OXFORD Oxford University in England. Meyer Wolfsheim refers to it
mistakenly as "Oggsford College." Oxford is not a college, but a
university, made up of a collection of colleges.
-
PLAZA HOTEL The famous hotel in New York City at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. You can still take carriage rides
from the Plaza today. (see Chapter IV).
-
ROCKEFELLER John D. Rockefeller (1839 1939) was an industrialist and
philanthropist who founded the Standard Oil Company. He was perhaps
the ultimate symbol of wealth in the United States.
-
"SHEIK OF ARABY" Another popular song of the day. overheard by Nick
and Jordan in New York.
-
TOSTOFF Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World is an
imaginary composition by an imaginary composer. The jazz orchestra
plays it for the guests at Gatsby's party in Chapter III. It's
self-important title is Fitzgerald's cynical comment on how jazz tried
to present itself as a serious rival to classical music during the
'20s.
-
TRIMALCHIO Central character of the Satyricon by Petronius.
Trimalchio is a vulgar, self-made millionaire whose brief and meteoric
rise to the top parallels Gatsby's brief career. Fitzgerald thought of
calling the novel, "Trimalchio in West Egg."
-
VON HINDENBURG German general, chief of staff in World War I, later
president of the Weimar Republic. Some say Gatsby worked for von
Hindenberg- another example of the Gatsby myth.
-
WORLD SERIES OF 1919 The famous "Black Sox" scandal in which the
Chicago White Sox deliberately lost the World Series to the Cincinnati
Reds, a much weaker team, in order to make money for themselves. The
arrangements were made through a group of gamblers, the key figure
of which was Arnold Rothstein, the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in
Gatsby. (See Chapter IV.)

CRITICS
THE CRITICS (FGRECRIT)
-
A LETTER TO FITZGERALD FROM HIS EDITOR, NOVEMBER 20, 1924
I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is
an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and
moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of
employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this
puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than
that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives
perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely
effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at
times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless
universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see
different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to
the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down
upon the human scene. It's magnificent!
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author:
The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, 1950
-
FITZGERALD'S DREAM: A PARALLEL TO GATSBY
When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I
learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream
divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even
though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry
immediately I had married her, but being patient in those days, made
the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along
and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives.
But I was a man divided- she wanted me to work too much for her and
not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was
dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working
herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.
Scott Fitzgerald, "Letter to His Daughter,"
July 7, 1938 from Letters to His Daughter, 1965
-
 FITZGERALD'S DOUBLE VISION
He cultivated a sort of double vision. He was continually trying
to present the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the
Riviera, on the North Shore of Long Island, and in the Hollywood
studios; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration and
simultaneously he drove the mist away... He regarded himself as a
pauper living among millionaires... a sullen peasant among the
nobility, and he said that his point of vantage "was the dividing line
between two generations," prewar and postwar. It was this habit of
keeping a double point of view that distinguished his work. There were
popular and serious novelists in his time, but there was something
of a gulf between them; Fitzgerald was one of the very few popular
writers who were also serious artists.
Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue,"
The New Yorker, 1945
-
FITZGERALD'S ARTISTIC METHOD IN GATSBY
...the characters are not "developed": the wealthy and brutal Tom
Buchanan haunted by his "scientific" vision of the doom of
civilization, the vaguely guilty, vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker, the
dim Wolfsheim, who fixed the World Series of 1919, are treated, we
might say, as if they were ideographs, a method of economy that is
reinforced by the ideographic use of that is made of the Washington
Heights flat, the terrible "valley of ashes" seen from the Long Island
Railroad, Gatsby's incoherent parties, and the huge sordid eyes of the
oculist's advertising sign. (It is a technique which gives the novel
an affinity with The Waste Land, between whose author and Fitzgerald
there existed a reciprocal admiration.) Gatsby himself, once stated,
grows only in the understanding of the narrator. He is allowed to
say very little in his own person. Indeed, apart from the famous
"Her voice is full of money," he says only one memorable thing, but
that remark is overwhelming in its intellectual audacity: when he is
forced to admit that his lost Daisy did perhaps love her husband, he
says, "In any case it was just personal." With that sentence he
achieves an insane greatness, convincing us that he really is a
Platonic conception of himself, really some sort of Son of God.
Lionel Trilling, "F. Scott Fitzgerald,"
The Liberal Imagination, 1950
-
THE GREAT GATSBY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it
exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that
concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The
illusions seem more real than the reality itself. Embodied in the
subordinate characters in the novel, they threaten to invade the whole
of the picture. On the other hand, the reality is embodied in
Gatsby; and as opposed to the hard, tangible Illusions, the reality is
a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the possession of a
vision, a faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood
possibilities of life.
Marius Bewley, "Scott Fitzgerald's
Criticism of America," 1954
-
THE SYMBOLISM OF EAST AND WEST
Fitzgerald's dichotomy of East and West has the poetic truth of
James's antithesis of provincial American virtue and refined
European sensibility. Like The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors,
Gatsby is a story of "displaced persons" who have journeyed eastward
in search of a larger and experience of life. To James this reverse
migration from the New to the Old World has in itself no special
significance. To Fitzgerald, however, the lure of the East
represents a profound displacement of the American dream, a turning
back upon itself of the historic pilgrimage towards the frontier which
had, in fact, created and sustained that dream.
Robert Ornstein, "Scott Fitzgerald's
Fable of East and West," 1957
-
COLOR SYMBOLISM IN THE GREAT GATSBY: DAISY
The white Daisy embodies the vision which Gatsby (who, like Lord
Jim, usually wears white suits) seeks to embrace- but which Nick,
who discovers the corrupt admixture of dream and reality, rejects in
rejecting Jordan. For, except in Gatsby's extravagant imagination, the
white does not exist pure: it is invariably stained by the money,
the yellow. Daisy is the white flower- with the golden center. If in
her virginal beauty she "dressed in white and had a little white
roadster," she is, Nick realizes, "high in a white palace the king's
daughter, the golden girl." "Her voice is like money"; she carries a
"little gold pencil"; when she visits Gatsby there are "two rows of
brass buttons on her dress."
Daniel J. Schneider, "Color-Symbolism
in The Great Gatsby," 1964
-
AN ATTACK ON NICK AS A CHARACTER
Carraway's distinctiveness as a character is that he fails to
learn anything from his story, that he can continue to blind himself
even after his privileged overview of Gatsby's fate.... He refuses
to admit that his alliance with Gatsby, his admiration for the man,
results from their sharing the same weakness.... He has learned
nothing. His failure to come to any self-knowledge makes him like
the person who blames the stone for stubbing his toe. It seems
inevitable that he will repeat the same mistakes as soon as the
feeling that "temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
sorrows and short-winded elations of men" has departed.... Had
Carraway been defeated by the impersonal forces of an evil world in
which he was an ineffectual innocent, his very existence- temporary or
not- would lighten the picture. But his defeat is caused by
something that lies within himself: his own lack of fibre, his own
willingness to deny reality, his own substitution of dreams for
knowledge of self and the world, his own sharing in the very vices
of which his fellow men stand accused.
Gary J. Scrimgeour, "Against The Great Gatsby," 1966

ADVISORY_BOARD
ADVISORY BOARD (FGREADVB)
-
We wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our
Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our
manuscripts to provide quality materials.
-
Murray Bromberg, Principal
Wang High School of Queens, Holliswood, New York
-
Sandra Dunn, English Teacher
Hempstead High School, Hempstead, New York
-
Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English
Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York
-
 Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook
-
Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee
National Council of Teachers of English Student Guide Series
Fort Morgan, Colorado
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Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher
Tamalpais Union High School District
Mill Valley, California
-
Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English
State University of New York College at Buffalo
-
Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
-
David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies
State University of New York College at Geneseo
-
Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education
State University of New York at Buffalo
-
Frank O'Hare, Professor of English
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
-
Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee
National Council of Teachers of English
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Guilderland Central School District, New York
-
Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, Illinois
-
-
THE END OF BARRON'S BOOK NOTES
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY

BIBLIOGRAPHY (FGREBIBL)

GREAT_GATSBY
FURTHER READING
-
CRITICAL WORKS
-
Much has been written about F Scott Fitzgerald and about The Great
Gatsby in particular. The list that follows includes some of the
most important works.
-
BIOGRAPHIES
-
Donaldson, Scott. Fool for Love. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983
-
Milford, Nancy. Zelda. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
-
Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1951.
-
 Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner's, 1962.
-
CRITICAL STUDIES- BOOKS
-
Hoffman, Frederick J., ed. The Great Gatsby: A Study. New York:
Scribner's, 1962.
-
_____. The Twenties. New York: Viking Press, 1955
-
Kazin, Alfred. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, Cleveland:
World, 1951.
-
Lockridge, Ernest H., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The
Great Gatsby, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
-
Miller, James E., Jr. The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald.
The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1957
-
_____. F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique. New York: New
York University Press, 1964.
-
Mizener, Arthur F., ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
-
Perosa, Sergio. The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1965.
-
Piper, Henry Dan. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. New
York: Holt, 1965.
-
Trilling, Lionel. "F. Scott Fitzgerald" in The Liberal
Imagination. Garden City: Doubleday, 1950.
-
CRITICAL STUDIES- ARTICLES
-
Bewley, Marius. "Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America." Sewanee
Review 62 (Spring, 1954), 223-46.
-
Bicknell, John W. "The Wasteland of F. Scott Fitzgerald." Virginia
Quarterly Review, 30 (Autumn; 1954), 556-72.
-
Cowley, Malcolm, "Third Act and Epilogue." The New Yorker (June
30, 1945).
-
Dyson, A. E. "'The Great Gatsby': 36 Years After." Modern Fiction
Studies, 7 (Spring, 1962), 162-67.
-
Fussell, Edwin. "Fitzgerald's Brave New World." English Literary
History, 19 (December, 1952), 291-306.
-
Hanzo, Thomas A. "The Theme and the Narrator of The Great Gatsby."
Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (Winter, 1956-57), 183-190.
-
Hemingway, Ernest. "Scott Fitzgerald" and "Hawks Do Not Share" in
A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), 145-191.
-
Hindus, Milton. "The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg." University
Studies in English, 3 (Spring, 1957), 22-31.
-
 Ornstein, Robert. "Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West."
College English, 18 (December, 1956), 139-43.
-
Schneider, Daniel J. "Color-Symbolism in The Great Gatsby." The
University Review, 31 (1964), 13-18.
-
Scrimgeour, Gary J. "Against The Great Gatsby." Criticism, 8
(Winter, 1966), 75-86.
-
Stallman, Robert W. "Conrad and The Great Gatsby." Twentieth Century
Literature 1 (April, 1955), 5-12.
-
Thale, Jerome. "The Narrator as Hero." Twentieth Century Literature,
3 (July, 1957), 69-73.
-
AUTHOR'S OTHER WORKS
-
This Side of Paradise (novel), 1920
Flappers and Philosophers (short stories), 1920
The Beautiful and Damned (novel), 1921
Tales of the Jazz Age (stories), 1922
All the Sad Young Men (stories), 1926
Tender is the Night (novel), 1934
Taps at Reveille (stories), 1935
The Last Tycoon (unfinished novel), ed. Edmund Wilson, 1941
The Crack-Up (essays), ed. Edmund Wilson, 1945
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Selection of 28 Stories, ed.
Malcom Cowley, 1951
Afternoon of an Author (uncollected stories and essays), ed. Arthur
Mizener, 1957
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull, 1963
Letters to His Daughter, ed. Andrew Turnbull, 1965
-
-
THE END OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR BARRON'S BOOK NOTES
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY

1932

WILLIAM FAULKNER'S
LIGHT IN AUGUST

by Michael Gallantz
Communications Program
School of Business Administration
University of California at Berkeley

SERIES COORDINATOR
Murray Bromberg, Principal,
Wang High School of Queens, Holliswood, New York
Past President, High School Principals Association of New York City

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to Milton Katz and Julius Liebb for their contribution to
the Book Notes series.
(C) Copyright 1985 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc.
Electronically Enhanced Text (C) Copyright 1993, World Library, Inc.

CONTENTS
 CONTENTS
SECTION............................ SEARCH ON

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES............................. FLIGAUTH

THE NOVEL
The Plot............................................. FLIGPLOT
The Characters....................................... FLIGCHAR
Other Elements
Setting......................................... FLIGSETT
Themes.......................................... FLIGTHEM
Style........................................... FLIGSTYL
Point of View................................... FLIGVIEW
Form and Structure.............................. FLIGFORM
THE STORY............................................ FLIGSTOR

A STEP BEYOND
Tests and Answers.................................... FLIGTEST
Term Paper Ideas and other Topics for Writing........ FLIGTERM
Glossary............................................. FLIGGLOS
The Critics.......................................... FLIGCRIT

Advisory Board....................................... FLIGADVB

Bibliography......................................... FLIGBIBL

AUTHOR_AND_HIS_TIMES
---------------------------------------------------------
Electronically Enhanced Text (C) Copyright 1991 - 1993 World Library, Inc.