 |
| The Great Gatsby |
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in 1924 while living in France, looking back at America with the particular clarity of distance, and the novel has the quality of a vision rather than a report — brilliantly lit, slightly feverish, more concerned with what things mean than with what they literally are.
Nick Carraway narrates, and his reliability as a narrator has been productively debated since the novel's publication. He tells us he is one of the few honest people he knows, which is exactly the kind of thing a dishonest person might say, or an honest person who has not examined his own complicity carefully enough. What Nick does unmistakably is witness — the parties, the carelessness, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby watches from across the bay.
Gatsby is the American Dream's most famous avatar because he is the Dream made legible: self-invented, obscurely funded, devoted to a vision of himself that is also a vision of a woman who was always more symbol than person. He bought the house across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, and the house is full of shirts. This is the novel's great joke and its great tragedy simultaneously.
Tom Buchanan represents the American Dream's dark underside — privilege so naturalized it has become thoughtlessness, wealth so entrenched it no longer requires justification. His carelessness, and Daisy's, is the novel's actual subject. Gatsby's dream is destroyed not by malice but by the casual damage that people who have never had to be careful leave in their wake.
The valley of ashes — gray, industrial, presided over by the enormous faded eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg on a billboard — is Fitzgerald's image of what the dream costs, who pays for it, where the consequences settle while the parties continue on Long Island.
The novel's famous final image — boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past — is often quoted without the word 'ceaselessly,' which changes everything. Gatsby's tragedy is not just that the past cannot be recaptured; it's that the attempt cannot be stopped. The current runs one direction. The dream insists on the other. Fitzgerald understood that this wasn't Gatsby's particular pathology. It was the national one.
Get The Great Gatsby
Post a Comment