Great Gatsby 15 Short Essays

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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’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.

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.

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 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.

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 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. ^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT
GATSBY: 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. ^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: 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 bri