The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In his decade-defining novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald effectively delineates
a linear, Gershwin-inspired Empire City portrait of the Roaring Twenties splashed with
explosive sparkling excess―an ornate microcosmic slice of New York's aristocracy
narrated by an outsider who describes his observations through a series of intriguing
vignettes that detail the sundry lives of a hodgepodge of denizens, the main colorful
characters who decorate the pages of his novel novel. It is told as a contrast between two
infidelities, one more conceived than realized, the other more realized than conceived,
both revolving around the title character who is a social anomaly, a man of overt wealth
but with secrets surreptitiously weaving the warp and weft through flashing jazz-dancing
couples swirling within the Charybdis of outrageously overstated parties the mysterious
host throws almost every weekend during the summer season, a dashing man with
rumored secrets that incessantly buzz of ubiquitous bumblebees superciliously hovering
over sharp brightly bending multi-hued blossoms in the well-manicured garden.
The Great Gatsby is a story of illusory contrasts: of East vs. West; of tradition vs.
celebrity; Chicago and Louisville vs. New York City, and within the Burroughs of New
York City's fictional West and East Egg subdivisions; of old money civility vs. new
money cupidity; of precious vs. semi-precious; of being an Oxford man as opposed to a
man who briefly attends Oxford. It's the story of early twentieth century, post World War
I hubris that has callously seeped, quite irreverently, quite relevantly, into the current
incipience of the twenty-first century, a supercilious yet superfluous superiority by a
myopic group of people who errantly claim that old money and all accompanying
accoutrements to ludicrous wealth are the rewards for not only superior morality but for
egoistic self-determination regardless of the obvious opportunities and privileges
unavailable to the comparably penurious group of people they openly disdain, the
ignored desolate itinerants groping around the outskirts of Opulence who may neither
care for ludicrous wealth or who are denied physically and mentally the opportunities
indifferently granted gratis to them who are acknowledged as worthy by ineffable
puissance that not only provides a path to prodigality but encourages and supplements it
as well, hypnotizing flocks of sheepish rote-inspired sycophants into believing that overconsumption is a benign sacrifice, an outrageous religiously and patriotically
encouraged reward for being accepted into this wealth-accruing cult. West Egg is the
new money and is thereby admonished by the old money of East Egg.
Connecting the two islands of flashy feigned happiness is the Valley of Ashes. The only
building along this stretch of wasteland is a small yellow brick building contiguous to
absolutely nothing. It contains three shops: one for rent, one an all-night restaurant, and
the last a garage owned by George B. Wilson. He and his adulterous wife Myrtle are part
of a set of economically deprived people easily manipulated by phantasmagorical
dreams of wealth and a dogmatic, childish faith that people of means actually care about
them and will, ultimately, grant them access to Robin Leech's illusions of "champagne
wishes and caviar dreams." Overlooking the desolate, sandy, gray-ashen isthmus are the
vivid, desperate, seemingly omniscient eyes jutting forcefully from a dilapidated
billboard.
Above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you
perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg... blue and gigantic―their
retinas... one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous
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.
As a moderate, introverted man highly influenced by his father's advice to him when he
was a child, a staid request to remember humility when judging others who may not
have had his advantages, Nick Carraway is the novel's plausible narrator who
wonderfully characterizes one summer of the satin- and silken-swaddled indifference of
a subset of New York aristocracy during the riotous, swinging decade of the Jazz Age
that indulges ludicrous excesses of feigned gaiety before Black Tuesday abruptly ends
the economic prodigality that defines the decade. He describes himself as the most
honest man he has ever known and stoically states in the opening section of the first
chapter:
"Because I was privy to the secret lives of wild, unknown men... [My] reserving
judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still afraid of missing something if I forget
that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat. A sense of fundamental
decencies is parceled out unequally at birth... When I came back from the East last
Autumn... I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human
heart... Only Gatsby... was exempt from my reaction... If personality is an unbroken
series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about [Jay Gatsby],
some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life... it was an extraordinary gift for
hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person... Gatsby
turned out all right at the end; it was 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"
Nick is a third generation wholesale hardware businessman, which his father carries on,
an observer from the Midwest, a poet who describes the seasonal milieu that surrounds
him as he approaches his 30s; a graduate of New Haven (Yale), class of 1915, and a
veteran of the Great Teutonic Migration (WWI). A restlessness derived from the
geographical impairment of living in the Midwest quickened Nick's decision, with
familial permission and his father's financial security for a year, to move to New York
City in 1922 to learn to sell bonds. He finds himself in a weather-beaten cardboard
bungalow that comes with an old Dodge and a Finish woman who provides domestic
help. This house resides on a sparse piece of property fifty feet from the sound off of
Long Island squeezed in between two huge houses that rent between twelve and fifteen
thousand per month during the season. To his right, on forty acres of manicured
landscape, is Gatsby's mansion, modeled after an affluent European Hotel magnificently
juxtaposed against Nick's house, which is "an eyesore... [with] a view of water, a partial
view of [his] neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires―all for
eighty dollars a month."
Reading for both leisure and to better understand Midas' gift for financial independence
through selling bonds, Nick sets his course to becoming a well-rounded man, but his
anticipated adventure begins the evening he enters luxurious East Egg to dine with the
Tom Buchanans. Nick knows Tom from his college days. Tom is a massive, violent,
good-looking man from a very wealthy family, one of the most powerful ends who ever
played football for New Haven with "a body capable of enormous leverage―a cruel
body... [a] national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited
excellence at twenty-one that anything afterward savors of anticlimax." Although Tom is
married to Daisy, he keeps a mistress whom he beats, the wife of the gasoline store
owner in the Valley of Ashes. Tom is so insouciant about what anybody may say about
his infidelity that he accompanies his mistress overtly when they're together in the city,
and on one occasion, he practically drags Nick off the train to meet her. His
determination to impress Nick borders on violence, with a supercilious assumption that
Nick has nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon.
Tom's wife Daisy is Nick's second cousin, once removed, with "the kind of voice that the
ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be
played again... a voice... full of money," a blonde ingenue with a not-quite innocuous,
flirtatious nature, a heart that yearns for something just out of her reach but that is
simultaneously undefined, and an insouciance that disallows any details of reality if they
become abrasive to her naive spiritual manifestation, an indifference that allows any
justification for her frivolity, even if it includes manslaughter. She and Tom carelessly
destroy things and people then wistfully retreat back into the blinding yet reassuring
luminescence of their money.
Jordan Baker is Nick's temporal yet pleasant carnal divergence from the pettiness by
which he is surrounded, a not-quite but almost love interest that temporarily distracts his
sensibilities away from the turbulent disquiet afforded by the major players in the game
of illusions. She is a "slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage, which she
[accentuates] by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her
gray sun-strained eyes [look]... out of a wan, charming, discontented face." She is an
"incurably dishonest" professional golfer not so much for the love of the game or the
thrill of competition as for the winning at all costs and the accompanying remuneration.
She grew up in Louisville as did Daisy, who is two years older.
George B. Wilson is the emaciated proprietor of the rundown garage in the Valley of
Ashes, a blonde, spiritless man, anæmic and faintly handsome with animated light blue
eyes. He is ignorant of his wife's affair until the end of Summer when he becomes
determined to forcefully remove her away from the temptations of the Edenic East. His
religious sensibilities encourage belief that Dr. T. J. Eckleburg's faceless eyes from the
dilapidated billboard are the ocular organs of God from which his duplicitous wife can
never hide; although, these same religious convictions, from a man who attends no
church, cannot prevent the murder of Gatsby and his accompanying suicide.
Myrtle Wilson is George Wilson's wife and Tom Buchanan's mistress who represents the
type of cupid opportunity available to sensuous women of vestigial beauty. She's a
faintly stout woman in her mid thirties. Dressed to accentuate any available opportunity,
Myrtle has a face that "contains no facet or gleam of beauty, but there is an immediately
perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering."
She's apt to purchase expensive collars for a mongrel bitch puppy as well as other
superfluity to demonstrate to anyone who may be vicariously observing her soi disant
lifestyle of elegance; ultimately, she is a worn and wearied dilettante trying desperately
to inspire encomium from people she has no desire to impress.
Accompanying the main group of denizens along the novel's periphery is a collection of
minor characters that adds a panache of primary colors to the pastel portraits of masked
gaiety. Meyer Wolfsheim, as his name suggests, is a shady character, Jewish, which adds
a bit of antisemitism to the overall affect of understated hubris prevalent throughout the
narration. He's a gambler with rumored connections to the 1919 World Series Chicago
White Sox Scandal and the probable source of Gatsby's education that may have led to
his potentially nefarious acquisition of wealth.
The very literal man with owl-eyed spectacles is an unnamed minor character who
represents astonished bewilderment of wealth for its mind-expanding possibilities,
which can be seen in his incredulous disbelief that the myriad leather-bound books in
Gatsby's massive library are actual, real books. Incidentally, he's one of the only men to
attend Gatsby's funereal, along with Nick and Gatsby's servants. He is also one of the
few who can pity such unhappiness despite the belying wealth that pervades Gatsby's
estate.
Cathryn, Myrtle's sister, is another minor character who symbolizes the acquiescence of
penury to the pursuit of wealth at any cost. She wants no trouble, like George before he
realizes of his wife's infidelity. When the investigation of Gatsby's murder brings the
police to question her, Cathryn lies that her sister has ever known Tom Buchanan, an
obvious acquiescence to the power of wealth, but her lie makes things easier for
everybody, and she remains innocuously anonymous.
It is during the beginning of the summer season when Nick, from his front yard and at a
distance, catches his first ambiguously pallid glimpse of Gatsby as he stands on the
balcony of his majestic estate overlooking the bay and, seemingly, trembling. Nick, then,
turns away from the celebrated man and scans across the bay onto the wooden docklined shore of sparkling East Egg, and he notices the green light from Daisy and Tom's
dock across the misty water, the same light that wistfully affects Gatsby, a light that
symbolizes for Gatsby the possibility of a convivially prosperous future perfectly
accompanying the primordial quintessence of requited love. The remainder of the story
guides the reader to determine her own individual interpretation of the word prosperous.
Through a whirlwind of audacious parties and smug invitations to tea or lunch, the
reader learns that before Gatsby compiled his ludicrous wealth, he had met a nineteenyear-old Daisy Fay and had fallen in love with her. He was James Gatz then, when his
impending deployment into the theater of WWI prevented the solidification of their
relationship, a coupling that may have been doomed even then because of his
accompanying lack of wealth. Circumstances gained power against James Gatz'
romantic dreams as the Wheel of Fortune chose another vehicle for Daisy's
entertainment, so when penniless but war-decorated James Gatz returns from the war,
Daisy is married Tom Buchanan. James then morphs into Jay Gatsby, driven to gain as
much wealth as possible in a star-crossed attempt to recapture the ideal love he
overwhelmingly knows quickened, symbiotically, in his youth. With the help of Nick
and Jordan, Gatsby arranges to meet with Daisy alone at Nick's modest bungalow, and
an all-too-brief affair ensues.
Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby finally confront one another during another social
luncheon, insisting with competitive firmness that neither has anything to hide and that
neither Nick nor Jordan have anything more important than to vicariously experience the
emotional drama between the two alpha males, but when the evening ends, all the reader
thinks she knows is that Daisy is easily manipulated by both; she can still end up with
either male. Gatsby's murder immediately solves that problem, but it also reveals, again,
Tom's calloused indifference to anybody other than himself when he lies to George
Wilson that Myrtle, George's wife and Tom's mistress, has been fatally run over by
Gatsby in his iconic automobile―"cream colored, bright in nickel, swollen here and
there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and toolboxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns"―despite
the fact that Daisy is the murderous driver. Tom's transition from libertine to prig is now
complete.
In the end, Jay Gatsby is buried practically alone, Jordan claims to be engaged and
silently slithers toward obscurity, and Nick returns back home thus ending the narrative
and Nick's discovery that the men of his age, despite economic disparity, are
fundamentally the same, intelligently, economically, and racially, and he senses an
undying impression that "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always
been obstinate about being peasantry."
Russell (Rusty) Allen Taylor
May 26, 2013
Note: The Great Gatsby is the first novel I read after purchasing a nook from Barnes and
Noble, which is an electronic reader that is easy for me, as a quadriplegic, to manipulate
with a stylus. One of the functions included with the nook is a dictionary that is
employed when I put the stylus on a word. It also retains a list of words I looked up
while reading. The following is a list of words I looked up while reading Fitzgerald's
Opus Magnus, starting with my favorite word of the novel:
Word of the novel: echolalia [ek-oh-ley-lee-uh] noun: 1. Psychiatry. The uncontrollable
and immediate repetition of words spoken by another person. 2. The imitation by a baby
of the vocal sounds produced by others, occurring as a natural phase of childhood
development.
* adventitious [ad-vuhn-tish-uhs] adjective: 1. Associated with something by chance
rather than as an integral part; extrinsic. 2. Biology, Zoology. Appearing as an abnormal
or unusual place, as a root.
* arthropod [ahr-thruh-pod] noun: 1. Any invertebrate of the phylum Arthropoda,
having a segmented body, jointed limbs, and a usually chitinous shell that undergoes
moltings, including the insects, spiders and other arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods.
* banns [banz] noun (used with a plural verb): 1. Notice of an intended marriage,
given three times in the parish church of each of the betrothed. 2. Any public
announcement of a proposed marriage either verbal or written and made in a church or
by church officials.
* civet [siv-it] noun: 1. A yellowish unctuous substance with a strong musk like odor,
obtained from a pouch in the genital region of civets and used in perfumery. 2. Any
catlike, carnivorous mammal of the subfamily Viverrinae, chiefly of southern Asia and
Africa, having a coarse-haired, spotted coat, rounded ears, and a narrow muzzle.
* complacency [kuhm-pley-suhn-see] adjective: 1. A feeling of quiet pleasure or
security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; selfsatisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.
* convivial [kuhn-viv-ee-uhl] adjective: 1. Friendly; agreeable. 2. Fond of feasting,
drinking, and merry company; jovial.. 3. Of or benefiting a feast; festive.
* endive (This is the surname of one of the guests of Gatsby's many parties, and I was
checking for possible hidden meanings that might better define the character) [en-dahyv]
noun: 1. A composite plant having a rosette of often curly-edged leaves used in salads. 2.
Furniture. An ornamental motif having the form of an arrangement of acanthus or
endive leaves.
endive
* hauteur [hoh-tur] adjective: 1. Haughty manner or spirit; arrogance.
* kike [kahyk] noun: 1. Slang: Disparaging and offensive. A person of Jewish religion
or descent.
* Maintenon [man-tuh-nawn] noun: 1. Marquise de (Francoise d‘Aubigne). 1635-11,
the mistress and, from 1685, second wife of Louis XIV.
* mendacious [men-dey-shuhs] adjective: 1. Telling lies, especially habitually;
dishonest; lying; untruthful. 2. False or untrue.
* muslin [muhz-lin] noun: 1. A cotton fabric made in various degrees of fineness and
often printed, woven, or embroidered in patterns, especially a cotton fabric of plain
weave, used for sheets and for a variety of other purposes.
* obstetric [uhb-ste-triks] noun (used with a singular verb): 1. The branch of medical
science concerned with childbirth and caring for and treating women in or in connection
with childbirth.
* ommatidium [om-uh-tid-ee-uhm] noun: 1. One of the radial elements composing a
compound eye.
* pasquinade [pas-kwuh-neyd] noun: 1. A satire or lampoon, especially one posted in
a public place.
* peremptory [puh-remp-tuh-ree] adjective: 1. Leaving no opportunity for denial or
refusal; imparative. 2. Imperious or dictatorial. 3. Positive or assertive in speech, tone,
manner, etc.
* photogravure [foh-tuh-gruh-vyoor] noun: 1. Any of various processes, based on
photography by which an intaglio engraving is formed on a metal plate, from which ink
reproductions are made. 2. The plate. 3. A print mae from it.
* postern [poh-stern] noun: 1. A back door or gate. A private entrance or any entrance
other than the main one.
* probity [proh-bi-tee] noun: 1. Integrity and uprightness; honesty.
* punctilious [puhngk-til-ee-uhs] adjective: 1. Extremely attentive to punctilios; strict
or exact observance of the formalities or amenities of conduct or actions.
* rotogravure [roh-tuh-gruh-vyoor] noun: 1. A photomechanical process by which
pictures, typeset matter, etc. are printed from an intaglio copper cylinder. 2. A print made
by this process. 3. A section of newspaper consisting of pages printed by the rotogravure
process; magazine section.
* Teutonic [too-ton-ik] adjective: 1. Of or pertaining to the ancient Teutons. 2. Of,
pertaining to, or characteristic of the Teutons or Germans. 3. Noting or pertaining to the
northern European stock that includes the German, Dutch, Scandinavian, British, and
related people.
* truculent [truhk-yuh-luhnt] adjective: 1. Fierce; cruel; savagely brutal. 2. Brutally
harsh; vitriolic; scathing. 3. Aggressively hostile; belligerent.