It’s the 1920s. Prohibition and the Jazz Age are in full swing. Nick Carraway, a recent arrival to Long Island, makes the acquaintance of his splendidly wealthy neighbour Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s mansion is the scene of legendary day-and-night parties. Everyone who is anyone seems to turn up there, from beautiful socialites of Ivy League old money to nouveau riche rumrunners.
He is handsome, wealthy, generous, friendly, and single—but who is Jay Gatsby really? His guests speculate. Everyone may have their own sordid theory, but where he came from and how he made his money remains a well-kept secret. Gatsby’s fleeting appearances only encourage the rumours: wandering, smiling, inviting, chatting, never being caught in a conversation too long, finally retiring to his private quarters; it’s as though he were searching for someone. At nighttime Nick Carraway notices him gazing longingly across the bay towards a green light fastened to the pier of the house where Daisy Buchanan lives…
Fitzgerald has to be one of the most dazzling writers in the English language. He’s sometimes too good; Tender Is the Night has such a high concentration of breathtaking sentences that it overwhelms the story being told. The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, is a more restrained and hence more powerful novel. Its writing is more suggestive, more controlled; it leaves more space for the reader’s imagination to work.
Take the scene in which Nick Carraway kisses Jordan Baker for the first time. Jordan is a bit of a hard-case. Though she and Nick Carraway have clearly been set up for each other, she comes off as sarcastic and aloof. There’s a suggestion—a romantic tension—that Baker may dislike Carraway (or at least that Carraway thinks that Baker may dislike him). In one scene Fitzgerald masterfully captures both Nick’s hesitation and the moment Jordan softens to intimacy:
It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.’
‘And Daisy ought to have something in her life,’ murmured Jordan to me.
‘Does she want to see Gatsby?’
‘She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re just supposed to invite her to tea.’
We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face. (77-8)
By coincidence, Nick happens to be cousins with Daisy. She and Gatsby were lovers, back in his army days. They fell for each other while he was stationed in the Midwest, but he lacked the money befitting a wealthy socialite’s hand in marriage, and when he went overseas to fight in the Great War, she wound up with Tom Buchanan instead. On his return Gatsby vowed to spend the rest of his life chasing the American Dream. He would compensate for what he did not have by obtaining all the worldly riches a beautiful young woman could only dream of.
Once again reunited in New York, Nick facilitates their initial meeting, which quickly escalates into an affair. Careless, ditzy Daisy doesn’t even try to hide it. Though her husband, Tom Buchanan, is the one whose wife is being stolen away, he is much less likeable than Gatsby. Cruel and self-absorbed, he is the sort of person that always makes a joke at someone else’s expense. In one particularly memorable scene early on in the book everyone is chatting lightly in the living room when Tom suddenly changes the conversation to race science. He explains how immigration from coloured races will one day threaten the existence of whites. Daisy acknowledges him with a saccharine sort of “That’s nice, sweetie”, while everyone else passes over the remarks with minimal interest.
It’s never outright said how Gatsby made his fortune, but he is strongly implied to be involved in several criminal activities. Nick Carraway meets a business partner of his who turns out to be a match-fixer, and when he later picks up a long-distance phone-call intended for Gatsby the beleaguered man stammers out something about counterfeit bonds before getting suspicious and hanging up. Tom Buchanan also alludes to Gatsby’s owning several drugstores—such places being permitted to sell medicinal whisky in the days of prohibition, the implication is that Gatsby must be bootlegging or slygrogging.
Whatever the source of his fantastic wealth, it never gives Gatsby the thing he actually wants. His love for Daisy is displaced first by his pursuit of money and then by the mere obsession of reaching that which he had set out to obtain: “He must have come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” (171) While speculation about Gatsby’s origins lend an air of romance to his life story, I can only think of the sadness a lovelorn millionaire must feel wandering around a mansion of strangers, watching on but never actually participating in the endless revelries.
We might say something about the depths to which Gatsby must have stooped in order to obtain his wealth—the implied trail of misery behind his bootlegging and match-fixing—but this remains a minor background detail. That Gatsby’s unhindered pursuit of money only destroys him when he turns that energy towards romance probably speaks to some key element in the American cultural psyche. Indeed, Gatsby has something of the “heroic outsider” about him that Michiko Kakutani describes in
The Great Wave:
No country has folklore more deeply invested in the myth of the heroic outsider than the United States, given its revolutionary origins and veneration of the frontier, [which] indelibly shaped Americans’ sense of identity – their prizing of individuality and freedom and independence.
Gatsby is an outsider in several respects: a Midwesterner; a member of earned (not inherited) wealth; someone involved in the criminal underworld; the son of a recent arrival from Germany (not a descendant of the first founders). All of these place him on the wrong side of a class barrier he can never break through. Despite his wealth and success, he lacks the birthright which otherwise confers an air of total self-assurance and absolute acquisitiveness to a boorish halfwit like Tom Buchanan. And when Gatsby’s feverish pursuit of status estranges him from his humble Midwestern origins, he is ultimately destroyed by the society he does not belong to.
Fitzgerald ends this novel with a beautiful passage in which narrator Nick Carraway, put off by the tragic end of the affair, decides to move back home. He reflects on how the events surrounding Gatsby’s downfall were connected to his inability—as a Midwesterner—to ever truly fit into the social fabric of bright young New York City:
That’s my Middle West – not the wheat or the prairies or the last Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreathes thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. (167)
