‘She didn’t answer. Angry and half in love with her and tremendously sorry, I turned away.’
And as I sat there brooding on the old , unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream mus have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it…’
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reminds us that emotions have a heart beat, feelings have a pulse. For when we read Gatsby we hear our own breathing through the rhythmic dance of his prose.
We acknowledge our own capacity to yearn!
Fitzgerald along with Virginia Woolf, is one of the greatest literary stylists of the Twentieth Century, and in the short extracts above we can hear the elegiac quality of his narrative, where his narrator Nick Carraway bids farewell to an unforgettable time of his life, all encapsulated in his best creation, Jay Gatsby: the elusive, eponymous hero of Carraway’s novel; a human being gifted with a singular and magical vision.
Read the extracts above and hear the inevitability of acceptance, as Nick recognizes his own complicity in the tragic events of the novel.
He adopts a certain stylized, theatrical resignation when he leaves his lover Jordan Baker and we know that this performance perfectly mirrors the performative aspect of their affair. Love has been as much about the beauty of one’s profile in the mirror as any real appreciation of the beloved’s difference.
For Fitzgerald’s world is a world of weary ennui, glittering, beautiful and heartlessly banal to its core.
The great irony of the novel is that the prose far exceeds in beauty the banality of its subject(s).
The studied stylishness of the 1920s is not unlike the superficiality of Dickens’ world of the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend , where values shift according to the tailoring of your suit and your credit score at the bank.
I always remember reading nick’s final verdict upon Daisy and her world: ‘They were careless people, Tomand Daisy..’ and thinking how resoundingly right Fitzgerald was to summarize the ordinary cruelty of Daisy through a resonantly ordinary word, ‘careless’.
Even Daisy’s name is just right; pretty, transient and ubiquitous. It is only Gatsby’s romantic delusion that resolutely clings to any other ‘better’ version of Daisy, who returns to her casual carelessness once her attraction to Gatsby’s attraction tires.
So we all make each other up and this emotional conjuring trick may leave us pleasantly deluded or unpleasantly disappointed.
And yet in Gatsby still the wonder lingers on through a language whose syntax reminds us that faith in something beyond our own banality will endure.
Look how expansive and even elated are the two verbs chosen by Fitzgerald in the sentence below as faith and physicality merge in a literally gorgeous image that expresses Nick’s love for Gatsby and his experiences with him:
‘Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.’
A hymn to remembrance and acceptance.
Wonderful analysis –
I assume you would exclude Gatsby himself from the ‘banality’ you write about?
And yes, Fitzgerald is an exceptional stylist.
Mark