17. The Great Gatsby

17. The Great Gatsby – by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (p. 101)

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (last page)

The story is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway during a short period of time when he lives next door to Jay Gatsby in West Egg, Long Island. Nick is closely acquainted with Daisy and Tom Buchanan, from his college days at Yale. Daisy grew up closely with Jordan Baker in Louisville as the most popular girl in the town and the fancy of officers from a nearby fort. One of whom was the mysterious Mr. Gatsby.

The present is placed five years after Daisy’s flirtations with officers and short romance with Gatsby as he is shipped into World War I. Her husband, Tom, is a gruff former polo player with a domineering, imperious nature. They moved East to enjoy New York city from their sleepy domain in the classy East Egg neighborhood.

Gatsby is shrouded in rumor and diabolical origins by the partygoers at his mansion. They say he has a look like he has “killed a man”, that he was a German spy during the war and that his rise to fame and fortune was underhanded. His parties are a magnet for movie stars, directors, writers and a flock of uninvited attachments. They are raucous, drunken affairs which end in crazed dances, spousal fights and accidents such as the man who drives his car into the ditch, losing a tire in the process, and reassures onlookers that it just needs some gasoline. Little does the reader know but Gatsby has planned all this in such a way as to maximize his chance of seeing Daisy and taking up their affair where it left off.

Gatsby started life out as James Gatz (Jimmy to his father), the son of “shiftless and unsuccessful farmers”. His fate was irrevocably changed when he befriended Dan Cody, a wealthy mineral dealer, and became his secretary and captained his yacht for an entire two years around the continental US. His ambitious nature was forged much earlier though as we are told:

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until the drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace.

We are later shown his daily schedule from when he was a boy. He had set aside time for work, exercise, improving his mind and trade skills in time slots with some “General resolves” underneath not to be delayed and to save money. Gatsby is above all an ambitious go-getter.

Another important character is Meyer Wolfshiem, who we first meet having lunch with Jay and Nick in a basement restaurant. He is described as a shrewd gambler who had fixed the 1919 World Series and not been caught. He is much more than this, however. He is the one who set Gatsby up in business and taught him the tricks of making piles of money. Some of their ventures come to light through Tom’s investigation of Gatsby. One is a buy-up of corner pharmacies to sell bootlegged alcohol (possibly during prohibition which started in 1919). Meyer later refuses to come to Gatsby’s funeral, saying that we should try to be the best friends we can during life rather than death. It is most likely a way to avoid being linked to his one-time friend and business partner by police.

Gatsby manages to reignite an affair with Daisy although we are not told how far beyond “visiting” they move. Tom has his own philandering problem, which is the reason Daisy and he had to move from Chicago. He regularly sees a girl named Myrtle Wilson, who is married to a mechanic named George. The two have a double life in an apartment in the city. Tom evidently thinks it his right to carry on this way.

Unsuspecting George finally figures out Myrtle has something going before Tom pulls in for gas in Gatsby’s yellow car on the way to movies in the city. He decides to lock her up and move west in two days but Myrtle later escapes and approaches the same car, now being driven back by Daisy, only to be smashed to her death. Jay takes control and they speed away home. George, driven to hysteria, realizes the car’s description matches the one Tom had been driving earlier. We are not told that Tom speaks with the crazed man or what he says but it is obvious he incriminates Gatsby as the hit-and-run driver. George kills Gatsby while he lies in the pool and is later discovered, having killed himself, nearby by Nick and some servants.

Nick’s final encounter with Tom over the conversation he must have had with George ends with the following:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

In the end Nick is the only ally Gatsby has. In organizing the man’s funeral, he realizes just how little party-goers knew or cared for their host. Klipspringer is more concerned with having a pair of shoes returned to him than attending the funeral, even though he boarded at Gatsby’s for months.

Before retelling Gatsby’s story, Nick tells us he makes a habit of reserving judgment, and how this tolerance has allowed him to see deeper into the minds of compatriots. Though Gatsby “represented everything for which [Nick has] an unaffected scorn”, there “was something gorgeous about him” and he is exempt from Nick’s limits of tolerance. He goes on:

No – 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.

Role of T.J. Eckleberg’s eyes: on the route from West Egg into downtown New York, on a wall near the ash pit where an oculist may have had an office in the past, are the great spectacled eyes in bluish hues. The eyes are ever watching and unblinking in their stare at passing traffic. They are used by George Wilson to illustrate to Myrtle how God knows what she is doing even if he does not. In this way they are omnipresent. They ‘see’ the fatal accident which claims Myrtle later that evening. Many of the characters in the book, Tom and Gatsby come to mind, are insular and perhaps unaware of their own actions and their consequences. Tom finds no fault in his parallel life with Myrtle, even allowing Nick in on the thinly veiled secret, but the thought of Daisy’s indiscretion disgusts him. Gatsby can’t see his own time with Daisy is over, he wants to recreate the past in the present and is unwilling to accept that Tom received a minute of her love.

"The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg are blue and gigantic fading, bespectacled eyes with retinas one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.”