Check out the horse's store at www.horses.land. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is an evisceration of the American spirit. In ways both subtle and blatant, Fitzgerald ridiculed the American dream, positioning a knife at its very heart.
For the author, American society had decayed into chaotic materialism, and the country had taken this American dream with it. The events of the story are remarkable, seething with Fitzgerald's distaste at the country around him. Every character in The Great Gatsby is truly deplorable, and the worst of them escape entirely unscathed. In authoring this brief 200-page novella, Fitzgerald reflected on the America of his age and predicted the America to come.
The book is rife with false prophets, but it is Fitzgerald himself who emerges as the true psychic. By contemplating the Great Gatsby and its context, we can discover uncomfortable truths about the past and present of America and the American Dream. Of course, before we see how Fitzgerald dismantled it, we would do well to identify the American Dream itself.
This term, the American Dream, was not actually coined until the early... 1930s, about seven years after Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. But the myth, the narrative, had existed for centuries without such a tidy name. The American Dream is said to be the greatest dream for the individual.
It tells us that even those born at the bottom may rise up to the pinnacle of society. They can own a house, impact the nation, and move mountains. This is usually achieved through some combination of tenacity, talent, optimism, grit. For Fitzgerald, this had all decayed into a propaganda.
It was a former truth, long distorted by the realities of American society. To come to his conclusion, Fitzgerald simply examined the world around him. Now, Fitzgerald was not a philosopher or a social critic.
He was a writer of fiction. So rarely has he expressed this disdain in a pointed, non-fictional way. But if we examine the cultural climate of his time and the works Fitzgerald studied, we can see how the author reached his rather pessimistic conclusion. Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the early 1920s, at a time of economic revolution in America.
After the First World War, the U.S. economy fell into a depression. Unemployment rose to nearly 12% in 1921. The price of crops surged to problematic, unattainable highs. But these economic woes swiftly turned around.
Unemployment dropped to 2.4% by 1923. The nation's GDP increased by 40%. Annual income per capita surged by 30%. The scholar Robert A. Devine has said, The American people by the 1920s enjoyed the highest standard of living of any nation on earth.
In the early 20s, the American economy grew by 7% per year, with the country responsible for 50% of the world's industrial output. Amidst times like these, the American dream was as alive as ever. but Fitzgerald and his contemporaries perceived danger. The author Oswald Spangler published a book called The Decline of the West in two volumes, from 1918 to 1922. Read today, the book is massive, confounding, and provocative to the point of being self-indulgent. It is, at best, a bore, and at worst, vaguely racist.
But it was a product of its time, and indeed it became one of the most influential works in the era. Fitzgerald once wrote in a letter, I read Spengler the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby, and I don't think I ever quite recovered from him. We cannot say with certainty which portions of the book resonated so intensely with Fitzgerald, but the overall narrative of Western decomposition sits at the heart of The Great Gatsby.
Spengler wrote, As soon as the market has become the town, it is no longer a question of mere centers for streams of goods traversing a purely peasant landscape. but of a second world within the walls. The true urban man is not a producer. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands.
He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life upkeep. In place of thinking in goods, we have thinking in money. This idea of thinking in money is crucial to The Great Gatsby, but it is like the clothing the book wears.
At the soul of Fitzgerald's novel, we have a more profound disillusionment with the American dream. With that in mind, it is time to begin our investigation in earnest. Narrated by a man named Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby follows its titular character, James Gatsby. Born impoverished, Gatsby pursues a romantic, idealized life, which is represented by his ostensible love for a wealthy young woman named Daisy.
Essentially, Gatsby tries to become the old money sort that Daisy desires. Gatsby earns a fortune as a bootlegger, reacquaints himself with the now-married Daisy, and tries to earn her favor as a very new man. This could be romance as the driving point of narrative action in The Great Gatsby.
But we must understand Gatsby himself if we are to discover the true meaning of this romantic entanglement. Jay Gatsby was born as James Gatz in North Dakota. it would be very blunt to say that Gatsby yearned to be rich.
More accurately and more sincerely, he yearned to be what he was not. According to the narrator Nick, his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people. His imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. It is precisely this imagination which typifies and motivates Gatsby, this rejection of his past. This too can be said of the American Dreamer as suggested by William Kane in his paper.
American Dreaming, really reading The Great Gatsby. Kane notes, The greatest American dreamers say yes, but their power comes first from saying no. The American dreamer is propelled by the dreamer's disavowal of his or her past, the refusal to be that person.
I cannot accept these parents, this upbringing. Who I am is intolerable to me, and I will not endure my existence in this paltry life. I will become someone else. Indeed, this is Gatsby's goal.
Already, we can begin to see that Daisy is not exactly the love of his life. His romantic interest in Daisy is just one facet of Gatsby's larger goal. She is his trophy for his lifelong quest. Fitzgerald's first blow at the American dream comes when Gatsby's career is revealed.
He is a bootlegger who sells alcohol illegally in pharmacies across the country. Here, Fitzgerald rejects the traditional social mobility which the American dream claims. Gatsby is shown to be an intelligent, capable man, but even he resorted not to schooling and career building, instead taking up a life of illegitimate gains and criminality. Through this methodology, Gatsby does indeed amass a great fortune. It is a fortune which he displays ostentatiously for a number of reasons.
In fact, his wealth often takes the place of Gatsby himself. Before we even meet him, the titular character is defined by the opulence of his home. The narrator Nick describes it, The house was a colossal affair by any standard. It was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. Gatsby is further defined by the raucous parties which he throws each weekend, which are so blanketed in expense that they may as well be celebrations of money itself.
Although glamorous, Fitzgerald unmasks these parties and again incises the American dream. To execute his events, Gatsby employs a small army of butlers, maids, cooks, and servants. Every Friday, five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York. Every Monday, these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of 200 oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed 200 times by a butler's thumb.
The lower class, the butlers like this one, then, are little more than tools for Gatsby's glamorous lifestyle. Gatsby, who we take as the embodiment of the American dream, is built on the backs of the poor. his life requires exploitation.
Like his machine extracts the juice from oranges only to discard the, quote, pulpless halves, Fitzgerald's American dream squeezes the layperson to extract the juice of capital for those invited to the party. Gatsby's absence continues through much of the book, so instead of meeting Gatsby, we are first introduced to his world, his parties, his house, his cars. Nick Carraway offers us this.
There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats slit the waters of the sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning. and long past midnight while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
And on Mondays, eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. These are the results of the American dream as Fitzgerald sees it. The sum of Fitzgerald's American dream is not in personal happiness, but in material abundance. These material things literally take the place of the man Gatsby himself. So to Fitzgerald, the American dream and its results become something of an illusion.
Gatsby is and always has been happy to live in an illusion. The people who attend his parties do not know who he is. The aftermath of the parties is quickly disposed of each morning.
Gatsby even proclaims that Daisy is a Catholic and that is why she cannot divorce Tom. but Nick tells us outright that this isn't true. Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
Gatsby even lived himself as an illusion. His wannabisms, pink suits, and old sport verbiage bordered on the absurd to those like Nick Buchanan. Gatsby does not recognize the illusory nature of his life. He has convinced himself that the entirety of his life's efforts have been for Daisy.
Indeed, it is his relationship with Daisy Daisy where we see Fitzgerald's impressions of the American dream and its pursuit displayed most viciously. When we are shown Gatsby and Daisy's very first introduction, prior to the events of the book itself, we can immediately see the true reasons for Gatsby's attraction. Gatsby was a soldier when he met Daisy, far removed from the debonair life he would go on to attain.
He was stationed near her home, and the young Gatsby went with a group of fellow soldiers to visit the residence. Nick tells us, He went to her house at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him. He had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there.
It was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. Gatsby's takeaway from his first meeting with Daisy was not actually Daisy herself. Instead, it was her home. The house had a breathless intensity. The house was beautiful.
Not Daisy. On that same page, the prose goes on to wax further about the home. Again, the word beautiful only appears to describe the house, not Daisy herself.
We are told, too, that Daisy has been loved by many men prior to Gatsby's first meeting. This only encouraged Gatsby. It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy.
It increased her value in his eyes. With the distinct choice of words increased her value, we see Daisy referred to in market terms. She is classified more as an asset than a person, which is emblematic of Gatsby's material obsession. Here we also have a remarkable parallel with the American dream.
It is one exalted by many, even proven by many famous individuals. Others have fulfilled it, so the masses are encouraged by these stories of success. So too with Daisy. The fact that other men had loved her only encouraged Gatsby's belief in his pursuit.
Gatsby did ignite a romance upon... first meeting Daisy, but the way it is communicated to the reader is remarkably unromantic. Fitzgerald writes, he took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously.
Eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand. In his army uniform, Gatsby wore a disguise. He was unburdened by the cheap clothing which he would have otherwise worn.
He could spin lies to Daisy about his past and his future. which he precisely did. When we see Daisy and Gatsby's relationship as a metaphor for the American Dream, this truly becomes a vicious attack on that dream from Fitzgerald.
Those who pursue the American Dream do so ravenously and unscrupulously. They steal, lie, and deceive because this is the only way for Fitzgerald to make the American Dream into reality. Gatsby has perhaps convinced himself to the contrary, that he has an earnest love for Daisy.
But we can see very clearly that Gatsby's love was not for Daisy. It was for Daisy's world, for what she represented. So his love was false, was always false, in the same way Fitzgerald believes the American dream is also false. At the end of their treast, Nick tells us Daisy, quote, vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby nothing. She left him no thing, rather than no body.
And indeed, for Gatsby, Daisy was just that. A thing, an idea, not a person. And so, like Americans pursued their dream with every bit of faculty which existed in their lives, Gatsby does the same at Daisy.
He spends years creating himself as the ideal match for her, as someone worthy of accomplishing her. When he finally reaches this pinnacle, when this height... of the American dream is so occupied by money and material things, Fitzgerald begins to show us the illusion of it all.
When Gatsby meets Daisy at the time of the story, we are once again shown the true nature of his infatuation. Fitzgerald writes, It was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of starshine. The wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned towards him, and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy gleaming like silver, safe and proud, above the hot struggles of the poor.
Here Gatsby again recognizes not the beauty of Daisy as a person but as a symbol. She gleamed like silver, safe and proud, above the struggles of the poor. Struggles Gatsby knew intimately well. She is more territory than person, a promised land he can access if only he can win Daisy's affection. Earlier we discussed Gatsby's desire as the American Dreamer to erase his past, to say no to his own background.
He too imposes that on Daisy. Even after Daisy admits to loving Gatsby, that isn't enough. Gatsby tells her to tell Tom that she doesn't love him.
This has been his lifelong vision. It never occurs to Yatsby to consider whether Daisy herself wants to participate in his dream. He assumes that she does, and that she will immediately erase the fact that she has been and is married to Tom and is the mother of Tom's child. Indeed, here is Fitzgerald's indictment on the American Dream once again. According to our myth, the dreamer need not consider if the society of America wants to oblige his ambitions.
The dreamer need only act, and he will achieve his ends, we are told. But Fitzgerald believes this to be false. He perceives that it is, in large part, up to the society if one is permitted to achieve their American dream.
For her part, Daisy ultimately does not allow Gadsby in. The naive nature of the American dream is relayed once again in this exchange between Nick and Gadsby. I wouldn't ask too much of her, I ventured. You can't repeat the past. Can't repeat the past, he cried incredulously.
Why, of course you can. He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before, he said, nodding determinedly. She'll see.
Here we have Gatsby almost panicking in denial when he meets with the idea that his American dream may be out of reach. The very ethos of Gatsby cracks. He cries that he can repeat the past, though Gatsby's defining trait hitherto has been his outright rejection of his own past.
At this point, it is starting to become clear to Gatsby that there is some piece of the puzzle which he does not have, which he may never have. He has bought into the American dream and is now discovering it may have been a propaganda. Fitzgerald notes Gatsby is looking around, searching for something in the shadows of his own house. The author then doubles down on this idea just lines later.
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life has been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, could find out what that thing was. That thing which was lurking in the shadows of his house which he seeks to recover is truth. The truth about his American dream. That it is, in fact, A lie.
All through the book, the closer Gatsby gets to Daisy, the more unraveled his American dream becomes. When he moves into his mansion across from Daisy and Tom's, we are told about a mist hovering over the bay, which blocks Gatsby's view of the Buchanan home. He is right on the precipice, but suddenly unable to see his dream.
Gatsby famously spends evenings staring at a green light which is perched on the end of Tom and Daisy's dock. This light is often at the center of Gatsby analysis, and for good reason. It is the entire book boiled down into one piece of machinery. Green is the color of life itself.
It is too the color of money, greed, jealousy, and Wall Street. The light is the American dream, Gatsby's, and Fitzgerald's all at once. So we are presented with this damning passage. Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.
Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy, it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock.
His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. Again, the closer Gatsby comes to Daisy, the more fraudulent everything is revealed to be. This is brought to its ultimate not by Gatsby's own faculties, but by another character, Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan.
The destruction of Gatsby and his illusion occurs at Tom's hands. The main characters spend an afternoon in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Tom calls Gatsby out on the entirety of his artifice, his false past, his bootlegging operation, his standing as an eternal outsider, saying that Gatsby should only see Daisy if he's bringing groceries to her door.
Gatsby implores Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him, and she does so in the most non-committal way. She is trembling and immediately regretful. Daisy quickly backtracks and declares that she loved both men.
In this scene, Tom commits many murders. He murders Gatsby's American dream, Gatsby's romance with Daisy, and the entirety of Gatsby's life's ambitions. Gatsby cannot be truly in elite society. He cannot be with Daisy. Despite all of his money, he will never gain access to his dream.
The titular character realizes he will never be. He will always be almost. That missing piece which he searched for in his home, it is revealed to him by Tom.
It is all of the truths and all of the lies. Tom also commits murder in the more real sense of the word. In short, Tom frames Gatsby for the death of his mistress Myrtle.
Her widowed husband shoots Gatsby in his swimming pool and Gatsby dies. The swimming pool is entirely emblematic of Fitzgerald's false American dream. It is opulent and beautiful and...
useless. The book tells us Gatsby never once swam in the pool, so when he finally does, when he literally dives into his illusion, becomes his grave. Jay Gatsby is just one cast member in Fitzgerald's American Nightmare, so to fully understand the book, we must investigate its other actors.
Among interpretations and analysis of of the Great Gatsby, it is popular to chastise Daisy Buchanan as a particularly venomous character. The following phrases have all been used to describe Daisy. Vicious emptiness, monstrous moral indifference, criminally amoral, vulgar and inhuman, dark destroyer, a purveyor of corruption and death, and one even more verbose, an early critic called Daisy the, quote, first notable anti-virgin of our fiction, the prototype. of the blasphemous portraits of the fair goddess as bitch in which our 20th century fiction abounds.
Clearly, Daisy is not looked upon favorably, nor should she be. None of the characters in The Great Gatsby can really be described as good people. But Fitzgerald was a masterful author, and so his characters should not be reduced to clumsy categorizations of bad or good.
Daisy very much included. For critics, Daisy Buchanan was a punching bag, and for the characters in The Great Gatsby, she serves much the same purpose. One of Daisy's first lines in the novella is a sort of confession. She meets Nick and proclaims, I'm paralyzed with happiness. Daisy is too a victim of the American dream.
Her paralysis is the chief symptom. Daisy's paralysis is large. By marrying Tom, her life has become frozen by money and status. She comes from money and married into money. Her whole life has been dictated by convention and circumstance.
Daisy is the embodiment of the vulgar materialism which Fitzgerald saw in the American dream. She was an insider, desperately and ruthlessly clinging to her status and her riches. Fitzgerald did not seek empathy for the Daisies of the world, these ruling class sorts. And so Daisy is not portrayed as a particularly likable woman. She is lazy, flighty, and unconcerned with anything outside of her immediate strata.
But this was not really the fault of Daisy. Rather, it was the impact of American materialism, a sort of brainwashing. See, Daisy is something of a two-sided card. On one side, she is presented as shallow and vaguely self-obsessed. But this is how her world instructed her to be, and Daisy is well aware of this.
So on the reverse side, we have an intelligent, perhaps even cunning woman who is just as attached to her status as Gatsby himself also is. When describing her infant daughter, Daisy says, I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. This line alone speaks volumes for her character.
She is well aware of her insider status and how one achieves it as a woman. So with this in mind, while she does love Gatsby in her own, perhaps shallow way, Daisy ultimately prioritizes her status over this love. Daisy flirts with the idea of running away with Gatsby, certainly.
We are told of an incident that occurred before the events of the book. When Daisy received a letter from Gatsby on the eve of her wedding, she ripped a $350,000 pearl necklace from her neck, leaving the pearls to scatter onto the ground. This necklace was a gift she'd received from Tom. Daisy called the wedding off, but was immediately forced by her friends and staff into an ice-cold bath.
As she was forced into the bath, Daisy was still clutching Gatsby's letter. The water destroyed the letter, and the wedding went on as planned. This bath, too, can be seen as Fitzgerald's American dream.
It is a cold shock, ultimately bringing the illusions of materialism into a paralyzing truth for all parties involved. Nick tells us, All the time Gatsby was overseas, something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately.
And the decision must be made by some force of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality that was close at hand. And so she married Tom Buchanan, who was unfaithful, abusive, and brutish. Daisy is not purely a victim, though. She is just as deplorable as her peers, and Fitzgerald makes that quite clear throughout the story. After all, for whatever self-awareness she displays on the dangers of her lifestyle, she elects repeatedly to remain in her castle.
She shows no interest in the needs or wants of others with the possible exception of Gatsby. But upon inspection, even her feelings towards Gatsby seem fraudulent. Indeed, the two have that distinctly in common.
Daisy is basically Gatsby. Jay Gatsby has constructed and lives in a fantasy land. Daisy herself expresses this same desire. She tells Gatsby, I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.
She has a romantic vision of her life with Gatsby, an escape from the insistences of material society, a dreamlike land where reality need not exist. She seeks the past. She desires to relive the early stages of her romance with Gatsby, prior to her marriage and prior to her insertion into the world of Tom Buchanan. Gatsby sees cracks in his vision for Daisy.
Likewise, but more severely, Daisy finds Gatsby unable to meet her expectations. Gatsby demands that she tells Tom she does not love him. He demands Daisy fit perfectly into his vision for life, which in turn does not fit into her vision. This is made abundant as Gatsby ostentatiously shows off his collection of fine shirts.
When Gatsby shows the shirts to Daisy, they are piled neatly in his closet, but he begins to throw them onto the floor in a messy pile. Daisy's reaction is to weep, the ideal of her and Gatsby, her dreamland. also comes apart like the neat piles of shirts.
She realizes that Gatsby's world is an illusion, as is her vision for their romance, and so her desire can never be fulfilled. When Tom reveals Gatsby's true nature to Daisy in the hotel, she finally withdraws from Gatsby entirely. Fitzgerald writes, With every word she was drawing further and further into herself.
So he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped by. away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. Daisy's fantasy is truly dead. Gatsby could not live up to her vision for him. Within Gatsby and Daisy, we have a mutual disillusionment, but the results of each are wildly divergent.
Fitzgerald realizes that Daisy, being of the privileged elite, has a safety net. She can return to her life with Tom. Driving Gatsby's car with him in the passenger seat, Daisy hits and kills Tom's mistress.
There's nothing to indicate that this was intentional, but it allows Daisy to slip back into her previous life with Tom Buchanan uninterrupted. She is damningly happy to let Gatsby carry the blame, legal or otherwise, for the incident. Tellingly, Daisy and Gatsby both have their hands on the wheel when they kill the woman.
Indeed, they both steered their own fantasies into death. With no great stretch of the imagination, we can read The Great Gatsby as a letter of hatred to the elites of American society and all they represent. In such a case, it would be Tom Buchanan's name on the envelope. In a swarm of bad, Tom Buchanan is perhaps the worst. Tom is brutish.
He is a well-built man who, in appearance and in beliefs, becomes a sort of proto-fascist. He spews racist vitriol. Tests the lower class and is perfectly happy to leave destruction in his wake.
Tom's physical description is relevant to this theme of the American dream. He is described as having a cruel body which is capable of enormous leverage. At one point he hits his impoverished mistress Myrtle and breaks her nose.
Tom Buchanan is not only Tom. He is the generations of wealthy American families who conquered the lower classes, who are capable of a strange and leisurely sort of oppression. Like Tom, these people would rather spend afternoons drinking and playing polo, but with the slightest whim, the Toms of the world can uproot and destroy those who are beneath them.
Indeed, Tom does just this. It only takes a brief monologue for him to undo the lifelong work of Jay Gadsby. Tom and Daisy have many of their worst qualities in common. While their relationship cannot be categorized as happy or even entirely functional, the pair are intimately similar. Near the end of the book, Nick concludes, 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. Indeed, this sort of Well-financed carelessness is a tie which bonds Daisy and Tom together. It is a unique trait which Fitzgerald notes exists preeminently in those who hold status like the Buchanan.
Tom Buchanan is enormously wealthy despite having no career and contributing nothing to society. Tom further has no ambition other than to keep invaders like Gatsby out of his castle. Daisy likewise, she is never portrayed as having any particular motivation besides self-interest. She is not as direct in her oppression as Tom, but she has a guilt by complacence.
Her romance with Gatsby results in the deaths of two individuals. Nothing indicates that either of these bodies weigh on her conscience at all. She does not attend Gatsby's funeral. This makes for a very clear portrait of how Fitzgerald sees old money elites. At the end of the story, Tom and Daisy perform one of the classically imperial American feats.
After engineering chaos and destruction, they simply leave. They just move on, unbound by consequence. Tom's mistress, Myrtle, is a supporting character in this story, but in reading The Great Gatsby within the context of The American Dream, she is remarkably significant. Myrtle not only propels much of the action in the novella, she provides grand insight into the story's main characters. Like Gatsby, Myrtle has her own American Dream.
Hers is wealth and all of the lifestyle which comes with it. Myrtle is married to a man named George who is a mechanic and owns a gas station. By her actions and words, it is clear that Myrtle despises her husband. He is a poor man who was forced to borrow his suit for their wedding. Remarking upon this, Myrtle says, The only crazy I was when I married him.
I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's suit to get married in and never told me about it. and the man came after it one day when he was out.
We do not learn much about George as a person, but it is almost irrelevant. Myrtle disdains George's status, and so she disdains him. In her American dream, Myrtle enters into an affair with Tom Buchanan. She believes that this is a way to enter into the aristocratic society. Myrtle is under the impression that Tom will leave Daisy for her, although there is little to indicate this was ever Tom's intention.
As typical for Fitzgerald in the novella, Myrtle's quest for her American dream decays and eventually kills her. Tom is Myrtle's dream. He abuses her, lies to her, and manipulates her.
In the end, her relationship with Tom brings about her death. She is killed by Daisy, who is at the wheel of Gatsby's car. Of course, Tom Buchanan simply continues with his days. Nick Carraway is the narrator of the novella.
Much has been debated about his reliability as a narrator, but I believe that Nick is and must be reasonably reliable for the book to even function. Fitzgerald exchanged a series of letters with his editor after finishing The Great Gatsby, in which they discussed Nick Carraway as a narrator. In these letters, Fitzgerald does not say anything to indicate that Nick is unreliable.
Furthermore, The Great Gatsby is about the corruption and decline of the American Dream. This is not a labyrinthian interpretation or abstract idea. It is the central theme of the book as expressed by Fitzgerald himself.
It is through Nick Carraway that Fitzgerald communicates his notion of this dream. This notion is the whole point of the book, so for the Great Gatsby to even function, Nick must be reliable. If Nick is untrustworthy, then the novella becomes little more than a soap opera. Nick is not an unreliable narrator in the traditional sense of the word, but he is also not a truly objective narrator. While it is tempting to categorize him in either camp, Nick is what I would call a biased narrator.
Nick has a background which is relevant to the story and how we receive the story. He is a person of means. Nick graduated from Yale, but he does not have the same laziness-inducing status of the Buchanans. He fought in the war.
Nick made the decision to travel east to pursue the Bond business, though he seems to have rather mixed feelings about it. He recounts having dinner at the Yale Yacht Club, but notes it was an experience he did not enjoy. Nick is something of an outsider in the story.
At least he is outside of the materialism and the American dreaming which propels virtually all of the other characters. Fitzgerald establishes this early in the novella when Nick states, I lived at West Egg, the well. less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.
Nick is put off by the division of East and West Egg, describing this attitude as bizarre and sinister. Throughout the story, he is in awe of the materialism around him. He remarks on the opulence of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom. Nick ultimately leaves the East Coast, describing the area as having a quality of distortion. and laments his journey as him visiting the wrong house.
The Buchanans, especially Tom, are quick to judge and excommunicate those of the lower classes. Nick is generally welcomed around them throughout the whole story, but regards the group with an amount of distaste. It is clear that Nick has no particular love for the lifestyles of the other characters. Nick notes that he is from a family of, quote, prominent, well-to-do people in this middle western city for three generations. So, clearly someone in Nick's family did accomplish the American dream, perhaps Fitzgerald's more pure, authentic version of it, which produced a reasonable individual like Nick.
One could make the case that Nick is a bad person. He did, after all, stand by and witness the world-burning and lethal drama of his peers unfold. But I think it is more accurate to call Nick shallow.
He is a shallow person who wants shallow relationships. We can see this when he writes, I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes in my mind I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness.
Even Nick's most romantic intimate fantasies conclude in anonymity. Nick also declares that quote Life is best viewed through a single window. He has no interest in grand perspectives.
His view of the world is intentionally limited. Nick does not intervene or save anyone simply because he is not interested. Perhaps that makes him a bad person, or perhaps not.
That is for the reader to decide. But Nick speaks to his inaction in the book. He has a very cynical opinion on the prospect of saving these people from anything.
Nick states that the entire group was distorted beyond his eyes. power of correction. To Nick, the American dream is sour.
He views the things which characterize it as corrupt and bizarre, so he functions as something of a proxy for Fitzgerald himself, embodying a sense of disillusionment. Nick ultimately washes his hands of the entire Gatsby affair, concluding that all is, in fact, lost. We can perhaps see this in the following passage.
I was reminded of something, an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth, and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was incommunicado forever. There is too one minor character who is emblematic of Fitzgerald's American dream. That is Ewing Clipspringer, who is a piano player and something of a squatter at Gatsby's residence.
Indeed, he gets the nickname The Border. Although Clipspringer has relatively little space in the book, his existence is a pointed warning of American materialism. Clipspringer often plays piano at Gatsby's parties, serving as an entertainer. But he lingers around the home throughout the week, and even still, Gatsby seems to have only disinterested ambivalence for the man.
Clipspringer is almost a caricature of the American materialist. He wanders around Gatsby's home, unkempt, taking advantage of his host's blasé generosity. Clipspringer is a wholly disrespectful and disinterested man who enjoys only the rampant debauchery and material possessions which Gatsby provides.
He attends Gatsby's funeral not out of respect, but instead to request a pair of shoes be sent to his house. For Fitzgerald, this is the impact that the American dream and surrounding culture has on the individual. It transmutes people into leeches who care not for one another, but instead suck away at their peers for the material luxuries of life. In Fitzgerald's eyes, the American experience can be separated into two distinct parts.
There exist the material, physical, functional realities of our American life. On the other hand, there are the more profound and universal, the spiritual wants and needs of the human. Within Fitzgerald's American Dream, it is incredibly difficult to see where one of these ends and the other begins. Does the American Dream, insofar as it is represented by the Gatsbys and Buchanans, fulfill our spiritual needs? Does it take the place of them?
Perhaps Gatsby represents the spiritual, the idea that things can always infinitely become better. This is a sort of blind faith which requires some degree of youthful optimism, but can produce incredible results. Meanwhile, the Buchanans are the material realities. The idea that becoming better has suddenly become synonymous with accumulating money, as well as the functional hierarchies that have simultaneously made this both true and absurd. Unfortunately, Gatsby is never able to see through his illusion.
It is Gatsby for whom the lines have become impossibly blurred. He is unable to discern that he is great in a way which the Buchanans will never be. And so he becomes terrible in the way the Buchanans are. The realities of American society meant Gatsby could never fulfill his dream.
He is the spiritual which is confused with the material. The Great Gatsby takes place in a fictional version of Long Island, New York. In the book, this residential area is divided into West Egg and East Egg.
West Egg is considered the new money side. It is where Gatsby lives. The houses in West Egg are often aspirationally modeled after famous mansions in Europe. The East Egg is a more desirable, fashionable part of town that is inhabited mostly by old money type. And of course it is where the Buchanans live.
It is plainly obvious to see how these two places fit into Fitzgerald's vision of the American Dream. These two neighborhoods seem to represent the division between the American Dream and its more real counterpart. There are the dreamers and there are those who already sit at the top. And these two groups are linked by their love of material goods. This allegory is made even more clear when we investigate what lies between East and West Egg.
The Valley of the Ashes is a bleak industrial wasteland between the two eggs. Unlike the egg neighborhoods, the valley is inhabited by the very poor. The valley is also occupied by factories and smokestacks, which put a gray, dusty bleakness over the area and its residents.
While the eggs are described in high, shimmering language, Fitzgerald paints a much bleaker picture of the Valley of Ashes. He uses phrases like ash gray, paintless days, spasms of bleak dust, and calls it a solemn dumping ground. Even the name itself invokes feelings of death.
Within the book, the Valley of the Ashes is the only setting which is described as anything besides aesthetically magnificent. For Fitzgerald, the American dream insofar as it existed was built on the backs of the poor. The Valley of the Ashes represents this idea wholly. It is a place in which production happens. On a very real level, it is full of factories.
The novel's two poorest characters, Myrtle and her husband, also live in the Valley of the Ashes. The valley is where the opulence of the Buchanans and the Gatsbys is truly produced. But it is also the place which suffers the most visibly from this production. So here we have a vaguely apocalyptic worldview from Fitzgerald. The Valley of the Ashes is sort of the dirty secret, the hidden ingredient of our American dream.
It is perhaps, too, the result produced by a society of materialism. While the valley features the story's most dismal atmosphere, It is also the place where the book's most tragic events occur. It is where Tom is unfaithful to Daisy.
It is too where Tom physically abuses his mistress Myrtle. Daisy kills Myrtle in the Valley of Ashes. This event also sets into motion the death of Gatsby himself.
Tom and Daisy ruthlessly abuse and exploit the people in the Valley of Ashes. So too we have the American Dream and its materialism, sucking the life from the lower classes. In the Valley of the Ashes, there is an old weathered billboard for an optometrist named Dr. T.J. Ekelberg. The billboard features a large pair of blue eyes rimmed by golden spectacles.
This advertisement is often a well-deserved centerpiece in analysis of the Great Gatsby. It is generally accepted that these eyes represent God himself. This idea comes from two places.
First, Scott Fitzgerald was a religious man, despite his often indulgent lifestyle. Secondly, one of the book's characters explicitly states this meaning. When Mr. Wilson confronts Myrtle about her affair, he takes her to their window and they gaze at the billboard.
Mr. Wilson declares, God knows what you've been doing. Everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God.
The book's most tragic events occur under the watchful eyes of Dr. Ekelberg. In this way, we can perceive Fitzgerald appealing to the highest order. Even if we the people fail ourselves and our country, we cannot go without punishment. God is always watching. The Great Gatsby is one of the finest American works ever produced.
But by many people's opinions, it is the only time F. Scott Fitzgerald soared to such enormous heights. So to earnestly understand the work, we should understand Fitzgerald himself. F.
Scott Fitzgerald spent most of his life writing about the rich, but in his childhood, he was decidedly middle class. His father was a twice-failed businessman, and only through an inheritance on Fitzgerald's mother's side was the family able to live in middle-class comfort. An aunt of Scott Fitzgerald paid for him to attend a private school, where his results were mediocre. The author eventually did attend Princeton, but only to drop out and join the military during World War I. Without getting too far into the particulars of Fitzgerald's youth, we can say he was distinctly not part of the Gatsby's or Buchanan's world, but some part of him likely yearned for just that.
In 1918, the penniless Fitzgerald wrote to his friend, I know I'll wake up some morning and find the debutantes have made me famous overnight. This happened precisely when he published the book This Side of Paradise in 1920. The book was a smash success, and suddenly Fitzgerald's status changed markedly. He later wrote that the offices of New York were suddenly open to him.
Quote, I, who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing, was pushed into the position of spokesman for the time. And indeed, Fitzgerald basked in this new lifestyle. He was a full-on literary celebrity, gallivanting around New York bars and high society. He later wrote that he once wept because, quote, I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
This is all to say the issues of class mobility and even the American dream were ones Fitzgerald knew intimately well. He did seem to grow disillusioned with the glitz and glam, however. Fitzgerald called that period of America the greatest, gaudiest spending period in history. He would later write that even the snow wasn't real.
that if you didn't want it to snow, you could just pay some money. But this lifestyle eventually caught up with Fitzgerald. In the early 20s, F.
Scott was about $5,000 in debt, around $39,000. in today's money. He began working 12 hours per day, writing 11 short stories in five months to climb out of debt.
By Fitzgerald's words, this sum allowed him to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class. This work was far from fulfilling, though. He wrote to a friend that the writing was all trash and it nearly broke my heart. So by the time Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, he had ascended to the pinnacle of society, crashed, and then begun to pick himself up again.
With The Great Gatsby, though, Fitzgerald abandoned lofty ideas about romantic high society. Instead, he returned to what he knew. The titular character, James Gatz, was an impoverished Midwesterner.
Gatsby's ability to move through the classes was partially based on Fitzgerald himself, with the author noting, He started out as one man I knew. and then changed into myself. The character of Daisy, a southern belle, was largely inspired by Fitzgerald's lover Zelda, who, like Daisy, was an aloof, wealthy, Alabama-born woman who changed romantic decisions at the drop of a hat.
Nick Carraway's past mirrors much of Fitzgerald's. Tom Buchanan is even imbued with some of the author. In his schooling days, just like Tom, Fitzgerald was a prodigiously talented athlete.
All of Fitzgerald's experiences in American society equipped him with a sharp, harsh perspective on our country's culture. Fitzgerald's thesis with the Great Gatsby was something like this. The culture of American materialism has corrupted American ideals and will continue to fracture the country.
Indeed, he was proven correct, almost immediately. In 1928, President Hoover proclaimed, We in America today are nearer to the financial triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land. The poor man is vanishing from us. Under the Republican system, our industrial output has increased as never before, and our wages have grown steadily in buying power. In a way, Hoover was right.
The poor were vanishing. They were vanishing from their jobs because of an increasingly unstable farming industry. They were vanishing from unions due to a concerted effort to minimize the power of the worker. African American sharecroppers were vanishing from the South due to mass layoffs, forced to take low-paying jobs in segregated neighborhoods and live in squalor. Mexican Americans were vanishing too.
They lived in extreme poverty with an infant mortality rate five times higher than their white counterparts. parts. Despite Hoover's declarations, income inequality was on the rise like never before. By 1929, the top 1% of the population owned 19% of all personal wealth.
The top 5% owned 34%. Certainly today, these numbers seem tame by comparison. But in 1929, a family of four required $2,000 per year for basic necessities.
50% of American families in that same year did not reach this minimum. threshold. Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed. Farms, factories, and mines collapsed, decimating the lower classes first.
The automobile industry cratered. This all rippled through the upper crust, wiping out investments and savings. Foreign trade stumbled by 66%, and within three years, personal income in America had dropped off by 50%.
The American dream, Fitzgerald's or otherwise, was by all counts dead. In 1931, Fitzgerald wrote an essay called Echoes of the Jazz Age, in which he practically eulogizes for the high-flying dreamers of the 20s. It ended two years ago, because the utter confidence, which was its essential prop, received an enormous jolt, and it didn't take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward.
And after two years, the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war. It was borrowed time, anyhow. The whole upper tenth of a nation living with the indifference of Grand Dukes and the casualness of chorus girls. But the moralizing is easy now, and it was pleasant to be in one's twenties in such a certain and unworried time.
The American dream would be reborn in the ashes of World War II, however. The American economy grew by 37% in the 1950s, and the American family saw a 30% surge in spending power. Surely, it is no coincidence that it was the 50s when The Great Gatsby was finally lauded as a masterpiece of American literature.
In the years since, the American Dream has died and been reborn over and over again. I tend to think this essay need not leap into every incarnation and failure. Instead, for our conclusion, we can simply look to the man who invented the American Dream itself. Fitzgerald saw the potential for the American Dream to decay, but he was not the first one to envision this possibility.
In fact, this dream was brought into phrase alongside exactly this type of warning. James Truslow Adams coined the term the American Dream in his 1931 book The Epic of America. He notes pointedly the materialistic perils of our American Dream, saying, The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily.
It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes. rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly, even among ourselves. Our American dream should not be predicated on larger houses or faster cars.
We should not be Gatsby and we should not aspire to be the Buchanans. We must create a fuller dream than these shimmering objects. We must seek one which elevates and works for all. not alone the privileged. Our American dream must not be a guarded tower in the East Egg, but a place which grants entry to those citizens of the world who seek earnest fulfillment.
Mechanically, this requires more than the free hand of our markets. It requires caution, thought, and indeed action. As Adams noted, if the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves. If we are to achieve a richer and fuller life for all, they have got to know what such an achievement implies. In a modern industrial state, an economic base is essential for all.
We point to pride to our national income, but the nation is only an aggregate of individual men and women. When we turn from the single figure of total income to the incomes of individuals, we find a very marked injustice in its distribution. It has been said that those qualities you dislike in others are the ones you see in yourself. As we look at Fitzgerald's book and its actors, The Great Gatsby proves this can also be true for an entire nation. The Great Gatsby eviscerated the very soul of America, and one century later, it continues to do so.