The book “The Great Gatsby”, written by Scott Fitzgerald and published during one of America’s greatest periods of economic growth, as the nation expanded its borders and developed industries, is considered to present a “successful manual” for those willing to enrich. Jay Gatsby, the main character fits this profile for a number of reasons.
He is born to poor “farm people” and spent his life in rural Minnesota. Despite his visual appearances, Gatsby composed a boyhood list of General Resolves which contains:
“No Wasting time at Shafters or
No more smoking or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save 5.00 dollars (crossed out), 3.00 dollars per week
Be better to parents (Fitzgerald, pp.181-182, ch.9)
Gatsby’s physical fitness, a self-improvement virtue, is very-well described as he is “balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes … with the formless grace of our nervous sporadic games” (Idem, pp 68, ch.4) Gatsby appeals to formality while speaking giving the impression to Nick Carraway that he is picking the words with care, fact that expresses the avoiding slang (Tyson pp 120-130).
Unlike Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway, Gatsby is motivated by the financial need, making his fortune through bootlegging alcohol or other illegal activities together with Wolfsheim. For Gatsby the war marked him as a young man to get ahead in the world, while for Nick the military experience seems undistinguished. Tom Buchanan and Nick contradict the dictum of self-made man. Tom is searching for ways of spending his inherited fortune, totally ignoring his wife Daizy Buchanan while Nick is still financially supported by his father during his business studies and however he feels himself without a clear direction in life. (Tyson pp 120-130)
Although the plot in “The Great Gatsby” begins in a dramatization, America having produced an idealism impalpable that had lost touch with reality (Gatsby) and a materialism so heavy that is was inhuman (Tom Buchanan), the novel presents the means of self-improvement (John Henry Raleigh The Great Gatsby in Arthur Mizener A Collection of Critical Essays, Maynard Mack Series Editor, Yale University, Prentice Hall, Inc Englewood Cliff, USA, 1965, p.101). As Nick says of Gatsby:
“…his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him somewhere back in that vast obscurity” (Fitzgerald Apud Raleigh, p.101)
Nick imagines that Gatsby, before the moment of his death, that he must have had his “realization” of the intractable brutishness of matter:
“…he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at the unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how row the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass” (Fitzgerald Apud Raleigh, p.101)
Raleigh adds that the novel “The Great Gatsby” does not deal with national customs but with the permanent realities of existence. As a result, most characters do not count, they “are merely a form of animality living out its mundane existence: Tom Buchanan, Jordan Bakers, Daisy Fay. Only Nick and Gatsby count” (Raleigh in Mizerner, p.102) Gatsby, with his “absurdities and his short sad, pathetic life is still valuable”, as Nick admits at a certain moment: “You’re worth the whole (…) bunch put together” (Fitzgerald Apud Raleigh, p.102). Although Nick is aware that the content of Gatsby’s dream is corrupt he “senses that its form is pristine”. In his own fumbling, often gross way, Gatsby was obsessed with the wonder of human life and driven by the search to make the wonder actual. Similarly with the urge that motivate visionaries to measure the facts up to the splendors of human imagination, but in Gatsby’s case this is utterly pathetic as he is strengthening to be subjective or uncouth.
The whole novel points out the contrast between Gatsby and Nick and only the bond that stays in between reveals their complementarity. The two design essential polarities which make up the human existence. Allegorically considered, Nick is reason, experience, waking, reality and history while Gatsby is imagination, innocence, sleeping, dream and eternity. Moreover, while Nick is conservative and historical as his lineage, Gatsby is radical and apocalyptic – as rootless as his heritage. .(Raleigh p.102) Even so, throughout the novel Nick is pursued by the “green light” – the “projection of his wishes”,: a signal to go ahead, to “beat on .. against the current”, the attempt so desperately with his unbroken series of successful gesture”, the recapturing of the past which can never attain (Burnam in Mizener, p.104) and his extreme feelings from ecstasy to tragedy, thus he is radical
Maxwell Perkins deduces some virtues from characters’ behavior: “…these are such things as make a man famous. And all the things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place and space (…) and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity” (Apud Raleigh p. 102). The genius in “The Great Gatsby” stays in self creation, in eternity.
Nick Carraway states that “Gatsb represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn” “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” (Fitzgerald in Dyson in Misener, p.117). “Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society. His background is cosmopolitan, his past a mystery, his temperament of an opportunist entirely obvious to the claims of people. (…) This intensity spring from a quality which he alone has: and this we might call- faith. He really believes in himself and his illusions”. Therefore, “Isolation is an essential part of his make-up, a necessary part of his God-like self-sufficiency” (Dyson in Mizener, p.113). His victory is as inevitable as unadmirable.
When Gatsby arrives with his “romantic readiness” he breaks against Daisy’s sheer non-existence. Her romantic attitude, adequate in appearance to the dreams Gatsby built around, proves to be unreal. This account gives her “cynicism”, fact that transmuted the pain into pleasure. (Dyson in Mizener, p.114). “ The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said.. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged” (Fitzgerald in Dyson in Mizener, p.114 )
All in all, Jay Gatsby is driven by the desire to rise up out of the class, becoming rich accordingly to the rules of a violent subculture, refusing so to adopt the “debilitating personal habits of his companion” (Tyson,pp 301-311)
Bibliography
Tyson Lois, Critical Theory Today : A user-friendly guide, New York, London : Routledge, 2006
Fitzgerald Scott, “The Great Gatsby”, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953
Raleigh John Henry, The Great Gatsby in Mizener Arthur, A Collection of Critical Essays, Maynard Mack Series Editor, Yale University, Prentice Hall, Inc Englewood Cliff, USA, 1965
Burnam Tom The Eyes of Dr Eckleburg: A Re-examination of The Great Gatsby in Mizener Arthur, A Collection of Critical Essays, Maynard Mack Series Editor, Yale University, Prentice Hall, Inc Englewood Cliff, USA, 1965
Dyson A.E. The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six years after, in Mizener Arthur, A Collection of Critical Essays, Maynard Mack Series Editor, Yale University, Prentice Hall, Inc Englewood Cliff, USA, 1965