The Great Gatsby
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Themes: Wealth, longing & the imagined past
Summary
Nick Carraway becomes fascinated by his wealthy neighbour Jay Gatsby, whose lavish parties conceal a particular hope: reunion with Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is married to Tom, and Gatsby has built an elaborate identity around recovering their earlier romance.
The reunion exposes the distance between Gatsby's dream and Daisy's actual life. After Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson while driving Gatsby's car, Gatsby remains protective of her. Myrtle's husband George, led towards Gatsby by Tom, kills Gatsby and then himself.
Nick is left to arrange a sparsely attended funeral and reconsider the world whose glamour had attracted him. Wealth protects Tom and Daisy from consequences that fall heavily on others.
The novel links romantic longing to class aspiration and reinvention. Gatsby's dream has an emotional grandeur, but it depends on treating the past as something money and determination might restore. Nick's retrospective voice gives the story its mixture of fascination, grief, and judgement.
A way into the book
Distinguish Gatsby's capacity to hope from the object of his hope. The novel can admire the first while exposing the fragility of the second.
Personal critique
Fitzgerald makes the dream beautiful enough that exposing it also feels like a loss. Gatsby's hope has an imaginative energy far greater than the life Daisy could plausibly offer him. I admire the novel's ability to preserve that distinction: the poverty of an ambition's object does not make the capacity to hope emotionally trivial.
Nick's narration is essential to this effect. His attraction and disapproval continually qualify one another, so I find him most useful as an involved interpreter rather than a final moral authority. His elegant account can illuminate Gatsby and help turn him into another carefully arranged image.
The narrowness of the social world is both a strength and a limitation. People outside its glamour often carry consequences without receiving equal inward attention. Still, the aftermath cuts through the spectacle with remarkable economy. The almost empty funeral gives the parties their final meaning: visibility and intimacy have been disastrously confused.