1.) You’re kidding, right? You can watch Jersey Shore every week, but you’ve never read THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL? Seriously, its American-ness is exceeded only by its greatness, and I have no idea what you’re waiting for. And,
B.) There are going to be some things in this post that will potentially completely ruin the entire book. With that being said…
I love The Great Gatsby, not only for what it says, but just as much for the devices it uses to say those things. Whether you read The Great Gatsby just for pleasure or for critical literary analysis, there are endless discoveries to be made within the story. Fitzgerald writes in a way that makes it possible to find some beautiful new secret hidden in the text every time you read the novel. Every page, every line has something more than what you see on the surface. Fitzgerald’s eloquence is just unmatchable. His command of language is astounding. There is another brilliant metaphor every time you flip a few pages.
And among those metaphors is the metaphor that looms over all of English literature like a challenge that no writer wants to accept: The green light.
Enter Jay Gatsby, our mysterious Hero. He’s way too young to be way too wealthy, and no one really knows how he got that way. Maybe it’s inheritance, but he’s actually probably a bootlegger, a drug peddler, or a German spy. No one actually knows crap about Jay Gatsby (apart from the fact that he throws the rockin’est parties in the whole West Egg). He is, as our faithful narrator Nick Carraway dubs him, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And boy, does he have everything. Except that he doesn’t. The first time we meet Jay Gatsby, Nick’s next-door neighbor, Nick spots him standing outside, looking out across the water, trembling, with his arms outstretched. Nick looks across the water and sees nothing more than a green light at the dock of an East Egg resident. It’s Daisy Buchanan’s dock.
Jay Gatsby may very well be Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, but he shares your ambitions. He is so hopelessly hopeful in the pursuit of fulfilling those ambitions that he has moved into an enormous mansion and thrown copious, extravagant parties. Just to impress some girl. The green light represents the object of Gatsby’s innermost desire—Daisy. His longing and his sufferings are so relatable that’s it’s nearly impossible for the green light metaphor to NOT tear your heart to pieces. It brings the reality of YOUR green light right to the surface of your consciousness, and you’re reading with your trembling arms outstretched toward your hopeless ambition.
Daisy Buchanan, as seen through the eyes of Jay Gatsby, is anything in the world but just some girl. Daisy Buchanan, to anyone else, is kind of just a wreck. She’s married to arguably the most detestable fictional character ever written. Tom Buchanan is such a filthy chump that he doesn’t even treat his mistress well, and Daisy has been miserable with that loser since even before they were even married. He wasn’t present for the birth of his daughter, and Daisy recalls that day in conversation with Nick at the Worst Dinner Party Ever. She expresses how happy she was to discover that her child was a girl, and she says, “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” It’s obvious that Daisy herself is trying to be a beautiful fool, because that is the only way she can think of to get through life.
The Great Gatsby is full of extremely wealthy, horribly miserable people who have everything, but they’re always having a terrible time. They have enough money to buy cars just to get super drunk and wreck them. Jay Gatsby has enough money for a mansion, enormous gardens, and a pool that he stresses to Nick on several occasions that he has never even used. It’s just not enough.
During the first miserable social gathering of the novel, Daisy shares an anecdote with Nick about her butler’s previous job and how it relates to his nose.
“Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.” (LOL)
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be a silver polisher for some people in New York… He had to polish morning and night until it began to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse until he was forced to give up his position.”
What this contributes to the novel is the lousy truth that, just as much as
wealth consumes the wealthy, it consumes the poor too. Everyone in the novel is just desperately and blindly searching for their green light in their Valley of Ashes.
Ah, the Valley of Ashes. The Valley of Ashes lies between the East and West Eggs and the city, and it is a mound of charred waste that masterfully represents the country’s moral and social decay. Overseeing the Valley of Ashes is a billboard depicting only a pair of bespectacled eyes. The eyes of Dr. T J Eckleburg. The novel says of the billboard,
“Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his business…. And then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under the sun and rain, brood on over our solemn dumping ground.”
MAN, isn’t that a spectacular metaphor for God and man turning their backs on Him. I’m just saying. That’s just too beautiful. (Also, during the 1920s when the novel is set, the Valley of Ashes was a real thing. Dr. Eckelburg, however, appears to be Fitzgerald’s independent creation.)
Now back to our hero Gatsby and his heroic ambitions! Long story short, Gatsby essentially gets exactly what he wants. He GETS WHAT HE WANTS, what he is LONGING FOR THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE FREAKING LIFE, and it isn’t good enough. He rekindles his romantic relationship with Daisy, a girl he loves so much that he actually tumbles down stairs when she is near. A girl he loves so much that he puts literally his entire life into going after her steadfastly. He gets her. He gets her, and then he complains that it doesn’t FEEL the way he hoped. It isn’t the same FEELING as when they were younger, and he insists that she assure him that she never once loved Tom.
WHY DO WE DO THAT!? Why? Why do we want something so much that it tears us apart, get it, and then decide that we don’t really want that anymore? The reality of it is that this doesn’t just happen in Jay Gatsby. Everyone does this every day, and I can’t possibly understand why. Seriously, she was your green light, you idiot, WHY would you act like it isn’t good enough?
Then, in the end, Mr. Jay Gatsby finally uses his swimming pool, and I’ll leave what happens next to the imagination.
Nick Carraway says at the start of the novel that,
“Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was 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.”
I’ll leave you with the questions:
DID Jay Gatsby turn out all right in the end?
Why are the elations of men so short-winded?
Was Jay Gatsby’s journey truly heroic?
Most importantly, is your journey heroic?
(These are non-rhetorical questions that demand answers, and I encourage answering them in comments.)
Finally, I absolutely intend to name my first-born daughter Gatsby Jay Whatever, and yeah, I get that your kid’s probably going to make fun of her at recess, but at least she’ll be reading Byron while your kid tastes the grass and races caterpillars.
(Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming article on caterpillar racing.)
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