Great or the Greatest? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

To cop a cliché, for many critics and readers The Great Gatsby still stands out as the Great American Novel — though it hardly started out that way. Upon its publication in 1925, the brief (less than 200 pages), tragic tale of one Jay Gatsby, aka Jimmy Gatz, was greeted largely with indifference by the reading public, who much preferred his 1920 coming-of-age debut novel This Side of Paradise. Indeed, on Fitzgerald’s untimely death in 1940 (at the age of 44), there were still thousands of unsold copies of his masterpiece gathering dust in the publisher’s warehouse. Sic transit gloria.

If the author had only remained on this mortal coil a few more years he would have seen his works undergo a popular renaissance — first and foremost The Great Gatsby. Reprinted as a free paperback by the U.S. military during WWII, it became a favorite among G.I.s and started a “Fitzgerald revival” that would not only resurrect Fitzgerald’s name and reputation but that of his flamboyant, troubled—and equally meteoric—wife, Zelda. Today, they still reign as the legendary first couple of U.S. literati.

For decades, it was required reading for English 101 courses far and wide. The Great Gatsby is one of those classic books that Hollywood takes a crack at every generation or so, though invariably with not-so-great results (the most recent was Baz Luhrmann’s razzle-dazzle 2013 Leonardo DiCaprio version).

Like any notable work of art popular beyond its time, Gatsby has been the subject of healthy reappraisals over the decades, though none so far has knocked it off its lofty pedestal. While necessarily and precisely dated by Fitzgerald’s devil-may-care Roaring Twenties milieu, in stature it has blown past newer 20th-century best-sellers as varied as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

With no intent to be flippant, what then is so great about The Great Gatsby? Given its brevity, it hardly possesses an epic scale in locales, time, or cast of characters, à la Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Victor Hugo. Unlike the dense, convoluted writing style of Henry James or William Faulkner, Fitzgerald writes in a simpler, terse, modern vein, generally avoiding lengthy digressions or asides.

His plot also does without intricacies or even much drama (which is probably why the film adaptations tend to fail), although at the center of the story is the unraveling mystery of Gatsby’s identity and background (Bootlegger? Oxford man? Murderer?). Next to the new “hardboiled” masculine hero of American fiction that spurted from the pen of Fitzgerald’s close proto-frenemy Ernest Hemingway, Gatsby is a passive, diffident, even “laid-back” protagonist. That his story is narrated in past tense by an observer who only slowly comes to know his subject—and his dubious past—keeps Gatsby as a rather remote, if not chilly, character.

Taking all these literary non-ingredients off the table, what remains is a feast of ironic social commentary, ripe with symbolism and lyrical romanticism, delivered in delectable, sometimes stunning prose. It is a short book that takes a long, hard look at timeless social and personal questions that are perhaps even more relevant today than in the 1920s.

What exactly is the “American Dream”? Monetary success, materialism, status? Love, marriage, and a two-car garage? Is it available to everyone (“all men are created equal… ”) or just a privileged few defined by class, race, birthright, beauty, or simply cold, hard cash — ill-gotten or otherwise? That 1980 Talking Heads song poses the question in a lighter way: “You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”

Jay Gatsby’s grand dilemma is that he has the house, all right—a lavish summer mansion in the town of West Egg along the coast of Long Island—but neither the wife nor a steady girl. Like the book’s pushing-30 narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby is a man alone.

Having come to New York City from the Midwest in 1922 to learn the “bond market,” Nick rents a small, shabby bungalow sandwiched between mansions in West Egg — one of them Gatsby’s. Soon enough Nick discovers his neighbor throws the biggest, ritziest summer parties in all of New York, both on the beach by day and on the terraces by night. No invitation? No problem.  “People were not invited,” Nick writes, “they went there. … In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Fitzgerald’s fictional towns are stand-ins for the Great Neck/Manhasset Bay areas of New York.

In his behind-the-scenes, but determined way, Gatsby aims to impress, first of all, those scores of invited and otherwise freeloading guests who partake in his bottomless buffets, boatloads of liquors and cordials (during the first years of Prohibition, mind you), and catered dinners, typically accompanied by a full orchestra. But most of all Jay Gatsby wants his luminous palatial soirees to serve as a kind of homing beacon to a certain woman from his past now living across the bay amid the wealth and splendor of East Egg. That Daisy Buchanan is married, a new mother, and enjoying a gilded life with her fabulously rich husband Tom are only minor obstacles to Gatsby. After all, love conquers all, doesn’t it?

Five years previous, when he was in the army, Gatsby met and courted Daisy Fay, Nick’s distant cousin and the blond (probably) belle of Louisville, Kentucky. Gatsby was smitten. They planned to marry. And why not? She was that charming, pretty, vivacious rara avis, “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth — but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget…” 

Alas, when Gatsby went off to serve in the “Great War” in Europe, he promised to write but didn’t. In his mind, he knew he was no match for her. For if his officer’s uniform could fake him into Daisy’s life and heart, without it he would have to come clean. “Jay Gatsby” was his own idealized creation, a bluff, a new and improved version of Jimmy Gatz, just a poor farmer’s son from Minnesota. How could he possibly give Daisy the life she would want and need?

Naturally, there was no shortage of suitors for Miss Daisy Fay. So she wed into wealth, if not true love, in the person of Tom Buchanan of Chicago, now “a straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and supercilious manner.” By 1922, the word was that Tom had a mistress on the side. He also is something of a white supremacist, on occasion ranting about a book called The Rise of the Coloured Empires.

To this uneven love triangle, Fitzgerald adds a fourth, namely Mrs. Myrtle Wilson from nearby working-class Queens in New York City. While it is an open secret that Tom has a mistress, only Nick knows that it is Myrtle (“she carried her surplus flesh sensuously”), who, in inappropriate but less-than-charitable terms could be described as a floozy.

As Fitzgerald was one of the key authors chronicling the rise of the 1920s female “flapper,” one of the book’s most interesting characters is Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker. Not only a willful, carefree, independent modern woman of the new century, she is a star female golfer whom Nick may have eyes for, and vice versa.

Now we must make a fitting segue to one (or two) of Fitzgerald’s most pronounced uses of thematic symbols. Near the Wilsons’ used-car shop, past the “valley of ashes” dumps on the way to Manhattan, is an old billboard advertising the practice of optician “Doctor T.J. Eckleburg.”

By car and train, Nick passes the billboard to and from his trips to the city, and he never fails to note the spectral doctor’s gigantic, even God-like, looming eyes.

What will he see of the human folly about to unfold, and what will he do? It is worth noting that two sad eyes and a tear, set above iridescent red lips, are at the center of the book’s iconic original cover art, together conjuring a phantom face in the night sky above a glowing amusement park.

Automobiles—for better or worse a quintessential symbol of modernity—play a supercharged role in driving the plot. Gatsby rides around town in a luxurious cream-colored Rolls-Royce, a gaudy and grandiose behemoth that will send his dreams careening into a dead end. Like the “elaborate formality of speech” that Gatsby affects in conversation, the Rolls is just one more part of the ornamental new man he has become.“Old sport,” is his common refrain, as in “Don’t mention it, old sport,” in his suave, almost paternal manner.

But don’t get the wrong idea. While Nick may first dislike Gatsby, ultimately he becomes fond of him. If Nick is befuddled by Gatsby’s unabashed romanticism in his quest to reclaim Daisy like some contemporary Ulysses returning to Penelope, he is also awed by the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” For Gatsby’s nostalgic, Proustian quest is nothing less than to repeat the past, only better. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he tells Nick, “She’ll see.”

Will it work? In one of the book’s most telling and signature passages, Gatsby coaxes Daisy (with Nick as a go-between) to his mansion for a tour. From its Restoration salons to the Marie Antoinette music rooms, she can’t help but be amazed. But the host’s crowning coup is when he grabs armload after armload of his fine imported shirts (“shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender”) from his armoire and begins excitedly tossing them on a table, with Daisy exultant. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she says simply, moved to the point of tears.

Jay Gatsby had been waiting five long years to pluck Daisy from his exiled past and back to his present and future. He purposely bought his residence directly across from the Buchanans’, where he could longingly gaze across the bay to see a green fog light on the end of their dock. In this singular, lonely light (suggestive of money? Or sickness?), Fitzgerald invests not just Gatsby’s hopes but everyone’s, both real and illusionary. It figures in his last lovely, poetic page, one that illuminates the seductive human reflex to look back in time, not in anger, but in deep nostalgia, need, and regret. For Fitzgerald, even in the 1920s, it was not just a light beckoning to a lost romance, but to a lost country, a lost world.