On the “Great” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

Is there a need for another analytical essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring The Great Gatsby (1925)? One would be inclined to say no. There is, however, a need for a reminder of the novel’s transcendental nature: its ability to cut through generations and zeitgeists to reach the 21^st-century reader.

Ernest Hemingway had the privilege of reading The Great Gatsby first-hand in Paris, and was so awed by its artistry that he considered it Fitzgerald’s best work. Generations of readers after Hemingway would come to share his view. What makes the work so fascinating that it is still being read today by high-school students and literary enthusiasts around the globe, despite its opaque language and style? The attraction of The Great Gatsby lies largely in its unabashed presentation of romanticism – the blood that runs through the veins of our imagination.

The towering titular character is a man of unconditional dedication. Having lost his love to a wealthy rival, Jay Gatsby spends the rest of his adult life trying to do only one thing: to win Daisy back come hell or damnation. Gatsby succeeds admirably, too, judging by the over-the-top West Egg mansion he lives in (strategically located across the bay from Daisy’s), the wild champagne parties he throws, the eager business partners he has, and the fast car he drives. All the ingredients that go into the making of the American Dream are embodied by Jay Gatsby. He is the man every one of us wants to be: steadfast, determined, committed, and unimaginably rich. How many of us living in the 21^st century cannot identify with that? (The phenomenal number of “life coaches” – Anthony Robbins, anyone? – America produces every year should prove my point.)

And yet there is something tragically unfulfilled about Gatsby, no matter how socially and financially successful he has become. The reader can sense this early on in the novel, thanks to a structural trick on Fitzgerald’s part – introducing him only halfway through Chapter 3, underscoring his detachment from the glitzy world around him. Gatsby’s solitariness is self-imposed. He needs no-one and wants no-one, except for Daisy. Here our somewhat naive narrator Nick Carraway enters the picture. He is lured into Gatsby’s world (and scheme), and is led to believe that Gatsby’s companionship is genuine. The truth is Gatsby is only using Nick, a distant cousin of Daisy’s, to get to her.

It would be a mistake to think that Fitzgerald is making us judge Gatsby. On the contrary, he is making us see Gatsby through Nick’s misty eyes. Nick’s descriptions of Gatsby, even after all the sound and the fury, are:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. (8)

What makes Jay Gatsby “great” is his unswerving perseverance and the old-world spirit he represents. We (and Nick) see in him how the past can be kept alive and burning bright – like that green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock. Even if it is a misleading light, it still provides ample momentum for a man to transform himself into a near-mythical figure on par with King Midas.

Regardless of Gatsby’s unscrupulousness, we are made to empathise with him. This is Fitzgerald’s doing. He wants us to recognise devotion and Golden-Age chivalry in a fellow human being. For even by the time Fitzgerald began composing The Great Gatsby in 1923, the Golden Age had long ceased to be. It had gone down in flames along with the devastations of the First World War, which snuffed out not only countless young lives, but also existing morals and old beliefs. It is as if after the war the West was only too eager to move forward, leaving behind the ghouls and demons that had led to the mass destruction. With the eradication of the old order, the West had to re-define its moral rules. What had been improper and vulgar before was no longer so (think flappers); what would have brought about outrage and public condemnation was now tolerated. Life took on an elusive, unsteady edge, with the young living from day to day not knowing where they would end up (this idea is most notable in Chapter 7, when Nick realises that he has just turned thirty, and that there is no promising future lying ahead). There was a certain fatalism to their existence: live for today, the heck with tomorrow.

The Great Gatsby gives a sharp portrait of the recklessness of the Jazz Age, but what it also does expertly is juxtapose that recklessness with an undeniable sense of nostalgia – a painful longing for the unattainable past. Gatsby himself longs for a woman who can never be his, even if she did once briefly belong to him. The irony (and tragedy) is that despite his wealth and shrewdness, he does not recognise this. (There is of course the possibility that the romantic in him does not allow him to.)

Even our narrator Nick has an incurable case of nostalgia. After Gatsby’s death, he continues to eulogise the man – not because of his moral uprightness, but because of the romanticism he personified. The fact that it is Nick who recounts the entire tragedy to us speaks volumes about his rose-tinted view of the past.

The past, then, is what The Great Gatsby is entirely about. It is the invisible force that propels the plot and the characters’ destinies forward. Gatsby, while alive, only lived for the past – the hope to repossess Daisy, but he never realised the hope “was already behind him” (171), as Nick puts it. The novel’s world-famous last line – which, incidentally, is also the inscription on Fitzgerald’s tombstone – reads: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (172). The line suggests that the past is inseparable from human existence. No matter how hard we try to steer ourselves forward, the past will always “reclaim” us. By ending the novel this way, Fitzgerald may also be suggesting that there is an inherent need in us to dwell on the past, to return to the Golden Age when the world was romantic, and the promise of youth, beauty, and hope gave life a purpose. It may not be a practical view to assume (Gatsby’s tragic end tells us this much), but at least it is a vision that will sustain us through hopeless, desolate times. This was uncannily foresighted of Fitzgerald, when one considers that the Wall Street Crash was only several years away, and the lush life portrayed in The Great Gatsby would die an ignoble death.

All page numbers refer to the 2000 Penguin Modern Classics edition.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Maryland