Daisy is the princess in the tower, the golden girl that every man dreams of possessing. She is beautiful and rich and innocent and pure (at least on the surface) in her whiteness. But that whiteness, as you will notice, is mixed with the yellow of gold and the inevitable corruption that money brings. Though Daisy seems pure and white, she is a mixture of things, just like the flower for which she was named (see Schneider in “Critics”).
Fitzgerald suggests the nature of this mixture beautifully in the famous passage from Chapter VII about her voice:
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of-” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood it before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl….
Like money, Daisy promises more than she gives. Her voice seems to offer everything, but she’s born to disappoint. She is the sort of person who is better to dream about than to actually possess. Fitzgerald–with that double vision we discussed in The Author and His Times section of this guide–knew very well both the attractions and the limitations of women like Daisy, who is modeled in many ways upon his wife Zelda.
Gatsby worships Daisy, and Nick distrusts her–just as Scott both worshipped and distrusted Zelda. Gatsby loves Daisy too much to see what is wrong with her. Nick stands back and sees the way Daisy lets other people take care of her in crises. If you want to study the nature of Daisy’s weakness, look especially at her behavior on the night before her wedding and on the night of Myrtle Wilson’s death. Daisy, unlike Tom, uses her money rather than her body or her personality to bully others. She uses her money to protect her from reality, and when reality threatens to hurt her, she cries and goes inside the protective womb her money has made.
Be careful not to identify Daisy with the green light at the end of her dock. The green light is the promise, the dream. Daisy herself is much less than that. Even Gatsby must realize that having Daisy in the flesh is much, much less than what he imagined it would be when he fell in love with the idea of her.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: JORDAN BAKER
Jordan Baker’s most striking quality is her dishonesty. She is tough and aggressive–a tournament golfer who is so hardened by competition that she is willing to do anything to win. At the end of Chapter IV, when Nick is telling us about Jordan, he remembers a story about her first major tournament. Apparently she moved her ball to improve her lie (!), but when the matter was being investigated, the caddy and the only other witness to the incident retracted their stories and nothing was proved against her. The incident should stay with you throughout the novel, reminding you (as it reminds Nick) that Jordan is the smart new woman, the opportunist who will do whatever she must to be successful in her world.
In many ways Jordan Baker symbolizes a new type of woman that was emerging in the Twenties. She is hard and self-sufficient, and she adopts whatever morals suit her situation. She has cut herself off from the older generation. She wears the kind of clothes that suit her; she smokes, she drinks, and has sex because she enjoys them. You may wish to explore Jordan as the new woman of the Twenties by looking at the manners and character traits she reveals. Note such things as her name (a masculine name), her body (hard, athletic, boyish, small-breasted), her style (blunt, cynical, bored), and her social background (she is cut off from past generations by having almost no family).
Another important aspect of Jordan is her function in the novel. Fitzgerald needs her to get the story told. Because she is Daisy’s friend from Louisville, she can supply Nick with information he would not have otherwise. She also serves as a link between the major characters, moving back and forth between the world of East Egg (Tom and Daisy’s house) and West Egg (Gatsby’s and Nick’s houses). She is rich enough to be comfortable among the East Eggers but enough of a social hustler to appear at Gatsby’s parties.
Jordan serves still another purpose: Nick’s girlfriend during the summer of 1922. The Nick-Jordan romance serves as a nice sub-plot to the Gatsby-Jordan relationship, and allows you to compare and contrast a romantic-idealistic love with a very practical relationship made on a temporary basis by two worldly people of the time.
If you want to explore the Nick-Jordan relationship and the possible reasons why Nick becomes involved with her and then breaks the relationship off, you’ll need to look particularly at three passages: Nick’s comments toward the end of Chapter III; the phone call between Nick and Jordan in Chapter VIII; and their final conversation in Chapter IX. We’ll take a close look at these passages later on.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: SETTING
The setting in The Great Gatsby is very important because in Fitzgerald’s world setting reveals character. Fitzgerald divides the world of the novel into four major settings: 1. East Egg; 2. West Egg; 3. the valley of ashes; and 4. New York City. Within these major settings are two or more subsettings. East Egg is limited to Daisy’s house, but West Egg incorporates both Gatsby’s house and Nick’s. The valley of ashes includes the Wilson’s garage, Michaelis’ restaurant, and the famous sign with the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. New York City includes the offices where people work, the apartment Tom Buchanan has rented for Myrtle Wilson, and the Plaza Hotel, where the final showdown between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan takes place.
Each of these settings both reflects and determines the values of the people who live or work there. East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live, is the home of the Ivy League set who have had wealth for a long time and are comfortable with it. Since they are secure with their money, they have no need to show it off. Nick lives in new-rich West Egg because he is too poor to afford a home in East Egg; Gatsby lives there because his money is “new” and he lacks the social credentials to be accepted in East Egg. His house, like the rest of his possessions (his pink suit, for example), is tasteless and vulgar and would be completely out of place in the more refined and understated world of East Egg. No wonder that Gatsby is ruined in the end by the East, and that Nick decides to leave.
The valley of ashes in contrast to both eggs is where the poor people live–those who are the victims of the rich. It is characterized literally by dust, for it is here that the city’s ashes are dumped (in what is now Flushing, Queens), and the inhabitants are, as it were, symbolically dumped on by the rest of the world. The valley of ashes, with its brooding eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, also stands as a symbol of the spiritual dryness, the emptiness of the world of the novel.
New York City is a symbol of what America has become in the 1920s: a place where anything goes, where money is made and bootleggers flourish, and where the World Series can be fixed by a man like Meyer Wolfsheim. New York is a place of parties and affairs, and bizarre and colorful characters who appear from time to time in West Egg at Gatsby’s parties.
The idea of setting as moral geography is reinforced by the overriding symbolism of the American East and the American Midwest. This larger contrast between East and Midwest frames the novel as a whole. Nick comes East to enter the bond business, and finds himself instead in the dizzying world of The Jazz Age in the summer of 1922. He is fascinated and disgusted with this world, and he eventually returns home to the Midwest, to the values and traditions of his youth.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: THEMES
A good novel has a number of themes. The following are important themes of The Great Gatsby.
1. THE CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
The American Dream–as it arose in the Colonial period and developed in the nineteenth century–was based on the assumption that each person, no matter what his origins, could succeed in life on the sole basis of his or her own skill and effort. The dream was embodied in the ideal of the self-made man, just as it was embodied in Fitzgerald’s own family by his grandfather, P. F. McQuillan.
The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. The characters are Midwesterners who have come East in pursuit of this new dream of money, fame, success, glamour, and excitement. Tom and Daisy must have a huge house, a stable of polo ponies, and friends in Europe. Gatsby must have his enormous mansion before he can feel confident enough to try to win Daisy.
What Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing in The Great Gatsby is not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream. What was once–for Ben Franklin, for example, or Thomas Jefferson–a belief in self-reliance and hard work has become what Nick Carraway calls “…the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” The energy that might have gone into the pursuit of noble goals has been channeled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but fundamentally empty form of success.
How is this developed? I have tried to indicate in the chapter-by-chapter analysis, especially in the Notes, that Fitzgerald’s critique of the dream of success is developed primarily through the five central characters and through certain dominant images and symbols. The characters might be divided into three groups: 1. Nick, the observer and commentator, who sees what has gone wrong; 2. Gatsby, who lives the dream purely; and 3. Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, the “foul dust” who are the prime examples of the corruption of the dream.
The primary images and symbols that Fitzgerald employs in developing the theme are: 1. the green light; 2. the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg; 3. the image of the East and Midwest; 4. Owl Eyes; 5. Dan Cody’s yacht; and 6. religious terms such as grail and incarnation.
2. SIGHT AND INSIGHT
Both the character groupings and the images and symbols suggest a second major theme that we can call “sight and insight.” As you read the novel, you will come across many images of blindness; is this because hardly anyone seems to see what is really going on? The characters have little self-knowledge and even less knowledge of each other. Even Gatsby–we might say, especially Gatsby–lacks the insight to understand what is happening. He never truly sees either Daisy or himself, so blinded is he by his dream. The only characters who see, in the sense of “understand,” are Nick and Owl Eyes. The ever present eyes of Dr. Eckleburg seem to reinforce the theme that there is no all-seeing presence in the modern world.
3. THE MEANING OF THE PAST
The past is of central importance in the novel, whether it is Gatsby’s personal past (his affair with Daisy in 1917) or the larger historical past to which Nick refers in the closing sentence of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The past holds something that both Gatsby and Nick seem to long for: a simpler, better, nobler time, perhaps, a time when people believed in the importance of the family and the church. Tom, Daisy and Jordan are creatures of the present–Fitzgerald tells us little or nothing about their pasts–and it is this allegiance to the moment that makes them so attractive, and also so rootless and spiritually empty.
4. THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG MAN
In Chapter VII, Nick remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday. He, like Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy, came East to get away from his past; now that his youth is officially over, he realizes that he may have made a mistake to come East, and begins a period of reevaluation that leads to his eventual decision to return to the Middle West.
The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick’s initiation into life. His trip East gives him the education he needs to grow up. The novel can, therefore, be called a bildungsroman–the German word for a story about a young man. (Other examples of a bildungsroman are The Red Badge of Courage, David Copperfield, and The Catcher in the Rye.) Nick, in a sense, writes The Great Gatsby to show us what he has learned.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: STYLE
Style refers to the way a writer puts words together: the length and rhythm of his sentences; his use of figurative language and symbolism; his use of dialogue and description.
Fitzgerald called The Great Gatsby a “novel of selected incident,” modelled after Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. “What I cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make another novel,” he said. Fitzgerald’s stylistic method is to let a part stand for the whole. In Chapters I to III, for example, he lets three parties stand for the whole summer and for the contrasting values of three different worlds. He also lets small snatches of dialogue represent what is happening at each party. The technique is cinematic. The camera zooms in, gives us a snatch of conversation, and then cuts to another group of people. Nick serves almost as a recording device, jotting down what he hears. Fitzgerald’s ear for dialogue, especially for the colloquial phrases of the period, is excellent.
Fitzgerald’s style might also be called imagistic. His language is full of images–concrete verbal pictures appealing to the senses. There is water imagery in descriptions of the rain, Long Island Sound, and the swimming pool. There is religious imagery in the Godlike eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and in words such as incarnation, and grail. There is color imagery: pink for Gatsby, yellow and white for Daisy.
Some images might more properly be called symbols for the way they point beyond themselves to historic or mythic truths: the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, for instance, or Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes, or Dan Cody’s yacht. Through the symbolic use of images, Fitzgerald transforms what is on the surface a realistic social novel of the 1920s into a myth about America.
Finally, we might call Fitzgerald’s style reflective. There are several important passages at which Nick stops and reflects on the meaning of the action, almost interpreting the events. The style in such passages is dense, intellectual, almost deliberately difficult as Nick tries to wrestle with the meanings behind the events he has witnessed.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: POINT OF VIEW
Style and point of view are very hard to separate in a novel that is told in the first person by a narrator who is also one of the characters. The voice is always Nick’s. Fitzgerald’s choice of Nick as the character through whom to tell his story has a stroke of genius. He had been reading Joseph Conrad and had been particularly struck by the way in which Conrad uses the character of Marlow to tell both the story of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and the story of Jim in Lord Jim. In those novels, Fitzgerald learned, we never see the characters of Kurtz or Jim directly, but only through the eyes of other people. And when we come to think of it, isn’t that how we get to know people in real life? We never get to know them all at once, as we get to know characters described by an omniscient novelist; we learn about them in bits and pieces over a period of time. And so, Fitzgerald reasoned, someone like Gatsby would be much more understandable and sympathetic if presented through the eyes of a character like ourselves. Rather than imposing himself between us and the action, Nick brings us closer to the action by forcing us to experience events as though we were Nick. The I of the novel becomes ourselves, and we find ourselves, like Nick, wondering who Gatsby is, why he gives these huge parties, and what his past and background may be. By writing from Nick’s point of view, Fitzgerald is able to make Gatsby more realistic than he could have by presenting Gatsby through the eyes of an omniscient narrator. He is also able to make Gatsby a more sympathetic character because of Nick’s decision to become Gatsby’s friend. We want to find out more about Gatsby because Nick does. We care about Gatsby because Nick does. We are angry that no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral because Nick is.
The use of the limited first person point of view gives not only the character of Gatsby but the whole novel a greater air of realism. We believe these parties really happened because a real person named Nick Carraway is reporting what he saw. When Nick writes down the names of the people who came to Gatsby’s parties on a Long Island Railroad timetable, we believe that these people actually came to Gatsby’s parties.
Nick is careful throughout the novel never to tell us things that he could not have known. If he was not present at a particular occasion, he gets the information from someone who was–from Jordan Baker, for example, who tells him about Gatsby’s courtship of Daisy in Louisville; or from the Greek, Michaelis, who tells him about the death of Myrtle Wilson. Sometimes Nick summarizes what others tell him, and sometimes he uses their words. But he never tells us something he could never know. This is one of the reasons the novel is so convincing.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: FORM AND STRUCTURE