Form and structure are closely related to point of view. Before writing a novel, an author has to ask himself: who is to tell the story? And in what order will events be told? The primary problem in answering the second question is how to handle time. Do I tell the story straight through from beginning to end? Do I start in the middle and use flashbacks?
As many critics have pointed out, the method Fitzgerald adopts in The Great Gatsby is a brilliant one. He starts the novel in the present, giving us, in the first three chapters, a glimpse of the four main locales of the novel: Daisy’s house in East Egg (Chapter I); the valley of ashes and New York (Chapter II); and Gatsby’s house in West Egg (Chapter III). Having established the characters and setting in the first three chapters, he then narrates the main events of the story in Chapters IV to IX, using Chapters IV, VI, and VII to gradually reveal the story of Gatsby’s past. The past and present come together at the end of the novel in Chapter IX.
The critic James E. Miller, Jr., diagrams the sequence of events in The Great Gatsby like this: “Allowing X to stand for the straight chronological account of the summer of 1922, and A, B, C, D, and F to represent the significant events of Gatsby’s past, the nine chapters of The Great Gatsby may be charted: X, X, X, XCX, X, XBXCX, X, XCXDXD, XEXAX.”
Miller’s diagram shows clearly how Fitzgerald designed the novel. He gives us the information as Nick gets it, just as we might find out information about a friend or acquaintance in real life, in bits and pieces over a period of time. Since we don’t want or can’t absorb much information about a character until we truly become interested in him, Fitzgerald waits to take us into the past until close to the middle of the novel. As the story moves toward its climax, we find out more and more about the central figure from Nick until we, too, are in a privileged position and can understand why Gatsby behaves as he does.
Thus the key to the structure of the novel is the combination of the first person narrative and the gradual revelation of the past as the narrator finds out more and more. The two devices work extremely effectively together, but neither would work very well alone.
Note that the material included in the novel is highly selective. Fitzgerald creates a series of scenes–most of them parties–but does not tell us much about what happens between these scenes. Think of how much happened in the summer of 1922 that Fitzgerald doesn’t tell us! He doesn’t tell us about Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship after they meet at Nick’s house in Chapter V, because Nick would have no access to this information. What the technique of extreme selectivity demands from the reader is close attention. We have to piece together everything we know about Gatsby from the few details that Nick gives us. Part of the pleasure this form gives us is that of drawing conclusions not only from what is included but from what is left out.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: CHAPTER I
The opening paragraphs teach us a lot about Nick and his attitude toward Gatsby and others. Nick introduces himself to us as a young man from the Midwest who has come East to learn the bond business. He tells us that he’s tolerant, inclined to reserve judgment about people, and a good listener. People tell him their secrets because they trust him; he knows the Story of Gatsby.
If you read closely, you’ll see that Nick has ambivalent feelings toward Gatsby. He both loves Gatsby and is critical of him. Nick is tolerant, but that toleration has limits. He hates Gatsby’s crass and vulgar materialism, but he also admires the man for his dream, his “romantic readiness,” his “extraordinary gift for hope.”
Nick makes the distinction between Gatsby, whom he loves because of his dream, and the other characters, who constitute the “foul dust” that “floated in the wake of his dreams.” Nick has such scorn for these “Eastern” types that he has left the East, returned to the Midwest, and, for the time being at least, withdraws from his involvement with other people.
Having told us about his relationships, Nick now introduces us to the world in which he lived during the summer of 1999: the world of East Egg and West Egg, Long Island.
Fitzgerald designed The Great Gatsby very carefully, establishing each of the locations in the novel as a symbol for a particular style of life. West Egg, where Nick and Gatsby live, is essentially a place for the nouveau riche. There are two types of people living here: those on the way up the social ladder who have not the family background or the money to live in fashionable East Egg; and those like Gatsby, whose vulgar display of wealth and connections with Broadway or the New York underworld make them unwelcome in the more dignified world of East Egg. Nick describes his own house as an eyesore, but it is a smaller eyesore than Gatsby’s mansion, which has a tower on one side, “spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy.” Words like new, thin, and raw describe some of the reasons Gatsby’s house is a monstrosity.
By contrast, East Egg is like a fairyland. Its primary color is white, and Nick calls its houses “white palaces” that glitter in the sunlight. The story actually opens in East Egg on the night Nick drives over to have dinner with Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Since Daisy is his cousin and Tom, a friend from Yale, Nick has the credentials to visit East Egg. Their house is “a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial Mansion” overlooking the bay. And the owner is obviously proud of his possessions.
Our first view of Tom Buchanan reveals a very powerful man standing in riding clothes with his legs apart on his front porch. He likes his power, and like the potentates of Eastern kingdoms, he expects the obedience of his subjects. We are ushered into the living room with its “frosted wedding cake” ceiling, its wine-colored rug, and its enormous couch on which are seated two princesses in white: Jordan Baker and Tom’s wife, Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald controls the whole scene through his use of colors–white and gold mainly–that suggest a combination of beauty and wealth. Yet underneath this magical surface there is something wrong. Jordan Baker is bored and discontented. She yawns more than once in this very first scene. There is something cool and slightly unpleasant about the atmosphere–something basically disturbing. Tom talks about a book he has read, The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard. It is a piece of pure Social Darwinism, advocating that the white race preserve its own purity and beat down the colored races before they rise up and overcome the whites. Daisy, who seems not to understand what Tom is talking about, teases him about his size and about the big words in the book. The telephone rings, and Tom is called from the room to answer it. When Daisy follows him out, Jordan Baker confides to Nick that the call is from Tom’s woman in New York.
The rest of the evening is awkward and painful as Tom and Daisy try unsuccessfully to forget the intrusion. Daisy’s cynicism about life becomes painfully clear when she says about her daughter’s birth: “‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’”
NOTE: Under the veneer of the white world, there is hollowness. Nick has said at the very beginning that “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is 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.” Even in this opening chapter, we are getting hints that Tom and Daisy are part of this foul dust.
In Nick’s eyes, Tom and Daisy belong to “a rather distinguished secret society,” whose members have powers the outside world can neither understand nor control. Nick finds both of them smug and insincere.
The evening ends early, around ten o’clock. Jordan Baker, a competitive golfer, wants to go to bed since she’s playing in a tournament the next day. Before Nick leaves for West Egg, Tom and Daisy hint that they would welcome his attention to Miss Baker during the summer.
Nick arrives home, and (in the final paragraph of the chapter) gets his first glimpse of Gatsby. Gatsby is standing on the lawn, stretching out “his arms toward the dark water in a curious way.” Nick, from his own house, believes that he can see Gatsby trembling. As Nick looks out at the water, he can see “…nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.”
NOTE: THE GREEN LIGHT AS SYMBOL This is the first use of one of the novel’s central symbols, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. What Fitzgerald seems to be doing is merely introducing a symbol that will gain in meaning as the story progresses. At this point, we don’t even know that the light is on Daisy’s dock, and we have no reason to associate Gatsby with Daisy. What we do know–and this is very important–is that Nick admires Gatsby because of his dream and this dream is somehow associated with the green light. The color green is a traditional symbol of spring and hope and youth. As long as Gatsby gazes at the green light, his dream lives.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: CHAPTER II
The opening description of the valley of ashes, watched over by the brooding eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, has been analyzed again and again. Fitzgerald’s friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins, wrote to Scott on November 20, 1924: “In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It’s magnificent.” Later in the same letter Perkins concludes, “…with the help of T. J. Eckleburg… you have imported a sort of sense of eternity.”
How should you approach this famous symbol? Remember, a wide variety of interpretations have been made and defended over the years.
It’s best to begin by placing Eckleburg in his geographical context: the valley of ashes, located about halfway between West Egg and New York City. The valley of ashes is the home of George and Myrtle Wilson, whom we’ll meet later on in this chapter. The valley is also a very important part of what we might call the moral geography of the novel. Values are associated with places. In Chapter I we were introduced to East and West Egg, the homes of the very rich, the nouveau riche, and the middle class. The valley of ashes is the home of the poor, the victims of those who live in either New York or the Eggs. Men, described by Fitzgerald as “ash-gray,” move through the landscape “dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”
Apparently the city’s ashes are dumped in the valley, and the men who work here have the job of shoveling up these ashes with “leaden spades.”
NOTE: On a more symbolic level, these men are inhabitants of what might be called Fitzgerald’s wasteland. T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land” had been published in 1922, and Fitzgerald had read it with great interest. There is no doubt that he had Eliot’s poem in mind when he described the valley of ashes. Eliot’s wasteland–arid, desertlike–contains figures who go through the motions of life with no spiritual center. Eliot’s imagery seemed to express the anxiety, frustration, and emptiness of a post-war generation cut off from spiritual values by the shock of the First World War.
Read the following passage carefully:
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, 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 sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Some readers interpret this passage as a description of the god of the modern world–the god of the wasteland. Keep this description in mind in Chapter VIII when the crazed and jealous Wilson looks at the giant eyes and says, “God sees everything.” For now, early in Chapter II, it is still too early to make any kind of direct correlation between the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and the eyes of God. At this point
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