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| The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, originally published on April 10, 1925. |
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. I re-read Gatsby last week in preparation for this occasion—I think it’s the fourth time I’ve read the novel. (Five if you count reading Trimalchio, the galley version of the novel.) Yesterday there was a live reading in Saint Paul of the entire novel, which took about six hours. There were about 65 different people who read the novel—everyone had a passage of about two pages. I was lucky enough to read the last two pages of the novel, featuring those last seven paragraphs, as perfect a passage of prose as you’ll ever find, in my opinion.
Hearing the novel read aloud, there are inevitably different things that struck me yesterday. It’s a wonderful communal experience to have, reading a novel out loud. You get to hear what people react to, what makes people laugh, what moves them. It’s striking how much humor there is in The Great Gatsby. It’s not a comedy by any means, but Nick Carraway’s narration has a fair share of sarcastic lines.
I usually say about Fitzgerald’s work is that even in his weakest short stories, there are still two or three sentences that will take your breath away. It’s rare for a writer to have that gift. In Gatsby there is one sentence on every page that will take your breath away. It’s just astonishing how brilliant and beautiful his writing was.
Fitzgerald’s decision to write The Great Gatsby in the first person, and to make Nick Carraway a partially involved narrator was a brilliant stroke. Fitzgerald channels Nick so perfectly, and first person narration makes the novel more interesting than if it had been written in third person with an omniscient narrator. I’d be fascinated to know exactly how and why Fitzgerald made the switch (there is a scrap of an early draft of Gatsby that is written in the third person) but I’d suspect that Joseph Conrad’s novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim were an inspiration.
Something that struck me in the last week is how hard it is for Daisy Buchanan to say what she means. Daisy might not always know what she wants to say, as she is torn between her husband Tom and her old boyfriend Jay Gatsby. There’s always something beneath the surface of what Daisy is saying. For example, when she says to Gatsby, “You always look so cool,” Nick narrates “She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw.” (p.125) In a similar vein, when Daisy starts crying over Gatsby’s shirts, there’s more she’s crying about than just some pretty shirts. I think Daisy’s comparing Nick to a rose at the beginning is another example of this. She’s saying something to Nick, maybe even something deep like “It’s so wonderful to see you again, I’ve missed you, Nick,” but she puts it in this simile of comparing Nick to a rose. Daisy is a fascinating character, and she gets deeper for me each time I read the novel. It’s easy to just paint her as a shallow, empty-headed beauty, but I think there’s more going on underneath the surface, and her use of language is perhaps a clue to this hidden depth.
It struck me yesterday that Nick’s famous declaration “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” is contradicted by what he has told us in the preceding paragraph about the girl back home that he’s sort of in a relationship with. He’s certainly not telling this girl back home the whole truth about his deepening feelings for Jordan Baker. But a key to Nick’s statement about being honest is what he says just before that: “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” (p.64) Nick isn’t just saying “I’m an honest person,” he is saying that he suspects himself of being honest, which might be slightly different than actually being honest.
Yesterday I noticed for the first time in Nick’s list of Gatsby’s party guests, he mentions “Newton Orchid who controlled Films Par Excellence”. (p.66) The mention of orchid reminded me of the party that Daisy and Tom attend, where they see “a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree.” (p.111) Gatsby adds, “The man bending over her is her director.” Is the director meant to be Newton Orchid? Yet another tidbit to ponder in the richly constructed world of this novel.
Fitzgerald’s writing is so tightly controlled here—I noticed how many times in the novel he will mention something but not tell us the specifics. “I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.” (p.21) Nick and Fitzgerald don’t tell us what these sedative questions were—ultimately, they are not important to the story of the novel.
The themes of The Great Gatsby still resonate deeply today. Fitzgerald was interested in class, money, status, and love—topics that will never be out of date. Gatsby is the striver, pulling himself upwards from nothing, a symbol of what we call “the American Dream,” the idea that we live in a meritocracy, where the best people rise to the top. What do we think about Tom Buchanan, who is clearly on the top by virtue of his inherited wealth but is also clearly the most rotten character in the novel. Should we blindly idolize Gatsby because he has reached the pinnacle, or should we condemn him because of the means by which he got there? Fitzgerald wrote often about the corrupting effects of wealth—it’s also one of the main themes of his novels The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night.
I wish Fitzgerald could have seen the reading yesterday. He would have been so delighted and amazed by seeing a crowd of people reading his words aloud. His brilliant masterpiece, largely ignored during his lifetime, is now rightly acclaimed as a classic. I like to think that somehow, somewhere in the universe, Fitzgerald knows how much people love his writing, and how people are still reading his gorgeous prose, a century later.
