Some Reflections on The Great Gatsby at 100

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.  

Book Review: Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad (1904)

Paperback cover of the 2004 Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, originally published in 1904. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) 

Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo is long, dense, complicated, and brilliant. Set in the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, Nostromo follows a large cast of characters. Conrad masterfully shifts between many points of view in the novel, and it’s a stunning example of an artist working at the height of his powers. The frequent shifts in point of view and time make reading Nostromo a challenge, but the reader’s efforts are rewarded by Conrad’s beautiful prose and his insights into human nature. 

The Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Nostromo features an excellent introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards, who writes “Nostromo is not just a single novel, but a stunning orchestration of many novels at once.” (p.xiii) Hayes Edwards then goes on to list the many themes and plotlines of the novel.  

One of the main plotlines in Nostromo deals with the San Tome silver mine. Charles Gould, a Costaguanero of English heritage, has inherited the mine from his father. It has never turned much of a profit in the past, but Charles Gould is determined to change that. Gould succeeds, and the silver that the mine produces becomes central to the fate of many characters and to Costaguana itself. (Side note: my father’s cousin is named Charles Gould, a coincidence that I enjoyed. And I was constantly reminded of this as Conrad almost always calls the character “Charles Gould,” never “Charles” or “Gould.”)  

The novel begins with a detailed physical description of Costaguana, and although Conrad had only been to South America once during his sailing career, he was able to conjure up a thoroughly believable landscape. (Conrad went ashore during the voyage for just three and a half days.) The action of Nostromo occurs in the port town of Sulaco, which is a somewhat sleepy place as the novel opens.  

Conrad was an insightful political thinker. An American tycoon who invests in the San Tome mine has a jingoistic monologue in which he says, “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.” (p.75) A prophetic statement to make in 1904.  

There are many beautiful passages in Nostromo. One of my favorite lines is in a letter that Martin Decoud writes to his sister: “All this is life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.” (p.205)  

Several of my favorite lines in Nostromo are about the character Colonel Sotillo: “Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself.” (p.233) Conrad shows off his wit with this line: “Sotillo had spent the morning in battling with his thoughts; a contest to which he was unequal, from the vacuity of his mind and the violence of his passions.” (p.350) Now that’s a burn, Joseph Conrad style.  

Late in the novel, there’s a wonderful line about Emilia Gould: “It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present.” (p.410) 

Class and status play important roles in the novel, and Nostromo, who is unable to hold onto money, has a great line: “It seems to me that everything is permitted to the rich.” (p.347)  

Nostromo is a novel about outsiders. Charles Gould is born in Costaguana, but he comes from an English family, and he was educated in England. His wife, Emilia, is also British, as is Captain Mitchell. Nostromo and the Viola family are Italian. Martin Decoud has spent much of his life in France. And much of the elite of Sulaco is of Spanish descent. The fascinating mix of ethnicities in South America was a perfect subject for a novelist like Conrad, who traveled around the world as a sailor. Conrad’s own life found him living in many different cultures. Conrad was born in the city of Berdychiv, which had been part of Poland, was in the Russian Empire when Conrad was born in 1857 and is now in Ukraine. Conrad’s heritage was Polish, he moved to France to begin his career at sea. He eventually moved to England, and wrote his novels in English, his third language.  

It wouldn’t be a Joseph Conrad novel without some time spent on the water, and one of the most dramatic parts of the novel is when Nostromo and Martin Decoud are tasked with sailing a lighter (small barge) full of silver out of the Placid Gulf that surrounds Sulaco, in the hopes of keeping it away from the military, who have overthrown the president of Costaguana.  

Nostromo has a bad premonition about transporting the silver from the beginning, and it’s certainly not an envious job. Conrad builds the tension with a night so dark that nothing can be seen. Catastrophe occurs when the lighter is struck by the ship bringing the soldiers to occupy Sulaco. Knowing the lighter is slowly sinking, Nostromo and Decoud bury the silver on one of the small islands in the gulf. Decoud stays on the island with a small rowboat, while Nostromo deliberately sinks the lighter and swims back to shore.  

The passages describing Decoud’s time on the island are beautiful and sad: “Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and skepticism have no place...In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.” (p.393)  

One of the many admirers of Nostromo was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote in a 1923 article that Nostromo was “the great novel of the past fifty years.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, p.86) High praise indeed.  

Silver tarnishes when it comes into contact with sulfur, and the silver of the San Tome mine tarnishes everyone in the novel who comes into contact with it. Perhaps that is the lesson of Nostromo.