The Great Gatsby, first published on 10 April 1925, is Scott Fitzgerald’s third and most famous novel and an established classic of modern American and Anglophone literature. It has also been widely translated. Its title character, Jay Gatsby, is one of those fictional figures, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who have floated free of their texts of origin and acquired a quasi-independent existence of their own. Gatsby has become a symbol of doomed Romantic aspiration and of the “American Dream”, in all its grandeur and vulgarity, and the novel of which he is the titular protagonist has become a major example of accessible Modernist writing; it combines the readability of nineteenth-century fiction with something of the intricacy of language and structure that characterizes the prose of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The fusion of tradition and innovation in Gatsby is summed up in two celebrated responses from older writers:, the avant-garde high Modernist, Gertrude Stein, wrote to Fitzgerald on 22 May 1925 to say that his novel was “creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis [1850] and Vanity Fair[1848]” (308), while T. S. Eliot, author of the great Modernist poem The Waste Land (1922), called Gatsby, in a letter dated 31 December 1925, “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (310).
The story of Gatsby is told by a single man in his early thirties, Nick Carraway, who has now returned to his unnamed native city in the Midwest and who looks back on his dramatic and enervating experiences in and around New York City in the summer of 1922. In the spring of that year, at the age of 29, he goes East to New York to become a bond salesman, rents a modest bungalow in West Egg on the shore of Long Island, and renews acquaintance with his second cousin once removed, Daisy Buchanan (née Fay), who lives across the bay in the socially superior area of East Egg. Daisy is unhappily married to Tom Buchanan, an enormously rich, physically powerful man of 30 whom Nick knew when they were students at Yale University but whose life has lost its purpose since his glory days as a college footballer; he is a sexual predator whose victims are socially and economically vulnerable women. Tom and Daisy have a small daughter, Pammy, who makes a brief appearance later in the novel, in chapter 7, but they seem to consign her care largely to a nurse. On his first visit to the Buchanans at East Egg, in chapter 1 of the novel, Nick also meets Jordan Baker, a celebrity amateur golfer whose integrity he doubts but with whom he will have an affair. The evening is interrupted by phone calls from Tom’s mistress and soon afterwards, in chapter 2, Tom takes Nick to meet her. Myrtle is the vital but frustrated wife of an insipid garage owner, George Wilson, with whom she lives in a “valley of ashes” (21) between West Egg and New York City; but she also has a small furniture-crammed apartment in New York, bankrolled by Tom, which they use as their trysting place.
All these characters are or will become connected, in ways as yet unknown to Nick, with the figure who becomes the chief focus of his fascination – Gatsby, his mysterious next-door neighbour, who holds huge and extravagant parties and whose shrouded origins give rise to many rumours: for instance, that he is “a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s” (28), that “he was a German spy during the war” (36), that he looks as though he has “killed a man” (37). Nick is invited to one of his parties and, after a slight contretemps, gets to know Gatsby; their experience as First World War veterans provides an initial bond between them and their friendship quickly develops; Nick learns that Gatsby was in love with Daisy almost five years ago, when he was still a soldier, but they were unable to marry because Gatsby was too poor. Now, in association with the character introduced in chapter 4, Meyer Wolfshiem, “the man who fixed the World’s series back in 1919” (58), Gatsby has acquired vast wealth by illicit and obscure means – bootlegging, gambling rackets, bond fraud – and he hopes to win Daisy back; he has brought his present huge house because it enables him to see, across the bay, the green light that burns on the end of her dock, and he gives lavish parties, perhaps, Jordan Baker suggests, because he half-hopes she will wander into one of them someday.
As Daisy has so far failed to do so, however, Gatsby, through Jordan, enlists Nick to set up a reunion between them in his bungalow, which Nick duly does. Gatsby and Daisy rediscover something of their earlier love, but its original grandeur can never be wholly regained, partly because Daisy is now married with a young daughter, but more fundamentally because Daisy cannot possibly live up to Gatsby’s idealization of her – nobody could match what Nick calls in chapter 5 “the colossal vitality of his illusion” (75). Nonetheless, Gatsby tries to take Daisy from Tom and Tom tries to defend himself. In chapter 7, on a boiling hot day, Nick, Tom, Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan gather at the Buchanan house and Daisy makes it clear to Tom, indirectly but unmistakably, that she loves Gatsby; out of restlessness and with no particular purpose, they then decide to drive into New York City and, pressured by Tom, switch cars to do so – Tom takes the wheel of Gatsby’s fabulous yellow automobile and Gatsby employs Tom’s blue coupé; this exchange will have grave consequences. In a verbal duel between Tom and Gatsby in a suite in the Plaza Hotel, Gatsby is outgunned when Tom demonstrates to Daisy that Gatsby is indeed a big-time crook and then – the killer shot – when he reminds Daisy, by no means unsubtly, of the passion they enjoyed on and immediately after their honeymoon, thus making it impossible for her honestly to obey Gatsby’s demand that she say she never loved her husband. Tom, now certain of victory, lets Gatsby and Daisy leave together, assuring her that “[h]e won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over” (105). After they have gone, Nick suddenly remembers that it is his thirtieth birthday and contemplates a bleak decade ahead, compounded of “loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair” (106).
As Daisy and Gatsby drive back through the valley of ashes, this time in Gatsby’s own car, Myrtle Wilson, who has been locked up by her husband in a room above the garage because he has begun to suspect she is having an affair – though he does not know with whom – escapes, and rushes out into the road, perhaps because she thinks Tom will be behind the wheel, as he was on the journey into New York. Daisy runs into her, kills her and drives on; Gatsby later makes it clear to Nick that he will say he was driving. The following day, Wilson, believing that Gatsby is responsible for Myrtle’s death, goes to his house, shoots him dead, and then kills himself. Tom and Daisy leave East Egg for an indefinite period and an unknown destination while Nick, disillusioned with the East, ends his affair with Jordan and goes home.
Outlined in this way, Gatsby may sound melodramatic and contrived; it is a tribute to Fitzgerald’s style and narrative technique that it comes across to most readers as a convincing and compelling tale. One crucial aspect of the novel’s technique is its use of the modified first-person narrator, a device which Fitzgerald had learned much about from Joseph Conrad and, to a lesser but significant extent, from Willa Cather. Nick tells his own story but modifies it by incorporating, at strategic points, the stories of others who have witnessed events that he could not have seen himself; one of these, in chapter 4, is a first-person account by Jordan Baker, but the other accounts are mostly paraphrases in Nick’s distinctive style.
A second key narrative technique is the “scenic method” which Fitzgerald took from Edith Wharton and, more distantly, Henry James; this aimed at “showing” rather than “telling” the reader by presenting a series of dramatized scenes that suggested meanings indirectly, by dialogue and behaviour, rather than by explicit authorial commentary. Thus, most of the major events in the novel take the form of scenes which are rich in implication and incident: for example, the confrontation between Tom and Myrtle in chapter 2 when he breaks her nose because she refuses to stop shouting his wife’s name, or the showdown between Tom and Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel in chapter 7 when Gatsby tries in vain to make Daisy declare that she never loved Tom.
A third important technique, again owing something to Conrad, is a chronological restructuring which means that the reader finds out about Gatsby in much the same way that Nick himself originally did, through an accumulation of rumours and fragmentary flashbacks. There are three major flashbacks. Chapter 4 includes a retrospective account by Jordan Baker which returns us to 1917 and to the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy that developed in Louisville, when Gatsby was in uniform but before he had to go off to war in France. A second retrospective account occurs near the start of chapter 6, with Nick’s paraphrase of Gatsby’s own story, as told to Nick, of his later adolescence and early manhood. It relates the extravagant fantasies of the young James Gatz and the turning-point in his life when he rows out to a luxury yacht to warn its owner that it has anchored in a dangerous place. It is at the moment that he meets the owner, Dan Cody, that he changes his name to Jay Gatsby. Cody, a tough multimillionaire who made his money out of trading precious metals but is now failing mentally, takes on Gatsby as an all-round personal assistant and minder, and Gatsby stays with him for five years, until Cody’s death. Cody leaves him $25,000, but some legal device stops Gatsby receiving the legacy; all Cody’s money goes to his mistress. The third major retrospective account, in chapter 8, complements Jordan’s account of Daisy’s relationship with Gatsby and her marriage to Tom by relating the same events from Gatsby’s point of view – although these are once more in Nick’s paraphrase, apart from one paragraph in direct speech attributed to Gatsby. There is a range of other smaller flashbacks or reminiscences that contribute to Gatsby’s story. But that story is never complete: one of the features of Gatsby that make it a Modernist novel is that it does not try to tell us everything; there is much about its eponymous protagonist that we can never know, particularly the precise course of his criminal career and the exact sources of his wealth.
A fourth crucial technique used in Gatsby is symbolism. Two of the most prominent symbols in the novel are the valley of ashes and the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which preside over it. On the literal level, the valley of ashes, in between West Egg and New York City, is a dumping ground for the ashes left over from domestic heating, while the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are the painted eyes and spectacles on a huge, neglected billboard advertising an optician’s practice which is now defunct. In the context of the novel, however, the valley of ashes symbolizes, among other things, physical, ethical and spiritual sterility – it is Fitzgerald’s version of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land – and Eckleburg’s eyes represent a lost visionary power and the absence or indifference of God. They link up with the partly comic and partly mythic figure, known only as “Owl Eyes” (44) because of his “enormous owl-eyed spectacles” (37), who, in chapter 3, appears in Gatsby’s library and later emerges from the car in the ditch that has been “violently shorn of one wheel” (44); becomes the imagined source of “ghostly laughter” (71) in chapter 5; and is one of the few mourners at Gatsby’s funeral in chapter 9. The car with the shorn wheel is an example of the way in which the automobile also takes on a powerful symbolic role in the novel: epitomized by Gatsby’s car, it is a magical, mythical, monstrous and ultimately lethal machine, a symbol of the seductive power and menace of modern technology. Other elements in the novel which take on symbolic significance include breath, breasts, noses, flowers, eggs, ghosts, ships, trains, telephones, water, heat and the sun and the moon.
Colour terms are an especially important aspect of the novel’s symbolism. The most notable colour is green; this is the colour of the light at the end of Daisy’s dock which Gatsby can see across the bay from his house and which symbolizes his desire for her and for what his imagination has made her represent. It is the colour of the land on which the first Dutch sailors to reach America set foot. It is associated with aspiration, with permission to go ahead – as in the colloquial expression “get the green light” – and jealousy. The colour yellow plays a complex role; it is the colour of Gatsby’s seductive and destructive car, of the “cocktail music” (34) that plays at his party, of the block in which Wilson’s garage is situated. Like all the symbols in the novel, we cannot reduce it to one meaning; it gives off multiple significances.
Fitzgerald was always a masterly stylist, and in Gatsby he develops an especially effective style which could be called Romantic Modernism: it combines vocabulary and rhythms associated with nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and prose with the compression and concentration of Modernist writing (Tredell [2007], 17-20). His style can encompass a range of effects from the poetic to the brutalist. For instance, his evocation of Gatsby’s parties in chapter 3 can incorporate the cadenced suggestiveness of the sentence “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (33). In contrast, his account of the scene at Myrtle’s apartment in chapter 2 includes a curt paragraph that would not be out of place in a hard-boiled thriller: “Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand” (31).
All these structural and stylistic elements enhance Gatsby’s exploration of its key themes. One of the most prominent of these is the possibilities and limits of the Romantic imagination. The novel evokes and endorses Gatsby’s quest for transcendence, his desire to surpass time and fuse with the object of his desire; but it also recognizes the impossibility of that quest, not only because Daisy could not possibly live up to the hopes he has embodied in her, but also, and fundamentally, because it involves impossible metaphysical contradictions. The novel’s examination of the Romantic imagination is enriched and complicated by its awareness that Romanticism in the modern USA is different from Romanticism in early nineteenth-century Europe, and in this respect Romanticism in Gatsby is closely linked with another of its key themes – the American Dream. In a similar way to its presentation of Gatsby, the novel offers fragments of a history of America, out of chronological sequence, which the reader must reassemble as they reassemble what can be known of Gatsby’s life; the end of the novel provides the starting point of this fragmentary history, in its superb evocation of the founding moment of modern America; it is Nick’s last night in West Egg:
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (140)
The closing passages suggest, however, that even in this founding moment, the American Dream was corrupt, bound up with European expansion and exploitation; and the novel as a whole conveys the sense that the Dream has now become hopelessly compromised and belated: the contradictions of Gatsby himself – gangster and grail-seeker, vulgarian and very gentle perfect knight – epitomize this.
The contradictions of the American Dream relate to a further key theme of the novel: money. For much of the narrative, Nick emphasizes the compelling, thrilling qualities of Daisy’s voice, but it is Gatsby who, in chapter 7, defines its essential feature: “Her voice is full of money” (94). In Fitzgerald’s novel, money is sexy, in both the erotic and in the more generally exciting sense: in this respect, he anticipates the frenetic capitalism of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century. Gatsby shows a shrewd and subtle awareness of the corruptions that the desire for or possession of wealth can bring, but it also recognizes the attractions and seductions of wealth and the ways in which it shapes human desires. It does not suppose that there is some superior position outside the flow of finance on which the writer – or anyone else – can stand.
Gatsby received a mixed review reception when it first appeared in 1925 and found fewer buyers than his two previous novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922): its first print run of 20,870 copies sold out, but copies of its second printing of 3,000 were still in the warehouse of his American publishers, Scribner’s, at the time of his sudden death from a heart attack on 21 December 1940 at the age of 44 (Tredell [1997] 11-32). His last royalty statement in his lifetime, dated 1 August 1940, showed sales of a mere seven copies (Bruccoli, 581).
In the post-war era, however, Gatsby began to attract more and more attention and started to feature in critical essays and books and on academic courses. Popular interest was stimulated by the appearance of four successive films (an early silent film of 1926 is now lost): the 1949 movie, directed by Elliot Nugent, which starred Alan Ladd in the title role and Betty Field as Daisy; the 1974 film with Jack Clayton as director, Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy, the 2000 TV production that Robert Markowitz directed, with Toby Stephens as the titular hero and Mira Sorvino as Daisy; and the 2013 Baz Luhrmann movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio played the eponymous protagonist and Carey Mulligan featured as Daisy.
Gatsby has sparked several stage as well as cinematic adaptations, from Owen Davidson’s in 1926 to the 2015 version by Simon Sharkey. The same year saw the launch of an “Immersive Gatsby”, adapted by Alexander White and the cast, and aiming to involve its audience in the action; this proved successful and has been revived in the 2020s. There have also been Gatsby musicals, for example by the Yale Dramatic Association in 1956, with Robert Moran’s music and Aubrey Goodman’s book and lyrics, and by the theatre company Ruby in the Dust where Joe Evans supplied the music and lyrics and Linnie Goodman the book. An opera by the American composer John Harbison premièred in 1999. A ballet scored by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett and choreographed by David Nixon took the stage in 2013, and a second ballet, with Carl Davis as composer and Jorden Morris as choreographer, came out in 2019. Two graphic novel adaptations have recently appeared, one in 2020, illustrated by Aya Morton and scripted by Fred Fordham, and another, by K. Woodman-Maynard, in 2021.
On I January 2021, Gatsby came out of copyright in the USA and entered the public domain, making it permissible to publish imaginative extrapolations from and rewritings of the novel, such as Michael Farris Smith’s prequel Nick (2021), about Nick Carraway’s life before Gatsby, especially as a soldier in World War One, and Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful (2021) in which Jordan Baker, translated into a queer Vietnamese American orphan, takes over from Nick as the primary first-person narrator.
All these adaptations, extrapolations and rewritings testify to the vitality of Fitzgerald’s original text, which remains the focus of a vast and still expanding volume of critical commentary and continues to have sharp and complex relevance for a world in which, arguably, a later version of the American Dream that Jay Gatsby seems to embody has spread across the globe.
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Great Gatsby". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 February 2006; last revised 17 January 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=668, accessed 16 October 2024.]
