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STUDYWORLD STUDYNOTES:
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE GREAT GATSBY CHARACTERS:
NICK CARRAWAY
Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby; he is also a character in
the novel. When you think about him, you have to think about what Fitzgerald is
using him for. You also have to look at him as a person.
Nick, is first of all, Fitzgerald's means of making his story more realistic.
Because Nick is experiencing events and telling us about them in his own words,
we're more likely to believe the story. After a while we almost begin to
experience the events a s Nick does; the I of each of us as readers replaces the
I of Nick. (For more details, see "Point of View.")
Nick is a narrator whose values you should have no trouble identifying or at
least sympathizing with. He's not mad or blind to what's going on aro und him.
He's a pretty solid young man who has graduated from Yale University, served his
country in the First World War, and decided to go into the bond business. He
comes from a solid Midwestern family, from whom he has learned some pretty basic
values. He is honest, but not Puritanical or narrow minded. He is tolerant,
understanding, and not hasty to judge people. He is the sort of person you might
talk to if you wanted a sympathetic ear. But his toleration has limits. He
doesn't approve of everything.
These are some of the qualities that make Nick a reliable narrator, someone
whose story we are likely to believe. It seems often that his values are pretty
close to those of the author.
Nick is in a perfect position to tell the story. He is a cousin of Da isy
Buchanan's, he was in the same senior society as Tom Buchanan at Yale, and he
has rented, during the summer of 1922, a house right next to Jay Gatsby. He
knows all the characters well enough to be present at the crucial scenes in the
novel. The inform a tion he doesn't have but needs in order to tell his story,
he gets from other characters like Jordan Baker, the Greek restaurant owner
Michaelis, and Gatsby himself. Nick knows things because people confess to him,
and people confess to him because he is tolerant, understanding, and
sympathetic.
Nick has that capacity, which Fitzgerald felt was so terribly important (see
The Author and His Times), of holding two contradictory opinions at the same
time. He both admires Gatsby and disapproves of him. He admi res Gatsby both
because of his dream and because of his basic innocence; and he disapproves of
Gatsby for his vulgar materialism and his corrupt business practices. (Nick does
not want to become involved with Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's underworld "connecti
on.")
One of the things that makes Nick special is that he understands Gatsby.
Nobody else in the novel-not even Daisy-really understands him. Nick is, at the
novel's end, Gatsby's only friend, even though he disapproves of many things
which Gatsby stands for. Almost nobody comes to Gatsby's funeral, and if it
weren't for Nick, there would probably not even have been a funeral. Would you
have gone?
Some readers think Nick is too sympathetic to Gatsby. They think that Nick
ought to be mature enough to see w hat is wrong with Gatsby's dream. They feel
that Nick should be more critical of Gatsby, and force us as readers to be more
critical, too. They believe that Nick in the closing pages, is too sentimental
and that his judgment is not as reliable as we might think. There's no critical
agreement on this issue, so you'll have to make up your own minds as you read
the book.
As you're deciding about Nick's powers of judgment--particularly in the
opening and closing pages where he talks about himself--keep in mind that Nick
is a Midwesterner and his values are colored by the values of the world in which
he grew up.
Many readers have remarked that the novel is based on a contrast between the
solid, traditional, conservative Midwest and the glamorous, glittering, fa st-paced
world of the East. Nick (like Scott Fitzgerald, his creator) is from Minnesota.
He comes East to experience the new and exciting world of New York that is very
different from Minneapolis-St. Paul. At the end, he chooses to leave the East
and retu r n to the Midwest. By that choice he seems to be saying to us that he
has tried the East and found it missing something he needs: a basic set of
values. So he goes home, where values still exist. Think about the two
worlds--the Midwest and the East and wha t they represented for Nick (and by
extension, Fitzgerald) and what they might represent for you.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: JAY GATSBY
The title of this novel is The Great Gatsby. If you like paradoxes, start
with this one: he is neither great nor Gatsb y (his real name was Gatz). He is a
crook, a bootlegger who has involved himself with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who
fixed the 1919 World Series. He has committed crimes in order to buy the house
he feels he needs to win the woman he loves, who happens to b e another man's
wife. Thus a central question for us as readers is, why should we love such a
man? Or, to put it in other word, what makes Gatsby great? Why, despite all
these things, does Fitzgerald invite us to cry out with Nick, "'They're a
rotten crowd '... 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'"?
We are asked to love Gatsby, even admire him to a point, because of his
dream. That dream is what separates Gatsby from what Nick calls the "foul
dust [that] floated in the wake of his dreams..." It is not merely what is
known as the American Dream of Success--the belief that every man can rise to
success no matter what his beginnings. It is a kind of romantic idealism,
"some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life," Nick calls it.
It is a bel i ef in fairytales and princesses and happy endings, a faith that
life can be special, remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby is not interested in power
for its own sake or in money or prestige. What he wants is his dream, and that
dream is embodied in Daisy. He mus t have her, and, as the novel's epigraph on
the title page suggests, he will do anything that is required in order to win
her.
But dreams don't always show on the outside. The Great Gatsby is a kind of
mystery story with Gatsby as the mystery. Who is he? A ll the way through the
novel people keep asking that question and answering it falsely. They answer it
falsely because they aren't really interested in who Gatsby is. They have heard
things about him--that he killed a man, that he was a German spy in Worl d War
I--and they pass these bits of gossip on to other people. So the myth of
Gatsby--the collection of false stories about him--hides the Gatsby that we come
gradually to know through the efforts of Nick Carraway. Nick genuinely cares who
Gatsby is, and in Chapters IV, VI, VIII, and IX he presents us with the story of
Gatsby's past as he has learned it from Jordan Baker, from Gatsby himself, and
eventually, from Gatsby's father.
No one else but Nick knows or understands Gatsby's background except maybe hi
s father and Owl Eyes--and they, significantly, are the only ones present at his
funeral. Fitzgerald invites us to share Nick's understanding of Gatsby as we
read the novel. He makes us see behind the surface of the man who at first
glance looks like a yo u ng roughneck. And he forces us to ask, as we finish the
book, what this dream is that Gatsby has dedicated himself to. Is it a
worthwhile dream? Is it our dream, too? Can we love Gatsby and be critical of
his dream at the same time? Fitzgerald makes us as k these questions and then
lets us find our own answers.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: TOM BUCHANAN
Tom Buchanan, Nick tells us, "had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those
men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything
afterward savors of anticlimax." He is also very wealthy, having brought a
string of polo ponies from Lake Forest to Long Island. This double power--the
size of his body and his bankrol l--colors our feelings about Tom Buchanan.
Because he is both very strong and very rich, Tom is used to having his own
way. Nick describes him as having "a rather hard mouth" and "two
shining arrogant eyes." When we first meet him in Chapter I, he reveals his
crude belief in his own superiority by telling Nick that he has just read a book
called The Rise of the Colored Empires. The book warns that if white people are
not careful, the black races will rise up and overwhelm them. Tom clearly
believes it.
Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George Wilson, who
runs a garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle seems to have a dark sexual
vitality that attracts Tom, and he keeps an apartment for her in New York, where
he takes Nick in Chapter II. Here he again shows how little he thinks of anyone
beside himself when he casually breaks Myrtle's nose with the back of his hand,
because she is shouting "Daisy! Daisy!" in a vulgar fashion.
Between Chapters II and VII we see little of Tom, but in Chapte r VII he
emerges as a central figure. It is Tom who pushes the affair between Gatsby and
Daisy out into the open by asking Gatsby point blank, "'What kind of a row
are you trying to cause in my house anyway?" It is Tom who verbally
outduels Gatsby to win his wife back and deflate his rival's dream. And it is
Tom who, after the death of Myrtle Wilson, tells George Wilson that Gatsby was
the killer and then hustles Daisy out of the area until the affair blows over.
Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy as carel ess people who break things and
then retreat into their wealth and let other people clean up their messes. It's
a particularly apt metaphor for Tom, who cannot understand why Nick should have
any ill feelings about Gatsby's death. After all, Tom was only p rotecting his
wife. Nick shakes hands with Tom in the final chapter because "...I saw
that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified." Yet Tom's behavior
was not justifiable, and when Nick refers to the "foul dust" that
floated in the wake of Gatsb y's dream, he seems to be speaking of Tom Buchanan
more than anyone else. It is Tom as much as anyone who sends Nick back to the
Midwest, where there are still values one can believe in.
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: DAISY FAY BUCHANAN
She was born Daisy Fa y in Louisville, Kentucky, and her color is white. When
Jordan Baker, in Chapter IV, tells Nick about the first meeting between Gatsby
and Daisy in October 1917, she says of Daisy, "She dressed in white, and
had a little white roadster, and all day long t he telephone rang in her house
and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of
monopolizing her that night."
Throughout The Great Gatsby Daisy is described almost in fairytale language.
The name Fay means "fairy" or "sprite." "Daisy,"
of course, suggests the flower, fresh and bright as spring, yet fragile and
without the strength to resist the heat and dryness of summer.
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 do uble
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 a s 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 especi a lly
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 thre atens 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 ba l l 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 (a s 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 woma n 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 f rom 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 e nough
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 co ntrast 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 brea ks 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 thes e passages
later on.
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