The Fire Hose of Time: The Great Gatsby and Swimming Against the Current

In my copy of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the introduction suggests the novel makes no particular call to action, no inclination to political correctness. There is no clear message advertised through story. Literature, they offer, serves no greater cause than for pleasure, and this novel immortalizes Fitzgerald as a master of such. There is irony here, since the novel comments on, even parodies, the social circles where this kind of reasoning flourishes, and it was within these same social circles that Gatsby generated his legendary esteem. To overlook Fitzgerald's creation of a hero from the vapid, spineless froth whipped up by high society, well, that is where I must disagree with the introduction's conclusion.

Jay Gatsby is perpetually blurry to all who experience him. All facts known about his life are muddied by a history that no two characters can get quite straight. His photographs, even, confirm the shakiest of suspicions, and yet nothing is proven about him. Gatsby's bloom among the powerful has only recently occurred. He has no history, like your bartender who serves brief tales to satisfy a narrative they could never fully convey (unless you tip well). Rhetorical power mists a cloudy backdrop using the implied prologue of a stranger, allowing listeners to believe the impossible, until the constant headache pounding in your skull is revealed to be the hard-hitting truth, alerting you like a speed bag. Gatsby's back story looms in shadow, protected by himself as adroitly as F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The novel's other characters also mystify. Daisy Buchanan, a delicate do-gooder whose once firm will softened after a dose of wealth to relieve a broken heart, receives little back story, with its absence justified like Gatsby's. Whatever Daisy had once been, money had infested it, and she, like Gatsby, like her husband, now longs for a time far distant. Tom Buchanan's story inverts the timeline, with his fortune and fame established early in his life. He now brusquely charges away from the unexpected toward a future without uncertainty, meeting Gatsby and Daisy somewhere in between. Shared between them is a desperate addiction to 'should be's'.

And where is in between? The neighbor's house, where Nick Carraway, the narrator, lives. Through his words, readers are bombarded with the concentrated, timeless, breathtaking prose of Fitzgerald. As so many have already raved about the mastery of his prose, I will leave my brief opinion here: F. Scott Fitzgerald is a master. His narrator is a finance trader whose career never changes, who witnesses the conflict between those alarmed by a murky history, and those entertained by it. He knows the coast of Long Island once glowed with a fertile green carpet of opportunity, rather than a metropolis—that time has changed and will continue to change the landscape. He knows a history is all one can know, and that no true history can be fabricated, at least not for long. All that nonsense about how there is only now—it's a cliche because it's true. Seeking the past is like bringing back the dead. Bone and muscle covered in skin does not constitute life, and gathering the elements of the past does not unseat the present.

"Hey Dallin, I mean, you're barking all this speculation at a dead author. What do you want to prove?"

I'll tell you, antsy reader. F. Scott Fitzgerald paid homage to the emotional struggle against time in The Great Gatsby. We're all rowing our crappy little tin cans against a swift, ambitious fire hose the size of Mars, toward Utopia. Will we ever get there? Could we? Fitzgerald writes,

"It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" [last page].

The Great Gatsby leads its literary tourists to the museum window of infinity—a realm that is ever transitory in its wax sculpture endowment of everlasting happiness. Does this model bring me pleasure? Not necessarily. Do I feel warmth in my spine as I explore the nature of life as F. Scott Fitzgerald sees it? Yes. Very much. I believe the author did indeed wish to share an important message. After all, Nick Carraway identified his cardinal virtue as rare honesty among casual and routine dishonesty. The only truth is everything must change, and the pursuit of the past does not, will not, and cannot revive it.