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.
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