SECOND READING: 22 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald (1925):A POOR BOY falls in love with a rich girl. He heads off to war and she, impatient with waiting for someone to organise her idle life, marries a more forceful suitor. That heartbroken boy may be a dreamer, but he is also insanely tenacious and convinced that with hard work, lies and material trappings he can regain his lost love. Romantic fantasy and cynical realism shape the atmospheric masterpiece that is Scott Fitzgerald's defining achievement as well as one of the finest literary performances of all time.
Set amid the boredom and the zany vulgarity of the Jazz Age, a traumatised, frenetic period intent on forgetting all the old rules as well as the war, The Great Gatsbychronicles the collapse of the American Dream. The more traditional values of the Midwest confront the assured sophistication of the East coast. Fitzgerald, who was born in Minnesota in 1896, achieved high art through the inspired use of a wry, pitch-perfect narrative voice in what could have been merely a tale of one man's extravagant ambitions. Nick Carraway not only tells the story, he lives through most of it, piecing together the rest.
Carraway is a shrewd, somewhat righteous, intelligent, ironic Midwesterner conscious of the lessons learnt from his father such as: "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
Arriving in New York to try his hand at bond dealing, he visits his distant cousin, Daisy, now married to Tom Buchanan, a brash former college football star. They live in restless Long Island splendour. As Nick remarks ". . . I felt Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." Daisy reclines on a sofa, and with her is another, slightly younger woman. Fitzgerald conveys their vapid ease, particularly the jaunty indolence of Jordan Baker, a golfer, and a Buchanan circle intimate.
Within moments, Tom is called to the phone. Jordan informs Carraway that Tom has a mistress. Carraway is aware that the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who owns the mansion next door to his rented house, is completely overshadowed by the lavish parties he hosts. Many of the guests speculate about Gatsby's alleged involvement in crime. Carraway finally meets him and is struck by his smile. For all his misgivings the narrator can't help liking him.
Gatsby is obsessed with winning back Daisy. Through Jordan, he asks Nick to invite Daisy to tea. The tense meeting between the former lovers is brilliantly handled by Fitzgerald, as Nick reports: "Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes." Despite his affair with Myrtle Wilson, earthy wife of the defeated local garage owner, Tom is outraged on grasping Gatsby's intentions towards Daisy. A wild excursion to a humid New York through the Valley of Ashes under the huge eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg, a billboard advertisement, ends in the death of Myrtle, killed attempting to flag down Tom's car - being driven by Daisy.
The Buchanans are content for Gatsby to take the blame, retreating, as Carraway recalls, "into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together . . ."
Only one of his many guests attend his funeral, yet Gatsby's father arrives, proud of his son's success. Carraway, having witnessed so much, mourns Gatsby and returns to the Midwest.
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This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon
