The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald, Volume 1

While this volume contains both 'The Last Tycoon' and 'The Great Gatsby' and I have yet to write a review of the former, I thought I'd upload a digitised version of what I wrote about one aspect of one of my favourite books quite a while ago. The page numbers refer to the Penguin edition I was reading then.

Having Carraway as the narrator serves a well-used purpose. His first-hand account of events and people helps the reader readily to accept what is described. It is more realistic and more personal in an attractive sort of way than third person narrative. Carraway also helps to establish one of the strands of unity in the novel in which chronological narration gives way to other considerations.

These are traditional uses or the first person. In The Great Gatsby, though, Carraway presents something much more complex. It is often commonly considered that Carraway is a mouthpiece for Fitzgerald. With Carraway ‘being there', witnessing the events he narrates or imaginatively reconstructing them from various sources (Jordan Baker and the newspapers, for example or simply surmising Gatsby's disillusionment), it seems as it Fitzgerald has managed to exclude himself entirely from the novel and that Carraway's views must be accepted as Fitzgerald's. This is not entirely true, though.

Through the style, particularly one extended metaphor and some of the reiterated words and symbols, we get a distinct indication of another way in which Fitzgerald wants us to interpret the story, a way which sometimes contradicts Carraway's viewpoint and puts Carraway himself into perspective as just another character.

Perhaps the main way in which we gauge Fitzgerald's opinion is through the metaphor of driving and cars. Jordan Baker introduces the idea that people’s characters can be interpreted through their driving ability when she calls Nick a bad driver meaning him to be dishonest and casual in their relationship. In turn Jordan Baker’s dishonesty and carelessness is initially seen through her leaving the hood of a car down and lying about it. Daisy's erratic, irresponsible nature is directly seen in her ‘accident’ involving Myrtle. Tom’s carelessness and violence are suggested in the way he ‘ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car’ (83) while the suggestion of the whole society being confused and disorientated is witnessed in the amusing incident outside Gatsby’s drive at the end of one of his parties. Here the cure for another severed wheel is seen as more gas in the fuel tank, a suggestion made against a background of ‘caterwauling’ (62) horns of restless people flocking to get out, presumably on their ‘short-cut from nothing to nothing’ (114).

So far this coincides with Carraway’s impression of people and society but the fact that Gatsby is also seen as a poor driver tends to make him just one of the society rather than a special man outside it. In his speeding into New York with Carraway as passenger and flashing the Christmas card at the policeman we can see Gatsby’s corruption and ability to corrupt as well as his haste in life (which led him to get rich quickly through bootlegging and underhand dealing in bonds). In another episode we find Gatsby's car ‘lurched’ (69) up the drive to Carraway’s home, bringing its driver to prepare the groundwork for a meeting with the woman of his dreams. The quoted word suggests the instability of Gatsby, the insecure base on which he tries to reestablish a relationship which he never really understood and whose significance and value he has exaggerated in the five years he has been away from Daisy. He may be ‘worth the whole damn bunch’(16O), as Carraway says, for the way he maintains his naively pure illusion of Daisy and what life holds but from the driving we can see the inadequacies and weaknesses in his approach to life.

The word ‘restless’ and its synonyms bind the characters together as well. Its use is firstly associated with Tom. Accompanied by Daisy he drifts ‘unrestfully’ (12), his eyes flash about ‘restlessly’(13) and he hovers ‘restlessly’ (16), this reiteration establishing the mark of the word, ready for us to note it elsewhere. In fact, we are reminded that earlier Carraway has said, ‘I came back restless’ from the War and later he finds the satisfaction of bustling men and women to ‘the restless eye’ (63) while another character, Jordan Baker, gets up ‘with a restless movement of her knee’ (24). The unfulfilment and discontent with life is obviously common to all these. The important point to note, though, in this context, is that once again Gatsby is not dissimilar. He ‘was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still . .’ (70). The image associates him with everyone else.

It is often suggested that Carraway’s role in the novel is to direct our response to Gatsby, to make us appreciate him. Carraway being almost exclusively involved in the purer side of Gatsby’s split life allows Fitzgerald to concentrate the narration on this aspect of Gatsby and strengthens Gatsby’s virtues through Carraway’s recurring praise - ‘He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour’ (85), ‘I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him’ (155), his ‘rare smile’ with a quality of eternal reassurance in it’ (54), ‘something gorgeous about him’ (8)and he is ‘worth the whole damn bunch’ (160), On the other hand while Carraway does direct our response, he also complicates it. We are made aware of the presence of a narrator at fairly regular intervals throughout the novel (see page 62 for example) and that our knowledge of events comes from him. We are not given the ‘factual’ narration offered by an omniscient author. So, to clarify our understanding of what happens, we have to examine the reliability of our narrator and see if he is accurate. We are even encouraged to do this through another character criticizing him.

Despite Carraway's pride in his honesty and his reserving of judgements (which offer him excellent credentials as a reporter), we find he is not as honest as he suggests. Fitzgerald indicates this to us in his relationship with Jordan Baker. Carraway allows himself to become involved with her, probably becoming her lover (see her ready acceptance of his embrace, 87 and his preoccupation and lightheadedness after the evening with her, p.90) but at the same time he knows that she is dishonest (64). Yet despite his saying, ‘It made no difference to me’ (65) and despite his ready involvement in both Tom's and Myrtle's affair (getting drunk at their party) and Gatsby’s and Daisy's (positively aiding the adulterous relationship), he ends up revolted by the lot. In other words he pretends to himself and Jordan Baker that her immoral hedonistic approach to life is no barrier to his developing a deep attachment to her but with the fight between Tom and Gatsby in the hotel his suppressed disgust at the Buchanans, the West Egg socialites and Jordan Baker as the epitome of that type of person, he rejects her. This is why she calls him a ‘bad driver’ (184) and says, ‘I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person.’ He has misled her.

Carraway’s role is complex, then. He is not as honest as he thinks he is (66) and he gives us a one-sided view of Gatsby, one which is made to contrast with his equally one-sided view of Tom Buchanan, who is made to seem the criminal, the man whose ‘hard malice’ (154) broke Gatsby's dream. But this neglects the ‘colossal vitality of his (Gatsby's) illusion’ (105) and the way James Gatz is ‘just the sort of Jay Gatsby a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent" (105), i.e. it ignores the adolescent weaknesses inherent in Gatsby himself which make his disillusionment inevitable. The similarity between Tom and Gatsby is perhaps greater than any difference. Obviously they are both wealthy. Tom, too, nostalgically remembers the past and finds the present unsatisfactory and just as Gatsby is obviously deluded in his faith in Daisy so is Tom in his science. Both seek something in adulterous unions. Admittedly Tom‘s is violent (breaking Myrtle‘s nose) but then Carraway seems convinced that there is violence in Gatsby too. When observing the showdown between the two men, Carraway says “He looked - and this is said in contempt for all babbled slander of his garden - as if he had 'the killed a man’” (141). Violence must be expected, anyway, in his Mafia-type dealing. And is Gatsby selfless while Tom is selfish? This seems too simple. Tom certainly is materialistic though the way he asks for Carraway's praise of his home (13) suggests more his insecurity than a boastfulness and then there is the free rein he allows Myrtle Wilson‘s avarice. Gatsby accumulates his wealth to attract Daisy, to win her back from Tom, to get her to tell Tom that she had never loved him, that "she never loved any one except me!" (157). Gatsby wants Daisy not as herself (which he cannot see anyway) but as the consummation of his dream, a dream of materialism with his ‘service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty’ (105) and he is prepared to get involved in crime to achieve his goal. So, we are given a picture of selfishness and concern with wealth no less than Tom's. All these similarities work against the simple divisions Carraway inserts between the two men.

Why has Fitzgerald complicated our response to Carraway, Gatsby, Buchanan and the events? Probably because he sees a truthful response to them all as being complex. (‘I think it is an honest book," he said in an introduction to The Great Gatsby in 1934.) We are made to see from the style and from as objective a view of the events as we can get that Gatsby‘s energetic behaviour stems from weaknesses but through Carraway and the way he vividly speaks for the inarticulate Gatsby we are encouraged to see the richness and purity of a deluded life. Gatsby had at least lived in a ‘warm world’ (168) of his own with ‘romantic readiness’ (10). ( )