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p. 73:

‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all ….’

Race plays no significant role in The Great Gatsby, unless you adopt the ludicrous assertion that Gatsby was black. Here is the only page with a meaningful composition involving black characters. Nick sees three black passengers in a limousine with a white chauffeur, and this observation is enough to inspire wonderment at the limitless possibilities beyond the border into New York City.

Fitzgerald was only three generations removed from the Civil War, so the upheaval in the social order that he saw in the roles of the limousine riders is understandable. But there’s something he considered more improbable than that: ‘Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.’ What was so fantastic about Gatsby that we should compare his existence to the reversal of centuries of slavery?

Gatsby was a bootlegger, a scammer, a fixer, a criminal through and through. And yet he was a successful social climber, welcomed in high society and regarded as mysterious rather than despicable. But this deception isn’t enough to rate the idea of Gatsby as improbable.

What’s improbable is Gatsby’s desire, particularly his desire in juxtaposition to his contemptible reality. His dream of lost love is a desire for purity and innocence that he’ll never have – not because the time has passed, but because of the person he is. He is a criminal and no matter how wealthy or charming or famous he may become, in his actions and in his heart, he is an evildoer.

It may be that every bad man desires to have some part of his life that is unsullied by his participation – the robber who gives to the poor, the gangster that supports the neighborhood, the vigilante that protects the weak. But no action ever redeems the sinner who can’t reform his own twisted soul. Gatsby’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t repeat the past, but that he wouldn’t have done anything differently even if he could. The idea that you can be bad and join your rotting heart to something good is the most improbable conceit of all.

p. 72:

I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot on his overpopulated lawn.

Gatsby warns Nick he’s “going to make a big request of you today,” but he won’t ask him directly, leaving it up to Jordan Baker to ask Nick at lunch later in the day. Nick claims to be more annoyed than interested, but this can’t possibly be true. It’s another example of Nick lying to himself and lying to us as readers.

Nick already knows Gatsby as the most mysterious figure he’s ever met, and surely the elaborate setup for the request must pique his curiosity. From a certain point of view, Nick’s right to treat the request as unworthy of the anticipation, and wrong to think it would be utterly fantastic. Instead, it’s a modest demand of impossible proportions – Gatsby only wants Nick to invite his cousin Daisy to tea, and have Gatsby drop by for a casually non-coincidental reunion. Gatsby only wants to recreate the past, to renew the idealized romance of his youth.

Fitzgerald believed that the great and small can share the same prosaic longings. He would have approved of the notion that somebody like Citizen Kane would spend his last breath on the name of a sled. In his day, some critics felt that Fitzgerald should be slightly regarded because his concerns weren’t sufficiently serious – he didn’t write about racism or poverty or bullfighting or war or incest. Almost a decade after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained, “I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

All he had to deal with was the problem of the past as both anchor and engine for an unattainable future. Orchestrating a chance meeting is a small request, but reviving lost love would really be something utterly fantastic.

p. 71:

I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

Gatsby carries around a couple of souvenirs to support the stories of his fantastic past: a war medal from Montenegro, a picture in an Oxford quad. These trinkets provide a tangible base to solidify his gauzy stories in the listener’s imagination; their production in conversation acts as a talisman that makes the stories real. But in the end these physical objects are signifiers for false tales – like building a castle in the air on a base of lily pads.

Gatsby’s use of his souvenirs seems childish and manipulative, but they’re only a more unique and imaginative application of a universal technique. In anyone’s life, what are the stories supported by driving a certain kind of car, or wearing a particular watch, or a wedding ring? These things are not manifestations of the truth; they are symbols of a story, objects we use to paint the brushstrokes of the picture we present to the world.

There’s truth only in action and emotion, not objects, and at the end Gatsby sums up, ‘You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.‘ The truth is, he is alone in the world, without friends and without a home, unable to escape from the traveling prison of his own regrets.

p. 70:

He lifted the words up and nodded at them – with his smile.

The Great Gatsby contains very little physical description of the man named Gatsby. Instead there is a careful magic enchanting the narrative, where Gatsby’s effect on others is described through the dark whispers of his reputation. Even when we do get a treatment of a physical feature – in this case, Gatsby’s smile – we do not see the whiteness of his teeth, whether his lips are thin or full, where the creases of past humor line his face. There’s no imagery here, only effect. We see the effect of his smile on the words that pass through his mouth, and we understand the effect of his personality on the listener. We get a sense of his controlling charisma, his ability to invest the most outlandish story with something pure from his heart.

He’s describing a romantic fantasy in which he travels the earth in riches, ‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.‘ The story is ludicrous. Nick says, ‘The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore …‘ But by the end, with his smile, Gatsby makes it all true.

p. 69:

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

Here’s another fine example of Fitzgerald’s ability to compress a complicated series of human behavior into a seemingly innocent and simple sentence.  Nick’s next door neighbor lives in a mansion so grand that it makes the surrounding houses look like serfs’ huts.  Gatsby is famed for his extravagant parties and mysterious background, his reputation redolent with hints of bootlegging and murder.

But you can’t remain in awe of your immediate surroundings for very long.  Humans have an enormous capacity to adapt to the most unnatural conditions.  Living next to a man with extreme wealth and fascinating identity, Nick simply packs all strangeness away into a corner of his mind where a mansion becomes a roadhouse and a living cypher is just another neighbor.

Your first impression is so often right, you’ve got to learn how to listen to your instincts.  You may lack the time, energy or desire to push your senses beyond the facade the world presents to you – but everything really worth finding out is on the other side.

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p. 68:

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.

The Great Gatsby is a candidate for the spurious crown of “the great American novel,” so it’s interesting to consider this passage, the only sentence in the novel that seriously applies the term “American” to mannerisms that amount to a description of national character.  (There’s one other sentence, more famous, but less serious, in the next chapter: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.“)  Of course, the entire novel is about America and Americanness, but in this sentence the term is explicit.

Fitzgerald doesn’t pick an idea, an opinion or political view.  He doesn’t pick an ethnicity, race, color or class. Instead, he focuses on an inchoate mark of physicality – resourcefulness of movement – as the mark of an American.  This may seem odd, but if you’re American and have ever traveled in a foreign land where you should appear ethnically similar to the natives, you may have noticed what he’s talking about here.  Though you may wear the clothes of their country and make every attempt to appear at home, you are routinely marked by the locals as an American, just at a mere glance and before you even open your mouth.  How did they know?

Maybe “resourcefulness of movement” is the best way to describe it.  In this country, most of us grow up far from the farm, aspirations run away from manual labor, our schooling lacks what other countries consider discipline, we glorify play and try to weave it into both school and work.  These are deep sociological differences from many other nations, too complex to explain briefly, and too restlessly ingrained to avoid vibrating through your body and into the very air around you.

p. 67:

They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before.

This is Fitzgerald’s description of the rotating retinue of “four girls” who always accompanied one of the revelers at Gatsby’s parties.  The narrator admits “I have forgotten their names . . . the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”  The girls are objects of art, objects of desire, signifiers of sex and wealth.  A feminist critique of Gatsby would deplore the nameless characters and the “girl” terminology.

But Fitzgerald’s gift is observation, not social commentary – and observation stands up better over time than commentary ever could.  The objectification he describes continues today, with different meaning and different dynamics.  These days a man can travel like Robert Palmer only as satire; making a habit of it just looks silly.  So we read this novel of the past with the feelings and morals of the present, which only enriches our understanding of how these crowded parties were filled with empty people.

p. 66:

Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand.

We are in the midst of two full pages in which Fitzgerald does nothing but reel off the guest list for Gatsby’s summer parties.  The first few times I read the novel, I barely skimmed these pages, not understanding the impact Fitzgerald was delivering with the sheer volume and baroque detail of the list.  Sprinkled throughout the fanciful names, there are these phrases that contain whole worlds, stories within stories, mysteries, comedies and crimes.  Why would a man’s hair turn “cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all“?  A man came “only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden” – did he come just to fight? What was a bum doing at this fancy estate party? How does it feel to have a brother so notorious that you can only be referenced as “brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife“?

But of course, my featured one-sentence story here involves jail, drunkenness, and maiming.  There is something very subtle here that shows Fitzgerald knows about passing out drunk:  writers without experience in this matter would describe what the man was doing just before he passed out.  Fitzgerald, being an unrepentant drunk himself, knew that a drunk never knows what he was doing in those moments.  He only knows the next day about the consequences, and only knows that because he was told by witnesses who are only barely more reliable than himself.

p. 65:

the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him

Nick reels off a list of over 70 names of people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer.  Both narrator and author sense that the sheer volume of names will give more color than any generalities of crowd description.  These visitors descended upon Gatsby’s lawns and gossiped about their host while getting drunk on his hospitality, they came to be part of the scene, they paid him a subtle and damning and damnable tribute in caring more about the idea of Gatsby than about the actual person.

p. 64:

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine:  I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

There are so many reasons why Nick’s ‘suspicion’ here is probably false, even though it is an assertion about himself.  He’s an unreliable narrator:  self-admittedly distracted, occasionally drunk, absorbed in his own career and love life and ego.  His statement is boastful no matter how mild the language, and immodest claims of high character are usually false.

But of all the reasons to doubt Nick’s self-assessment, I’ll highlight this one:  He’s only a few days shy of his 30th birthday.  That’s too small a percentage of an expected lifespan to judge one’s own possession of a cardinal virtue.  Think about the changes that people make in the years after 30:  wild partiers become sedate homemakers, stable careerists become out-of-control addicts, atheists find a higher power while the devout renounce their gods.

We can’t know yet whether Nick deserves to stand with the few honest people in the world. We don’t have any reason to believe that he’s ever been tested, and we have every reason to believe that the final judgment of his character will take many more years to make.

Finally (and pedantically), honesty isn’t even one of the cardinal virtues . . . which I suppose should have been the first thing to tip us off to Nick’s (self-)deception.