Book note
The Great Gatsby
Gatsby-esque
The social critique in The Great Gatsby is ever-relevant and well discussed. The rich eat those who don’t belong and while outside actors (Myrtle, Gatsby) can wield wealth for their own devices, those accustomed to it will always find distinguishing marks. But the great joy in analysing this book stems from the fact that there are so many angles to take, and so I’d instead like to write about what makes Gatsby himself so fascinating and likeable.
I saw someone describe Fitzgerald’s writing as “an exercise in semantic self-indulgence”, and while I disagree with the review’s verdict, I think the description is quite apt. The lyrical excess feels like an appropriate stylistic pendant to the story told, because just like Gatsby deals in unbound optimism and dreams, the prose often reaches for superlatives.
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
It speaks of life’s most ethereal qualities, the cornerstones of this novel: love, youth, and the romantic illusion of mastering time. Gatsby is rags to riches, infinitely ambitious and charming. He has come to believe what the American dream, or modern life, promises and in his hubris weds this vision to a flawed, mortal woman. It’s an enterprising one-track mind caught on something out of his control.
“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
We, along with a century’s worth of readers, are like to forgive the follies of naïve love. We’ve been conditioned to believe that great romance is the ultimate transcendence, that chasing an impossible ideal is the most sublime way to exist. This makes it easy to sympathize with Gatsby’s conviction that he can simply bend time to his will, manifest destiny. No one wants to grow old when it comes to love, so why bother?
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
It’d be a bleak world if we only ever saw people for who they really are. There’s nothing romantic about a perfectly logical mind, and while Gatsby is on the extreme end, don’t we all want to be slaves to our obsessions sometimes? Gatsby’s death ultimately attaches yet another mystic dimension to the character. In death he becomes a martyr, the ultimate hopeless romantic. Nevermind that he is a liar, reckless and deeply delusional. It helps that, more or less by coincidence, his actions cause harm only to him. We can see his obsession as noble because it only results in his own downfall. Gatsby is a character whose romantic idealism we’d all like to channel sometimes, but to embody him fully is to embrace certain demise.