The Finer Things Club

The Great Gatsby: Chapters 3 & 4.

                “There was music from my neighbor’s house thought the summer nights.  In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.  At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam” (p. 39). 

            This is but one of various accounts made by Nick Caraway concerning the fabulous and frantic orgies held at Gatsby’s mansion.  Although, seemingly annoyed by it all, it is apparent that Caraway knows much concerning the nature of these parties.  A truly irritated individual would seek to separate him/herself from the raucous riot occurring simultaneously next door.  We are certain of this tone of bother in Caraway’s voice by the comparison of the people to moths (an aggravating insect which can eat clothing).  Once again, Nick Caraway demonstrates his ambivalence.  At the same moment he holds contradictory attitudes—that of attraction and repulsion. 

            Caraway then informs us that he went to the party.  He involves himself because his fascination is more than his disinterest.  The invitation from Gatsby allows his imaginations to get the best of him.  Thus, while at the party, he walks among this castle of chattels enchanted by the extravagance and lured by the luxury of it all.  Then, he unintentionally meets Gatsby.  It is an absorbing scene:

                “I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

                “What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

                “I thought you knew, old sport.  I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

                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 external 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.  Precisely at that point it vanished— (p. 48).”

            This occurrence tips the balance in Gatsby’s favor.  Nick Caraway figuratively becomes a fan of Gatsby. Even so, Nick Caraway tries to “write off” this glamour of the gala later when finished writing about the party:

            “Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me.  On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs” (p. 56).

Caraway is not about to admit that he enjoyed the party.

The interactions with Gatsby gives rise to the question of the rumors heretofore heard by Nick throughout the night.  We, the reader, are left wondering: “Is this hyperbole, do these rumors have foundation?”  The night continues in the suave soiree of fireworks and introductions.  However, as the night presses on, there is a moment of innate symbolism.  Nick Caraway comes to a large room full of people.  A girl in a yellow dress is playing the piano and a red-haired lady, standing nearby singing:

            “She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too.  Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano.  The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets.  A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sand into a char and went off into a deep vinous sleep.  ‘She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,’ explained a girl at my elbow. 

                I looked around.  Most of the remaining women were not having fights with men said to be their husbands” (p. 51). 

                At this disgusting deluge of fighting between husbands and wives, we see the theme symbolically portrayed.  Amid the excess of the bash, a place where people should be enjoying themselves, there is quarreling and weeping of remorse.  There is emptiness.  Here is the rancorous reality that human beings will never be happy with this lifestyle. Is Fitzgerald’s message that the hedonism of the age is a problem which cannot satisfy the terms and conditions of men and women’s happiness?  That people aren’t truly happy with the “live for the moment” lifestyle, continually getting what they want?  Are we to know that the unabated receiving of our desire’s whimsical wants is not instantaneously given?  Further reading will reply.  We see this emptiness again, just pages later:

            “A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell” (p. 55).

            Will all this emptiness resolve itself?  Shall Fitzgerald reveal, at any point in the novel, the panacea for the woes and angst of the age? 

                “‘I’ll tell you God’s truth.’  His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by.  “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West—all dead now.  I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years.  It is a family tradition’” (p. 65). 

            In this chapter, for the first time we are intimately introduced to Gatsby, as is Nick Caraway. Gatsby’s attempted portrayal as a traditional wealthy family is a tragic exaggeration which likely stings his Gatsby’s lying lips as it leaves.  For those who are familiar with the story, we are deeply melancholic about this supposition accepted unwittingly by Nick Caraway.  The first portrait we have of Gatsby is gallant, refined, and sophisticated.  Furthermore, our narrator admits this in his reflections; the “Great” Gatsby, Gatsby the wonderfully mysterious. 

James Gatsby’s hamartia, his error, his misstep, his frailty, his flaw is his obsession, obsession with Daisy Buchannan.  Caraway wrongly sees it as “hope.”  However, this is not hope.  Gatsby’s is hope in excess, hope in the extreme.  This hope cankers into monomania, a preoccupation so preemptive, that everyone involved is affected.  It is his fatal flaw.  This flaw leads to his lying, his cheating, his foul-play to get, what he wrongly assumes, he deserves.