“James
Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. he had change it at the age of seventeen and
at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw
Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior….I suppose
he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm
people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at
all. The truth was that jay Gatsby of
West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it
means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the
service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby
that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception
he was faithful to the end” (p. 98).
Here,
in striking detail, is revealed the rub of Gatsby’s fantasies. Here, we learn from whence he (in all enigmatic
mystery) stems. Not the haughty
hot-house of pleasure, ease, and luxury; but rather a destitute hearth of agrarian
mean. With finality of the novel in
mind, coupled with its searing impact on all who read it, we awaken to the idea
that this tale is one of embittering dejection.
It is a story of the death of the American dream. Gatsby, in the vibrant naiveté of youth,
conceives an existence for himself which shall cut his woes from his
coat-tails. This conjuring, envisioned
at 17, is magnanimous and noble. Should
we discourage Gatsby’s lofty ideals and expressions? Is not every creature entitled to the rare expressionism
as exhibited in the altitudinous fantasies of James Gatz?
None
can resist, amid the peering moonlight of sleepless reverie, the chance to
steal away from the mundane and minutia of living to the chimerical
fabrications of juvenile imagination.
The world we generate, although fantastic and unreal, if allowed, can
become a monomaniacal obsession which drags us deep into fen and swamp whence
hardly a man can escape its slimy grasp.
When a dream, silently and unnoticeably, corrupts into ill fixation, the
spawn is hamartia. We applaud Gatsby for
the brilliancy of his hope. Hope that
consumes, however, becomes the hero’s error.
Do
not misunderstand. Our dreams are laudable,
as is Gatsby’s, but anticipation which wafts men and women into mania is
insalubrious. James Gatsby created: “A
universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock
ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes
upon the floor. Each night he added to
the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene
with an oblivious embrace. For a while
these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory
hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was
founded securely on a fairy’s wing” (p. 99).
This
monomania is evidenced when, following the extravagant party held at his
mansion, he tensely councils with Nick Caraway:
“‘She
didn’t like it,’ he said immediately.
‘Of
course she did.’
‘She
didn’t like it,’ he insisted. ‘She didn’t have a good time.’
He
was silent and I guessed at this unutterable depression.
‘I feel far away from her,’ he said.
‘It’s hard to make her understand.’
‘You mean about the dance?’
‘The dance?’ He dismissed all the
dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. ‘Old sport, the dance is
unimportant.’” (p. 109).
Nick
Caraway then comments about Daisy:
“‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I
ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t
repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’
He
looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his
house, just out of reach of his hand.” (p. 110—emphasis added).
This pathetic, forced indoctrination,
by Gatsby himself, is that the past can somehow be manipulated at your own
discretion. Such a thought is wholly illogical. This absurdity will form the cast of his
misfortune.
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