The Great Gatsby

20/01/2025

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The Colossal Vitality of an Illusion

    The Great Gatsby is such a good book it is almost a shame it's a famous one. The danger of many a celebrated text is that they become culturally rather than personally read — as though there may be no need to read them because one knows the story already, or one has read them but with a haste that might have nothing to do with how quickly the book was absorbed but how youthfully it was devoured. Thus the two dangers: the book is left unread because we all know it anyway, or it is read at a premature age while working through the books that ought to be read. Yet The Great Gatsby was far from an instant success, selling poorly and reviewed modestly. Thomas Powers notes that when Fitzgerald died in 1940, his career was seen as a failure: “Fitzgerald’s reputation as a serious novelist had reached absolute bottom when he died of a heart attack in December 1940. Obituarists all wrote in mournful tones of promise squandered.” (London Review of Books) Yet now Powers can offer in a statement few would contradict: “Jay Gatsby is one of the great characters of American fiction, like Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield. The list is not long.” The book that, while Fitzgerald was alive, should have made him even more famous, becomes in posterity a novel so monumental that it is hard to read without an awareness of its status. 

      Partly what has made the book so well-known is the depiction of parties that Jay Gatsby hosts at his mansion on Long Island. But this isn’t what makes the novel such a marvellous piece of literature as Fitzgerald always views the events at the legendary house as secondary to the narrator’s perspective on them. While Fitzgerald may have become with the triumph of his first couple of novels (This Side of Paradise; The Beautiful and the Damned) a celebrated chronicler of his age, with The Great Gatsby, the book’s potential commercial failure might have rested on the insistent distance that is evident in the prose. Powers notes this aloofness when saying, “What did it mean when Tom and Daisy [Buchanan] packed up and left East Egg: ‘retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together’? To early readers, it seemed to mean they had moved.” (London Review of Books) The book is full of such circumlocutions, with our narrator Nick Carraway trying to comprehend a world hampered by his position as someone who is situationally close both to Gatsby and the other main characters in the book, the Buchanans (he lives in a modest house with Gatsby as his next door neighbour and the Buchanans across the bay), but knows them chiefly through rumour, drunken claims and elliptical confession. (Though Daisy is a distant relative.) Nick is also inclined to ambivalence, someone who while overreacting to one piece of evidence will be forced to reassess the claim afterwards. It gives the novel less the marvellous depiction of a given time, but the conjectural quality of a time past, remembered partially. 

      For example, late in the book when he believes that Gatsby was responsible for the hit and run Jay hasn’t reported, Carraway thinks, “I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.” This is potentially a very complex feeling being offered; one that contains instant judgement and accumulated judgement; a need to say something and the greater desire to withhold the remark, all under the guise that there wouldn’t be any point in offering a comment even if others might see in such a retreat a greater cowardice. When Carraway asks Gatsby how the accident happened, with Buchanan’s lover, Myrtle Wilson, dead, Jay starts describing it and breaks off, with Nick suddenly guessing the truth. “Was Daisy driving?” Gatsby acknowledges she was and explains what happened. Does Nick now no longer despise Gatsby at all, or still despises him in many ways but not over the accident? We notice this ambivalence again when he refuses to shake Tom’s hand not long after Gatsby’s death, one that in a roundabout way Buchanan has been responsible over. Tom allows Myrtle’s husband to assume it was Gatsby who killed her, and Wilson in turn kills Gatsby and then himself. Buchanan and Nick talk briefly and Carraway says, “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” Then, before saying goodbye, Nick tells us: “I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.” It is there too when Nick speaks to the man, Mayer Wolfsheim, who helped Gatsby become a success but doesn’t want anything to do with the messiness of his death. Should he assume this man is cynically distancing himself from Jay or aware that little can help someone who has already died, and nobody did more for Gatsby when he was alive? Wolfsheim has a point, but he also seems self-serving and evasive. “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way, I keep out. When I was a young man it was different — if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental, but I mean it — to the bitter end.” Why not now? Carraway doesn’t know, but he has moments earlier wondered whether Mayer had been “included in the World’s Series transactions in 1919”: a famous betting scandal that included 8 White Sox players throwing the game." Wolfsheim is a dubious figure who probably has achieved a level of wealth and notoriety that means turning up at the funeral of a murdered man isn’t a good idea. Nick might be initially horrified that Wolfsheim won’t attend the funeral of someone who made Gatsby, but he just about comes to accept Wolfsheim’s probable reasoning. 

          Fitzgerald’s book was partly based on fact (with Wolfsheim racketeer Arnold Rothstein), but its greatness rests on how it creates its fiction. It could have been much clearer and more upfront about Jay’s activities, but everything is viewed through the prism of a character who as the opening page informs us he has had a privileged upbringing. His father once told Nick, “whenever you feel like criticising someone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Someone with Gatsby’s background rather than Nick’s might have been more alert to Gatsby’s sudden wealth and how he achieved it. Gatsby’s huge fortune is accumulated in less than four years. He is  a man  after the war who was so “hard up”, Wolfsheim informs Nick near the end of the book, “he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes.” In less than five years, Gatsby has two motorboats, a Rolls Royce and “eight servants, including an extra gardener, [who] toiled all day with mops and scrubbing brushes and hammer and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.” A man of the world noticing these things would be more inclined to investigate the sudden fortune; Carraway is someone, though, who is fascinated instead by the calibrations of Gatsby’s personality — more determined to discover the value of the man over how he accumulated his financial assets. 

    Nick gives a lot of thought to Gatsby’s status as an Oxford man, so much so that he all but misses the cufflinks someone wears who is telling him about Gatsby’s time at “Oggsford college.” This man is Wolfsheim, much earlier in the book, and he says after mentioning Oxford, “I see you are looking at my cuff buttons.” Nick then notes that “…they were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory”, as Wolfsheim informs him that they are from human molars. Another narrator might spend more time wondering who this figure that knows Gatsby so well happens to be, and who seems perverse enough to have cuff links made of human enamel. Nick also doesn’t make much of Wolfsheim’s claim that Gatsby is “…very careful about women, He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife”, when the novel is centrally about him trying to win back another man’s: Daisy, who he fell in love with him before going off to war. This could make Nick a hopelessly unreliable narrator, a comic figure instantly missing the point of the story as he focuses too much on his own narrow, privileged perspective.

     Yet that isn’t how Fitzgerald presents him, even if it might have been how some critics saw it initially. L. H. Mencken reckoned the book was “no more than an overvalued anecdote” (A Mencken Chrestomathy). From a certain point of view that is how the book could be read, if we assume that Fitzgerald has failed to focus on the salient features, or at least has oddly chosen a narrator who fails to do so. There are potentially two novels in The Great Gatsby: the large book about a poor midwesterner who in four years makes his fortune in a US that shows the rise of gangsterdom in the period immediately after prohibition — which was implemented in 1920. “It was difficult to enforce the Volstead Act. Demand for alcohol remained high so gangsters sold it illegally and made significant money from doing so. Gangs fought to control this, and other trades, such as protection rackets and gambling dens. As gangsters started selling alcohol, organised crime started to soar.” (BBC) This could have been the grand subject of Fitzgerald’s novel and undeniably more than an anecdote. Instead, this rise in organised crime is put into the background as Fitzgerald focuses on the various rumours over Gatsby’s past and increasingly his determination to impress and win back Daisy. Thus the novel’s plot is roughly this: a man who has amassed a fortune hosts parties that don’t seem much to interest him as he tries to find a way of wooing a nearby neighbour. He used Nick for this as Carraway’s place is literally a halfway house between Gatsby’s and the Buchanans’. Nick's house is next to Gatsby's and across from Daisy's and Daisy is Nick's distant cousin. After the arranged meeting it looks like Jay might again have a chance with Daisy but her increasing awareness of his dubious activities, and his assertive manner, seem to put Daisy off and she insists that she does love Tom. As she drives with Gatsby back to Long Island (under Tom’s behest) she accidentally kills Myrtle. Myrtle’s husband of course thinks it was Gatsby, and kills him.  

            Not only has Fitzgerald focused on the minor story, some could argue this isn’t a very strong one causally. Gatsby buys a mansion to be nearer Daisy and to impress her with his wealth; ropes a neighbour in as a go-between, fails to get the girl, and finds himself murdered while covering for the accident. But it’s as if Fitzgerald has chosen a tale so dramatically weak, and potentially insignificant, all the better to bring out the narrative voice and the oblique perspective. Nick is interested chiefly in Gatsby’s character over his personality and in his obsessions rather than his successes. When he first finally meets Gatsby, Nick notes that Jay offered him “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 favour.” Nick then adds, “precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” It is another of Nick’s about-turns, his capacity to see a character one way and reverse the assumption promptly. However, this shouldn’t make us question Nick’s reliability but admire Fitzgerald’s roundness of characterisation. Gatsby has the qualities of making someone feel special, and simultaneously an aspect that shows he is a common man. 

      Literature however is consecutive rather than simultaneous, and what we potentially take in all at once can only be conveyed in words in a temporal order. It isn’t that Nick is someone who doesn’t trust his own mind, or perhaps more importantly has a mind that the reader shouldn’t trust, but that he is trying to be fair to the problem of time in the immediacy of impression. Rather than seeing Nick as an unreliable narrator, as some commentators have, better to see him as one that shows up the problem of narration in principle: an issue of reliability partly because of the difficulty in conveying the inevitably partial. Nick, more than most, wants to acknowledge that partiality in his revised perspectives as he sees people are more complex than ready description allows. When one of the proponents of Nick’s unreliability, Thomas E. Boyle believes “…that far from providing ‘thoroughly reliable guidance,’ the narrator is shallow, confused, hypocritical” (‘Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby’) we are inclined to disagree, no matter how infuriatingly well Boyle makes his case.

      Such a claim seems to have all the certitude that Nick is careful to avoid, or, if he offers such assertiveness, will then promptly question. Why would Fitzgerald write a book with a narrator offering complex characterisation all the better to have the reader then see it as no more than instances of shallowness, confusion and hypocrisy? The book for example is surely full of asides that we take straight, like Carraway telling us about the history of Gatsby’s house. The previous owner wanted in return for paying five years of taxes on the neighbouring cottages that the inhabitants would allow all their roofs to be thatched to keep with the prior look. Carraway says, they refused: “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” When Carraway speaks of drinking with Tom Buchanan, he reckons, “I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.” When thinking of Gatsby, Nick notes Jay was ”delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour”, and sees the “colossal vitality of his illusion” over Daisy. These are the words of an astute observer, not a figure blinded by ignorance. To see Nick as unreliable is to allow a fashionable theory that has its uses to impose itself upon a book that is far more interested in perspective than unreliability. Nick is a limited narrator whose knowledge grows, as the book starts enigmatically and concludes disappointingly, with Gatsby unable to live up to the rumour of himself, and Nick accepting the final smallness of a man who seemed so big. 

   Near the end of the novel, and before his son’s funeral, Gatsby’s father arrives and shows him a notebook Jay wrote in when he was young. It describes the purpose of Gatsby’s day in some detail, and is followed by a list of general resolves. The day includes getting up at 6 and doing some exercises, followed by an hour of study. Gatsby would then work all day, and do some sport after it, then elocution lessons and further study. His resolutions include no more smoking or chewing and to “read one improving book or magazine per week.” The father is so impressed that Nick suspects the father reckons he should take a note of the list and use it himself. There may be snobbery in Carraway’s awareness that he has no need for such things since self-improvement is unnecessary — he was a boy who started with all the advantages; Nick never had to attain them. But what comes through more is how disappointing life happens to be. Gatsby may end up murdered, but the book has none of the melodrama that such an event would imply. This rests on the book’s capacity less to show up Nick’s confusion and superficiality than perhaps, from a certain perspective, everybody’s. If Nick is less facile than most, rather than the epicentre of that shallowness, this rests on the fact that he is narrating events (which shows reflection) and that he turns up to Gatsby’s funeral. One of the book’s obvious ironies is that while many were there for the parties, hardly anyone came to pay their respects after Jay’s death. This is exacerbated by a further irony: that people won’t be coming partly because many of the rumours over Gatsby’s illegal activities will have appeared unequivocal through his demise. Yet of course Gatsby neither had the affair with Myrtle Wilson nor killed her: these were deeds committed by the well-respected Tom and Daisy Buchanan respectively, and makes perfect sense of Nick’s remark about them being careless people. Jay was in many ways the opposite: a careful person who despite living for many years a controlled life — from the teenager who applies his will to all aspects of his existence; to building up immense wealth all the better to impress Daisy when he feels he is finally able to win her back from Tom — will die because of the very lack of it practised by others. 

     It is partly why we propose that though the book is potentially melodramatic in content it offers instead a meditation on the futility of purpose. It isn’t just that Gatsby doesn’t get the girl; in trying to get her he loses his life. He doesn’t lose it fighting for her but in protecting her from criminal charges, which in turn leads him in his death to seem more a criminal than he happened to be as people who could accept a few half-whispered claims when attending his parties, aren’t likely to hang around for a funeral when someone who may have run with gangsters loses his life. How many others thought like Wolfsheim, when Nick asks him to come to the funeral, that “I can’t do it — I can’t get mixed up in that”? The event consists of a hearse with Gatsby’s body, Nick and Gatsby’s father, a third car with some servants in it. That is it, except for a man whose name Nick never knew whom he remembers from one of the parties. The man looks surprised by the poor turnout and says “Oh my God! They used to go there by the hundreds…the poor son of a bitch.” 

           If some commentators may now want to read The Great Gatsby as the work of an unreliable narrator, the very creator of the term thought it wasn’t useful in the context of Fitzgerald’s book. Boyle notes Wayne C. Booth “asserts that Nick has only a minor involvement in the events of the novel and that he "provides thoroughly reliable guidance.”  Boyle proposes that his involvement is much greater and Carraway isn’t always reliable, reckoning that “…an arrogant pride is revealed under the guise of objectivity and humanity.”(‘Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby’) He reckons Nick might be a racist to boot. A “limousine "driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl ... anything can happen now ... anything at all”, Boyle notes. The full passage in the novel can seem worse, with Nick also saying: “I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry.” But Nick also sees that anything happening at all includes Gatsby’s success: “even Gatsby could happen without any particular wonder.” The affluence The Great Gatsby explores in the years before the 1929 crash, those roaring twenties, could incorporate people of different races and classes. If Nick so disapproved of this he’d be unlikely to admire Gatsby at certain important moments and would surely be sympathetic to a book Tom references, The Rise of the Colored Empires. Tom reckons “it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Later, when Tom wishes to undermine Gatsby, Jay proves that he did spend time in Oxford and Nick tells us “I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.” If Nick was chiefly a racist and a snob, he would be on Tom’s side all the way.  

   If we are finally disinclined to agree with Boyle over Nick’s unreliability because of aspects of his character that we don’t think define him and that Boyle does, then what about the significance of Carraway’s role in the book? Booth claims it is of little importance; Boyle begs to differ. He reckons that Nick is very involved indeed: if he had told the police that Daisy was driving the car, she would have been in jail, Gatsby would have been proved innocent and the madly grieving Wilson wouldn’t have killed Gatsby and then himself. But this appears to reflect more on Carraway’s passivity than making him an active figure in the narrative. If, for example, Nick was secretly in love with Daisy as (Boyle claims), then we could perhaps argue that Nick wants to keep mum in the hope that Wilson will assume Gatsby’s guilt and then kill him. But even Boyle doesn’t go that far, and this leaves Nick implicated in Gatsby’s demise but hardly guilty of it. Gatsby wouldn’t want Nick to report what happened and it surely his loyalty to Gatsby and not his love for Daisy that leads to Jay’s death.

      Boyle’s essay is a fine one but too keen to push a comprehensive reading on a book that is interested in ambiguity and mystery rather than ready text and subtext. By turning Nick into a categorically unreliable narrator it is as Fitzgerald wrote the book to be de-coded rather than as a complex account of human interactions. It isn’t that Boyle makes claims that aren’t so and, even if they were, could be seen as errors Fitzgerald made, it is more that Boyle’s take wants to turn Fitzgerald’s sensibility into something cruder and cleverer than it is. For example, Boyle says, “There is a good deal that is fishy about Gatsby which Nick does not see. He seriously reports for example, that Gatsby as a young man had spent over a year ‘beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and salmon fisher,’ yet we know, as Fitzgerald must have known, that Lake Superior contains neither edible clams nor salmon. Once again there is distance between reader and narrator.” (‘Unreliable Narration in the Great Gatsby’) It seems however that you can catch salmon in Lake Superior, but this isn’t simply to point out that Boyle is wrong; it is more to say that even if he were right it might only have proven that Fitzgerald was wrong. Neither writer had the advantage of a search engine that can quickly reveal whether or not salmon can be caught in Lake Superior. It would seem an odd clue to Nick’s unreliability to include a fact that many would have been oblivious to and that couldn’t have been easily known one way or the other by many readers.

           There are no doubt writers who are happy to create decipherable novels and readers who are keen to play textual detectives. But it wouldn’t appear that Fitzgerald was one of those novelists and we feel that what matters is retaining the book’s ambiguity. Just as Boyle reckons Nick is in love with Daisy, others insist that he is gay (and for some in love with Gatsby). It is true there is an unusual passage at the end of the second chapter, with Nick going back to a man’s place after a party and then stands watching as Mr McKee in his underwear looks through a photo album, before Nick finds himself wakes at 4am in Pennsylvania station. There is also a little detail earlier that might suggest Nick would go on to sleep with McKee. Earlier in the New York apartment they and others were partying in, Nick removes some dried lather from his cheek while McKee sleeps. We know that Nick has female lovers (including Jordan Baker) but maybe he is bi-sexual; the book doesn’t give us enough evidence to suggest this is so but a few critics have viewed the book through a queer lens. However, what comes through clearly in this chapter is the drunkenness rather than the sexual activity. The characters have worked through more than one bottle of whisky, Carraway is in New York and far from his home, and he appears to hang out at McKee’s place till he can get the first train back to Long Island.  

            It is not so much that a great novel can be read many different ways; it inevitably will be as generations of readers notice aspects of the book that reflect their interests. As Michael Bourne says, “I suspect the queer readings of Nick Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby. We read with a perpetually queered eye, forever on the hunt for coded language or secret lives in characters. We live in an age not just sympathetic to seeing gay lives as perfectly accessible but read into literature its earlier presence as well.” (The Millions) However, rather than saying that Nick is in love with Daisy or in love with Jay, the book indicates more that the enigmas and mysteries remain in place enough for such readings to be possible (if not always plausible) and that the novel has endured for it to pass through various eras of interpretation.

         How best then to read the book if we are sceptical of various interpretations from the unreliable to the queer, from decoding the novel to suggesting that Nick’s real infatuation isn’t a heterosexual admiration for Gatsby but a secret desire for him, or a straight obsession with Daisy? Sometimes a book is best read within the context of a writer’s preoccupations — as Bourne says, if Fitzgerald were so keen to explore gay sexuality it wouldn’t have been so difficult in later works that were written in decadent France rather than the Puritan US. Equally, to write a book predicated on either unreliability or decipherability seems to miss out on what Fitzgerald was continually fascinated by: time lost and impossible desires and hopes chased. These themes give works like The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, their melancholy, and this also allows Fitzgerald to find a narrative voice that captures temporal fragility, showing time is made up of so much more than the now. While the story is a book in the writing as Nick says early on “…Gatsby... gives his name to this book…” and later says “reading over what I have written so far”, there is little in the work that indicates novelistic self-reflexivity. It is merely the opportunity it provides for reflection, and the awareness that time seen retrospectively can give to earlier events a texture far greater than their apparent present mundanity. Nick notes, “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.” 

    The novel becomes the opportunity to explore time rather than manipulatively tell a story and, just before the end of the book, Carraway talks of brooding “on the old, unknown world” and thinks of Gatsby. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity behind the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Gatsby’s prospective future with Daisy was only a brief reenactment of the past, and no matter how much money he made, how big the house in which he lived, and the opulence of the parties he held, time stubbornly refused to accommodate his feelings. Fitzgerald explores the complexity of a phrase like ‘stuck in the past’ and gives it the most elaborate of environments as the book’s tragedy is finally not about Gatsby’s death, which has an immediate irony as Wilson kills the wrong person in every way. Gatsby neither slept with his wife nor killed her. The tragedy is more one resting on a man trying to recapture a feeling by purchasing a mansion. It becomes a haunted house before the event, with Gatsby sharing memories and hoping to turn them into future realities, a poor boy who wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to win a wealthy woman’s heart, but who accumulates the money only for time to have moved on. 

     To concern ourselves too much with Nick’s status as a narrator, to fret over the sexual inclinations of Nick or over details that might be mistakes as readily as sly inferences to unreliability, would be to make a point but miss a larger one. Fitzgerald is one of the great writers less of narrative unreliability than temporal indiscernibility, and what is commonly referred to as regret. Gatsby may regret that he didn’t secure Daisy’s love before he went off to the war, and by the time he returned, she belonged to another. He may regret he made his fortune by means that Daisy would find repellent; he should have seen that if she is interested in money why wouldn’t she remain with Tom’s old wealth rather than Gatsby’s newly acquired fortune? Daisy may have regretted marrying Tom, and gets drunk the evening before doing so, after receiving a letter from Gatsby, but she makes the decision and makes it again when Gatsby, now a rich man, tells her, in an argument with Tom, that she never loved Buchanan and she should leave him. But she doesn’t leave, with the reader perhaps wondering if Gatsby hadn’t been viewing her as an object to be fought over she might have made a different decision. Gatsby comes out of the exchange little better than Buchanan — another man who can buy whatever he wants, and why end a marriage with one control freak for another? Nick may regret that he hadn’t reported the accident to the police — if he had, both Gatsby and Wilson would be alive. He is also ambivalently regretful over the affair with Jordan Baker. She took him for a more honest man than he was and was clearly hurt by him. When he sees her after Gatsby’s death, their exchange is acrimonious and Nick says, “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”  

     Yet regret is also a matter of perspective, and Nick’s narration is accumulated out of gossip, rumour and confession. It is Jordan who tells him about Daisy’s marriage, and it is Gatsby who tells him how they fell in love. We assume Gatsby is correct within the broader context of Jordan seeing Daisy drunk the night before her wedding. How Gatsby made his fortune comes from Jay, but how he got his start comes chiefly from Wolfsheim. Nick may or may not be unreliable but he is unequivocally limited in what he knows and what he can tell, which is central to the purpose of the book. It moves forwards and develops backwards, with Nick often accumulating information after the event or relating events he heard later, earlier: as when he says Jay “told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding this wild rumours about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true.”

     If we opened with the claim the novel was too famous, despite its initial relative failure, then it rests on a work so well-known becoming contained by the assumptions that accrue over it. Gatsby becomes an archetypal figure of wealth; Daisy of shallow greed, Tom a heedless husband and Nick the prevaricating narrator. There is obviously a lot of truth to all of these claims, and even some truths to the hermeneutic pile-ins that can read in the novel homosexual desire and racism. But there is finally the mystery of a novel that wants to try and comprehend a moment in time and the man at its empty centre — Jay Gatsby, living a life of splendour without point while harbouring that colossal vitality of his illusion. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Great Gatsby

The Colossal Vitality of an Illusion

    The Great Gatsby is such a good book it is almost a shame it's a famous one. The danger of many a celebrated text is that they become culturally rather than personally read — as though there may be no need to read them because one knows the story already, or one has read them but with a haste that might have nothing to do with how quickly the book was absorbed but how youthfully it was devoured. Thus the two dangers: the book is left unread because we all know it anyway, or it is read at a premature age while working through the books that ought to be read. Yet The Great Gatsby was far from an instant success, selling poorly and reviewed modestly. Thomas Powers notes that when Fitzgerald died in 1940, his career was seen as a failure: “Fitzgerald’s reputation as a serious novelist had reached absolute bottom when he died of a heart attack in December 1940. Obituarists all wrote in mournful tones of promise squandered.” (London Review of Books) Yet now Powers can offer in a statement few would contradict: “Jay Gatsby is one of the great characters of American fiction, like Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield. The list is not long.” The book that, while Fitzgerald was alive, should have made him even more famous, becomes in posterity a novel so monumental that it is hard to read without an awareness of its status. 

      Partly what has made the book so well-known is the depiction of parties that Jay Gatsby hosts at his mansion on Long Island. But this isn’t what makes the novel such a marvellous piece of literature as Fitzgerald always views the events at the legendary house as secondary to the narrator’s perspective on them. While Fitzgerald may have become with the triumph of his first couple of novels (This Side of Paradise; The Beautiful and the Damned) a celebrated chronicler of his age, with The Great Gatsby, the book’s potential commercial failure might have rested on the insistent distance that is evident in the prose. Powers notes this aloofness when saying, “What did it mean when Tom and Daisy [Buchanan] packed up and left East Egg: ‘retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together’? To early readers, it seemed to mean they had moved.” (London Review of Books) The book is full of such circumlocutions, with our narrator Nick Carraway trying to comprehend a world hampered by his position as someone who is situationally close both to Gatsby and the other main characters in the book, the Buchanans (he lives in a modest house with Gatsby as his next door neighbour and the Buchanans across the bay), but knows them chiefly through rumour, drunken claims and elliptical confession. (Though Daisy is a distant relative.) Nick is also inclined to ambivalence, someone who while overreacting to one piece of evidence will be forced to reassess the claim afterwards. It gives the novel less the marvellous depiction of a given time, but the conjectural quality of a time past, remembered partially. 

      For example, late in the book when he believes that Gatsby was responsible for the hit and run Jay hasn’t reported, Carraway thinks, “I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.” This is potentially a very complex feeling being offered; one that contains instant judgement and accumulated judgement; a need to say something and the greater desire to withhold the remark, all under the guise that there wouldn’t be any point in offering a comment even if others might see in such a retreat a greater cowardice. When Carraway asks Gatsby how the accident happened, with Buchanan’s lover, Myrtle Wilson, dead, Jay starts describing it and breaks off, with Nick suddenly guessing the truth. “Was Daisy driving?” Gatsby acknowledges she was and explains what happened. Does Nick now no longer despise Gatsby at all, or still despises him in many ways but not over the accident? We notice this ambivalence again when he refuses to shake Tom’s hand not long after Gatsby’s death, one that in a roundabout way Buchanan has been responsible over. Tom allows Myrtle’s husband to assume it was Gatsby who killed her, and Wilson in turn kills Gatsby and then himself. Buchanan and Nick talk briefly and Carraway says, “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.” Then, before saying goodbye, Nick tells us: “I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.” It is there too when Nick speaks to the man, Mayer Wolfsheim, who helped Gatsby become a success but doesn’t want anything to do with the messiness of his death. Should he assume this man is cynically distancing himself from Jay or aware that little can help someone who has already died, and nobody did more for Gatsby when he was alive? Wolfsheim has a point, but he also seems self-serving and evasive. “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way, I keep out. When I was a young man it was different — if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental, but I mean it — to the bitter end.” Why not now? Carraway doesn’t know, but he has moments earlier wondered whether Mayer had been “included in the World’s Series transactions in 1919”: a famous betting scandal that included 8 White Sox players throwing the game." Wolfsheim is a dubious figure who probably has achieved a level of wealth and notoriety that means turning up at the funeral of a murdered man isn’t a good idea. Nick might be initially horrified that Wolfsheim won’t attend the funeral of someone who made Gatsby, but he just about comes to accept Wolfsheim’s probable reasoning. 

          Fitzgerald’s book was partly based on fact (with Wolfsheim racketeer Arnold Rothstein), but its greatness rests on how it creates its fiction. It could have been much clearer and more upfront about Jay’s activities, but everything is viewed through the prism of a character who as the opening page informs us he has had a privileged upbringing. His father once told Nick, “whenever you feel like criticising someone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Someone with Gatsby’s background rather than Nick’s might have been more alert to Gatsby’s sudden wealth and how he achieved it. Gatsby’s huge fortune is accumulated in less than four years. He is  a man  after the war who was so “hard up”, Wolfsheim informs Nick near the end of the book, “he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes.” In less than five years, Gatsby has two motorboats, a Rolls Royce and “eight servants, including an extra gardener, [who] toiled all day with mops and scrubbing brushes and hammer and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.” A man of the world noticing these things would be more inclined to investigate the sudden fortune; Carraway is someone, though, who is fascinated instead by the calibrations of Gatsby’s personality — more determined to discover the value of the man over how he accumulated his financial assets. 

    Nick gives a lot of thought to Gatsby’s status as an Oxford man, so much so that he all but misses the cufflinks someone wears who is telling him about Gatsby’s time at “Oggsford college.” This man is Wolfsheim, much earlier in the book, and he says after mentioning Oxford, “I see you are looking at my cuff buttons.” Nick then notes that “…they were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory”, as Wolfsheim informs him that they are from human molars. Another narrator might spend more time wondering who this figure that knows Gatsby so well happens to be, and who seems perverse enough to have cuff links made of human enamel. Nick also doesn’t make much of Wolfsheim’s claim that Gatsby is “…very careful about women, He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife”, when the novel is centrally about him trying to win back another man’s: Daisy, who he fell in love with him before going off to war. This could make Nick a hopelessly unreliable narrator, a comic figure instantly missing the point of the story as he focuses too much on his own narrow, privileged perspective.

     Yet that isn’t how Fitzgerald presents him, even if it might have been how some critics saw it initially. L. H. Mencken reckoned the book was “no more than an overvalued anecdote” (A Mencken Chrestomathy). From a certain point of view that is how the book could be read, if we assume that Fitzgerald has failed to focus on the salient features, or at least has oddly chosen a narrator who fails to do so. There are potentially two novels in The Great Gatsby: the large book about a poor midwesterner who in four years makes his fortune in a US that shows the rise of gangsterdom in the period immediately after prohibition — which was implemented in 1920. “It was difficult to enforce the Volstead Act. Demand for alcohol remained high so gangsters sold it illegally and made significant money from doing so. Gangs fought to control this, and other trades, such as protection rackets and gambling dens. As gangsters started selling alcohol, organised crime started to soar.” (BBC) This could have been the grand subject of Fitzgerald’s novel and undeniably more than an anecdote. Instead, this rise in organised crime is put into the background as Fitzgerald focuses on the various rumours over Gatsby’s past and increasingly his determination to impress and win back Daisy. Thus the novel’s plot is roughly this: a man who has amassed a fortune hosts parties that don’t seem much to interest him as he tries to find a way of wooing a nearby neighbour. He used Nick for this as Carraway’s place is literally a halfway house between Gatsby’s and the Buchanans’. Nick's house is next to Gatsby's and across from Daisy's and Daisy is Nick's distant cousin. After the arranged meeting it looks like Jay might again have a chance with Daisy but her increasing awareness of his dubious activities, and his assertive manner, seem to put Daisy off and she insists that she does love Tom. As she drives with Gatsby back to Long Island (under Tom’s behest) she accidentally kills Myrtle. Myrtle’s husband of course thinks it was Gatsby, and kills him.  

            Not only has Fitzgerald focused on the minor story, some could argue this isn’t a very strong one causally. Gatsby buys a mansion to be nearer Daisy and to impress her with his wealth; ropes a neighbour in as a go-between, fails to get the girl, and finds himself murdered while covering for the accident. But it’s as if Fitzgerald has chosen a tale so dramatically weak, and potentially insignificant, all the better to bring out the narrative voice and the oblique perspective. Nick is interested chiefly in Gatsby’s character over his personality and in his obsessions rather than his successes. When he first finally meets Gatsby, Nick notes that Jay offered him “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 favour.” Nick then adds, “precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.” It is another of Nick’s about-turns, his capacity to see a character one way and reverse the assumption promptly. However, this shouldn’t make us question Nick’s reliability but admire Fitzgerald’s roundness of characterisation. Gatsby has the qualities of making someone feel special, and simultaneously an aspect that shows he is a common man. 

      Literature however is consecutive rather than simultaneous, and what we potentially take in all at once can only be conveyed in words in a temporal order. It isn’t that Nick is someone who doesn’t trust his own mind, or perhaps more importantly has a mind that the reader shouldn’t trust, but that he is trying to be fair to the problem of time in the immediacy of impression. Rather than seeing Nick as an unreliable narrator, as some commentators have, better to see him as one that shows up the problem of narration in principle: an issue of reliability partly because of the difficulty in conveying the inevitably partial. Nick, more than most, wants to acknowledge that partiality in his revised perspectives as he sees people are more complex than ready description allows. When one of the proponents of Nick’s unreliability, Thomas E. Boyle believes “…that far from providing ‘thoroughly reliable guidance,’ the narrator is shallow, confused, hypocritical” (‘Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby’) we are inclined to disagree, no matter how infuriatingly well Boyle makes his case.

      Such a claim seems to have all the certitude that Nick is careful to avoid, or, if he offers such assertiveness, will then promptly question. Why would Fitzgerald write a book with a narrator offering complex characterisation all the better to have the reader then see it as no more than instances of shallowness, confusion and hypocrisy? The book for example is surely full of asides that we take straight, like Carraway telling us about the history of Gatsby’s house. The previous owner wanted in return for paying five years of taxes on the neighbouring cottages that the inhabitants would allow all their roofs to be thatched to keep with the prior look. Carraway says, they refused: “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” When Carraway speaks of drinking with Tom Buchanan, he reckons, “I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.” When thinking of Gatsby, Nick notes Jay was ”delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour”, and sees the “colossal vitality of his illusion” over Daisy. These are the words of an astute observer, not a figure blinded by ignorance. To see Nick as unreliable is to allow a fashionable theory that has its uses to impose itself upon a book that is far more interested in perspective than unreliability. Nick is a limited narrator whose knowledge grows, as the book starts enigmatically and concludes disappointingly, with Gatsby unable to live up to the rumour of himself, and Nick accepting the final smallness of a man who seemed so big. 

   Near the end of the novel, and before his son’s funeral, Gatsby’s father arrives and shows him a notebook Jay wrote in when he was young. It describes the purpose of Gatsby’s day in some detail, and is followed by a list of general resolves. The day includes getting up at 6 and doing some exercises, followed by an hour of study. Gatsby would then work all day, and do some sport after it, then elocution lessons and further study. His resolutions include no more smoking or chewing and to “read one improving book or magazine per week.” The father is so impressed that Nick suspects the father reckons he should take a note of the list and use it himself. There may be snobbery in Carraway’s awareness that he has no need for such things since self-improvement is unnecessary — he was a boy who started with all the advantages; Nick never had to attain them. But what comes through more is how disappointing life happens to be. Gatsby may end up murdered, but the book has none of the melodrama that such an event would imply. This rests on the book’s capacity less to show up Nick’s confusion and superficiality than perhaps, from a certain perspective, everybody’s. If Nick is less facile than most, rather than the epicentre of that shallowness, this rests on the fact that he is narrating events (which shows reflection) and that he turns up to Gatsby’s funeral. One of the book’s obvious ironies is that while many were there for the parties, hardly anyone came to pay their respects after Jay’s death. This is exacerbated by a further irony: that people won’t be coming partly because many of the rumours over Gatsby’s illegal activities will have appeared unequivocal through his demise. Yet of course Gatsby neither had the affair with Myrtle Wilson nor killed her: these were deeds committed by the well-respected Tom and Daisy Buchanan respectively, and makes perfect sense of Nick’s remark about them being careless people. Jay was in many ways the opposite: a careful person who despite living for many years a controlled life — from the teenager who applies his will to all aspects of his existence; to building up immense wealth all the better to impress Daisy when he feels he is finally able to win her back from Tom — will die because of the very lack of it practised by others. 

     It is partly why we propose that though the book is potentially melodramatic in content it offers instead a meditation on the futility of purpose. It isn’t just that Gatsby doesn’t get the girl; in trying to get her he loses his life. He doesn’t lose it fighting for her but in protecting her from criminal charges, which in turn leads him in his death to seem more a criminal than he happened to be as people who could accept a few half-whispered claims when attending his parties, aren’t likely to hang around for a funeral when someone who may have run with gangsters loses his life. How many others thought like Wolfsheim, when Nick asks him to come to the funeral, that “I can’t do it — I can’t get mixed up in that”? The event consists of a hearse with Gatsby’s body, Nick and Gatsby’s father, a third car with some servants in it. That is it, except for a man whose name Nick never knew whom he remembers from one of the parties. The man looks surprised by the poor turnout and says “Oh my God! They used to go there by the hundreds…the poor son of a bitch.” 

           If some commentators may now want to read The Great Gatsby as the work of an unreliable narrator, the very creator of the term thought it wasn’t useful in the context of Fitzgerald’s book. Boyle notes Wayne C. Booth “asserts that Nick has only a minor involvement in the events of the novel and that he "provides thoroughly reliable guidance.”  Boyle proposes that his involvement is much greater and Carraway isn’t always reliable, reckoning that “…an arrogant pride is revealed under the guise of objectivity and humanity.”(‘Unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby’) He reckons Nick might be a racist to boot. A “limousine "driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl ... anything can happen now ... anything at all”, Boyle notes. The full passage in the novel can seem worse, with Nick also saying: “I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry.” But Nick also sees that anything happening at all includes Gatsby’s success: “even Gatsby could happen without any particular wonder.” The affluence The Great Gatsby explores in the years before the 1929 crash, those roaring twenties, could incorporate people of different races and classes. If Nick so disapproved of this he’d be unlikely to admire Gatsby at certain important moments and would surely be sympathetic to a book Tom references, The Rise of the Colored Empires. Tom reckons “it’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” Later, when Tom wishes to undermine Gatsby, Jay proves that he did spend time in Oxford and Nick tells us “I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.” If Nick was chiefly a racist and a snob, he would be on Tom’s side all the way.  

   If we are finally disinclined to agree with Boyle over Nick’s unreliability because of aspects of his character that we don’t think define him and that Boyle does, then what about the significance of Carraway’s role in the book? Booth claims it is of little importance; Boyle begs to differ. He reckons that Nick is very involved indeed: if he had told the police that Daisy was driving the car, she would have been in jail, Gatsby would have been proved innocent and the madly grieving Wilson wouldn’t have killed Gatsby and then himself. But this appears to reflect more on Carraway’s passivity than making him an active figure in the narrative. If, for example, Nick was secretly in love with Daisy as (Boyle claims), then we could perhaps argue that Nick wants to keep mum in the hope that Wilson will assume Gatsby’s guilt and then kill him. But even Boyle doesn’t go that far, and this leaves Nick implicated in Gatsby’s demise but hardly guilty of it. Gatsby wouldn’t want Nick to report what happened and it surely his loyalty to Gatsby and not his love for Daisy that leads to Jay’s death.

      Boyle’s essay is a fine one but too keen to push a comprehensive reading on a book that is interested in ambiguity and mystery rather than ready text and subtext. By turning Nick into a categorically unreliable narrator it is as Fitzgerald wrote the book to be de-coded rather than as a complex account of human interactions. It isn’t that Boyle makes claims that aren’t so and, even if they were, could be seen as errors Fitzgerald made, it is more that Boyle’s take wants to turn Fitzgerald’s sensibility into something cruder and cleverer than it is. For example, Boyle says, “There is a good deal that is fishy about Gatsby which Nick does not see. He seriously reports for example, that Gatsby as a young man had spent over a year ‘beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and salmon fisher,’ yet we know, as Fitzgerald must have known, that Lake Superior contains neither edible clams nor salmon. Once again there is distance between reader and narrator.” (‘Unreliable Narration in the Great Gatsby’) It seems however that you can catch salmon in Lake Superior, but this isn’t simply to point out that Boyle is wrong; it is more to say that even if he were right it might only have proven that Fitzgerald was wrong. Neither writer had the advantage of a search engine that can quickly reveal whether or not salmon can be caught in Lake Superior. It would seem an odd clue to Nick’s unreliability to include a fact that many would have been oblivious to and that couldn’t have been easily known one way or the other by many readers.

           There are no doubt writers who are happy to create decipherable novels and readers who are keen to play textual detectives. But it wouldn’t appear that Fitzgerald was one of those novelists and we feel that what matters is retaining the book’s ambiguity. Just as Boyle reckons Nick is in love with Daisy, others insist that he is gay (and for some in love with Gatsby). It is true there is an unusual passage at the end of the second chapter, with Nick going back to a man’s place after a party and then stands watching as Mr McKee in his underwear looks through a photo album, before Nick finds himself wakes at 4am in Pennsylvania station. There is also a little detail earlier that might suggest Nick would go on to sleep with McKee. Earlier in the New York apartment they and others were partying in, Nick removes some dried lather from his cheek while McKee sleeps. We know that Nick has female lovers (including Jordan Baker) but maybe he is bi-sexual; the book doesn’t give us enough evidence to suggest this is so but a few critics have viewed the book through a queer lens. However, what comes through clearly in this chapter is the drunkenness rather than the sexual activity. The characters have worked through more than one bottle of whisky, Carraway is in New York and far from his home, and he appears to hang out at McKee’s place till he can get the first train back to Long Island.  

            It is not so much that a great novel can be read many different ways; it inevitably will be as generations of readers notice aspects of the book that reflect their interests. As Michael Bourne says, “I suspect the queer readings of Nick Carraway say more about the way we read now than they do about Nick or The Great Gatsby. We read with a perpetually queered eye, forever on the hunt for coded language or secret lives in characters. We live in an age not just sympathetic to seeing gay lives as perfectly accessible but read into literature its earlier presence as well.” (The Millions) However, rather than saying that Nick is in love with Daisy or in love with Jay, the book indicates more that the enigmas and mysteries remain in place enough for such readings to be possible (if not always plausible) and that the novel has endured for it to pass through various eras of interpretation.

         How best then to read the book if we are sceptical of various interpretations from the unreliable to the queer, from decoding the novel to suggesting that Nick’s real infatuation isn’t a heterosexual admiration for Gatsby but a secret desire for him, or a straight obsession with Daisy? Sometimes a book is best read within the context of a writer’s preoccupations — as Bourne says, if Fitzgerald were so keen to explore gay sexuality it wouldn’t have been so difficult in later works that were written in decadent France rather than the Puritan US. Equally, to write a book predicated on either unreliability or decipherability seems to miss out on what Fitzgerald was continually fascinated by: time lost and impossible desires and hopes chased. These themes give works like The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, their melancholy, and this also allows Fitzgerald to find a narrative voice that captures temporal fragility, showing time is made up of so much more than the now. While the story is a book in the writing as Nick says early on “…Gatsby... gives his name to this book…” and later says “reading over what I have written so far”, there is little in the work that indicates novelistic self-reflexivity. It is merely the opportunity it provides for reflection, and the awareness that time seen retrospectively can give to earlier events a texture far greater than their apparent present mundanity. Nick notes, “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.” 

    The novel becomes the opportunity to explore time rather than manipulatively tell a story and, just before the end of the book, Carraway talks of brooding “on the old, unknown world” and thinks of Gatsby. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity behind the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Gatsby’s prospective future with Daisy was only a brief reenactment of the past, and no matter how much money he made, how big the house in which he lived, and the opulence of the parties he held, time stubbornly refused to accommodate his feelings. Fitzgerald explores the complexity of a phrase like ‘stuck in the past’ and gives it the most elaborate of environments as the book’s tragedy is finally not about Gatsby’s death, which has an immediate irony as Wilson kills the wrong person in every way. Gatsby neither slept with his wife nor killed her. The tragedy is more one resting on a man trying to recapture a feeling by purchasing a mansion. It becomes a haunted house before the event, with Gatsby sharing memories and hoping to turn them into future realities, a poor boy who wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to win a wealthy woman’s heart, but who accumulates the money only for time to have moved on. 

     To concern ourselves too much with Nick’s status as a narrator, to fret over the sexual inclinations of Nick or over details that might be mistakes as readily as sly inferences to unreliability, would be to make a point but miss a larger one. Fitzgerald is one of the great writers less of narrative unreliability than temporal indiscernibility, and what is commonly referred to as regret. Gatsby may regret that he didn’t secure Daisy’s love before he went off to the war, and by the time he returned, she belonged to another. He may regret he made his fortune by means that Daisy would find repellent; he should have seen that if she is interested in money why wouldn’t she remain with Tom’s old wealth rather than Gatsby’s newly acquired fortune? Daisy may have regretted marrying Tom, and gets drunk the evening before doing so, after receiving a letter from Gatsby, but she makes the decision and makes it again when Gatsby, now a rich man, tells her, in an argument with Tom, that she never loved Buchanan and she should leave him. But she doesn’t leave, with the reader perhaps wondering if Gatsby hadn’t been viewing her as an object to be fought over she might have made a different decision. Gatsby comes out of the exchange little better than Buchanan — another man who can buy whatever he wants, and why end a marriage with one control freak for another? Nick may regret that he hadn’t reported the accident to the police — if he had, both Gatsby and Wilson would be alive. He is also ambivalently regretful over the affair with Jordan Baker. She took him for a more honest man than he was and was clearly hurt by him. When he sees her after Gatsby’s death, their exchange is acrimonious and Nick says, “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”  

     Yet regret is also a matter of perspective, and Nick’s narration is accumulated out of gossip, rumour and confession. It is Jordan who tells him about Daisy’s marriage, and it is Gatsby who tells him how they fell in love. We assume Gatsby is correct within the broader context of Jordan seeing Daisy drunk the night before her wedding. How Gatsby made his fortune comes from Jay, but how he got his start comes chiefly from Wolfsheim. Nick may or may not be unreliable but he is unequivocally limited in what he knows and what he can tell, which is central to the purpose of the book. It moves forwards and develops backwards, with Nick often accumulating information after the event or relating events he heard later, earlier: as when he says Jay “told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding this wild rumours about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true.”

     If we opened with the claim the novel was too famous, despite its initial relative failure, then it rests on a work so well-known becoming contained by the assumptions that accrue over it. Gatsby becomes an archetypal figure of wealth; Daisy of shallow greed, Tom a heedless husband and Nick the prevaricating narrator. There is obviously a lot of truth to all of these claims, and even some truths to the hermeneutic pile-ins that can read in the novel homosexual desire and racism. But there is finally the mystery of a novel that wants to try and comprehend a moment in time and the man at its empty centre — Jay Gatsby, living a life of splendour without point while harbouring that colossal vitality of his illusion. 


© Tony McKibbin