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$Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Gatsby: Chapters 5 - 9}
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$Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Simon Fraser University}
$Subject{gatsby
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Title:       Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book:        Great Gatsby, The
Author:      Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Critic:      Cooperman, Stanley
Affiliation: Department Of English, Simon Fraser University

Great Gatsby: Chapters 5 - 9

Chapter V

     Once Nick understands the Gatsby-Daisy relationship, he (and the reader)
also understands that Gatsby's entire "production" is aimed at the winning of
an ideal, and there is a marked increase in urgency when Nick discovers the
entire area of West Egg ablaze one evening with "unreal" light. It is Gatsby's
mansion, where the lights have been turned on in every room. This is a very
effective image, an example of the narrative economy of Fitzgerald at his
best. For the blaze of "unreal" light communicates both the intensity of
Gatsby's emotion, and the illusion which is the basis for the emotion itself.
Some sort of climax is obviously in the offing - and if this climax turns into
a absurdity, into an anti-climax of pathetic tragedy (as indeed it will), the
cause is to be found in the nature of Gatsby's dream - a dream which (as we
have so often remarked) contains the inevitability of its own destruction.

Gatsby's Gratitude:

     The resources of Gatsby himself are so completely without a standard of
either moral code or social perception, that his attempt to express himself
becomes little more than a vulgarity. For in sincerely wanting to "thank"
Nick, he offers to cut him in on a lucrative stock deal.

     Under the circumstances, however, Nick has no choice but to refuse
Gatsby's offer - for the offer itself would turn an act of friendship into a
"business deal," and so become an act of degradation. That Nick perceives
this, and Gatsby does not, defines the gulf separating a world in which all of
human emotion - love or friendship, or gratitude - is little more than
"business" and material acquisition, from a world (Nick's world of the
Midwest) where there are still areas of human life which are simply not to be
bought or sold.

     The point to remember is that Gatsby does not mean to be sordid or
insulting; he is using the only means at his disposal-the only "magic" he has
at his command: material acquisition. It is, indeed, the same "magic" with
which he hopes to achieve his Ideal of Beauty: Daisy Buchanan.

"Grand Passion" And Low Comedy:

     Nick tries to comfort him, and finally becomes impatient: "You're acting
like a little boy," he says to Jay Gatsby, the Prince of the Golden Palace,
and this single remark defines much of Gatsby's peculiar charm - and pathos.
For Gatsby, despite (or because of) his wealth, and his dreams, is indeed a
"little boy" - a worshipper of toys which he takes to be signs of Divinity.
For boy-men like Jay Gatsby, the trivial must be always elevated to the
Cosmically Significant, and it is precisely this quality of "boyish"
idealization demonstrated by Gatsby, that other American writers (Ernest
Hemingway, for example) came to see as the unique "charm" - and maddening
weakness - of so many of their countrymen.

The Palace Of Enchantment:

     And how does Gatsby react to the fact that he has at last captured his
Butterfly Queen with a "net of gold"? He simply moves like a man sleep-walking
through a dream that has suddenly become flesh. His very possessions,
accumulated with such effort, suddenly become almost "unreal" in Daisy's
presence; and indeed they are important only as they succeed or fail to
succeed in giving her delight.

     It is important to note, however, that the very realization of Gatsby's
dream has in some way "spoiled" the dream itself; at this moment which he had
idealized for so long, when his emotion is at "an inconceivable pitch of
intensity," Gatsby somehow is beginning to feel a loss-a loss of something he
cannot name or identify. "He was running down like an overwound clock," Nick
observes - and the image, with all its absurd deflation, is indeed a
description of Gatsby's ultimate fate.

Gatsby's Magic Shirts:

     Gatsby's silk shirts as many critics have noted, are actually far more
important than any mere garment ever spun by machine or man. For these shirts,
to Jay Gatsby (like his car or his mansion), are important not in themselves,
but for what they represent - and what they represent is the shrine of
"success" and Ideal value made possible by success itself. Gatsby does not
merely "wear" these shirts; he worships them, or uses them as sacred objects
in a ritual whose meaning is, paradoxically enough, spiritual rather than
materialistic.

     To Tom Buchanan, for example, a shirt, even a silk shirt, would be-quite
simply-a shirt. For Jay Gatsby the material object transcends itself; it
becomes a mystic sign and spiritual endowment. This is what Daisy sense in
this memorable scene-for as Gatsby continues to pile the rainbow of silk cloth
higher and higher, Daisy literally collapses in a kind of ecstatic moaning;
bending her head into the shirts, she begins to cry "stormily," declaring
their beauty with sobs of mingled delight and sadness: like a music lover
rhapsodizing over a violin solo by Bach.

     The meaning of Gatsby's shirts, in other words, despite the peculiar
absurdity of the entire scene, is that of a man who brings to his Dream a
preoccupation with materialism which in some way has been transformed into
enchantment; hence the relevance of the dedication on the flyleaf of The Great
Gatsby, the bit of verse from the work of Thomas Park D'Invilliers:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"

Gatsby's "Hymn":

     After what might be called the "ecstasy of the shirts," however, Gatsby's
mood of exultation somehow darkens and returns to a lower pitch. For having
shown Daisy his palace, having reached her at last-knowing that she will be
his-there must inevitably be a loss of enchantment itself. Daisy's fascination
for Gatsby, after all, had rested in large part upon her very unavailability;
made available once again, turned from an Ultimate Cause to simply another
possession, Daisy must suffer a considerable loss in status. Gatsby senses
this, a "loss" to which Nick refers when, describing Gatsby's appearance, he
remarks that "his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."

     "Enchanted objects," after all, by definition disappear when touched;
and this is precisely the measure of Gatsby's success - and his loss.

Chapter VI

Gatsby's Identity - And The American Dream:

     At this point Nick's analysis of the Gatsby character provides a basic
insight not only into the character of the namesake of the novel, but into
"The American Dream" of enchanted "success." For the dream of the 17-year-old
James Gatz-the vision of "a vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty" that in some
way was Divine as well as merely materialistic, is precisely the dream of
Jay Gatsby as a man.

     The pathos, of course, is that the fevered dreams and hope for some
iridescent and glowing "glory" that one might expect from a 17-year-old
drifter possessed of a keen imagination, is precisely the dream of the adult
man as well. The result is a kind of nursery turned into a cathedral; a world
in which the fairy-stories of adolescence (themselves based on pulp fiction)
become the sole motivation of manhood, and are given an almost spiritual
sanctification because they are the only Holy Cause which James Gatz - and the
world which shaped him - can offer to human aspiration.

     From his adolescence, in short, Gatz - Gatsby had been pursuing the Holy
Glow of some vaguely imagined "success," an "identity" gleaming like a mirage
just over the horizon of tomorrow. The result is both complete romanticism and
complete lack of any real identity at all; obsessed (as Nick remarks) with "a
promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing" and
viewing his own identity through fashion-magazine spectacles, Jay Gatsby-the
Prince of Enchantment-indeed "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."

     It is, however, a "Platonic Idealism" whose only means of
self-realization is material acquisition at any cost; it is an identity
founded on facade, and a "self" which depends for its very existence upon
illusion. This is the core of the Gatsby paradox, and the paradox of The
American Dream itself: a unique kind of materialism that in a basic sense
never "grows up," that is elevated into a perpetual, adolescent, romantic,
and spiritual value. And because Gatsby's materialism-like American
materialism-is all of these things, the result must be destructive; when
material goals are reduced (or elevated) to spiritual cotton-candy, they
dissolve at the touch.

     The smile itself, of course, is still another symbol of the vacuum
beneath the surface of Gatsby's appearance. Representing not a state of
emotion but a state of ambition, the "smile" is an instrument to be
deliberately manipulated; it is a social weapon rather than a personal
tribute, and as such is no more meaningful than are the bright, "perky" and
vacuous "smiles" which so often infest college campuses on sorority-pledge
day.

Gatsby's Apprenticeship:

     Cody, however, was taken in by the Gatsby smile-for he was himself a
creature of emptiness, an opportunist whose wealth was based on certain
"lucky" transactions in the mine-fields of Montana.

     But Gatsby was, in some basic way, made of finer stuff than his "mentor";
a romanticist even as a youth, he had remained apart from the worst
dissipation, and indeed had at this time acquired a dislike for liquor which
was to last all his life.

The Buchanans At Gatsby's Party:

     The guests at the party contribute to the effect we have already
discussed: a kind of kaleidoscope of insubstantial "fun" and meaningless
charm, together with a hint - and perhaps more than a hint-of nightmare or
vacuum beneath all the colored lights and "perfect" moon.

     Fitzgerald, all through this scene, introduces images which serve to
reinforce the lack of substance in the Gatsby-Daisy relationship, and so
delicately does he combine fragile "beauty" with absurd pomp, that the
result is an indirect definition-or redefinition-of character.

Imagery Of Gesture:

     For Daisy Buchanan, indeed, emotion itself is a matter of "gesture", and
anything too real is likely to prove "offensive" in more ways than one.

The Basis Of The Gatsby-Daisy "Love":

     Daisy, in short, is "in love" less with Jay Gatsby the man, than with
Jay Gatsby the "Knight Errant"; one might say that she loves the gesture
which Gatsby has made, the "romance" of unrequited love and noble devotion.
This attitude, of course, is itself a paradox, for in loving the gesture of
Gatsby, Daisy must-inevitably-find the romance of the gesture dissolving if
she ever gives herself to him in the flesh. That flesh is precisely what she
does not want, is a basic irony of the book.

     Gatsby himself, furthermore has no less difficulty in "loving Daisy
as a woman. So completely has she been for him an ideal, a Holy Cause, that
to accept her for a woman with a real life and a real past-a past complete
with a husband and a child-is no longer possible. In a basic sense, Gatsby
has not only idealized reality, but has replaced reality with the Ideal.

     Gatsby's insistence that one can indeed "repeat the past" is an important
clue to his essential adolescence - an adolescence which he has never
outgrown. For Gatsby no less than for Myrtle Wilson or Tom Buchanan it is "I
want" that must serve as a theme for living; the difference between them is
that what Gatsby "wants" is based on illusion, on ideal, while Buchanan or
Myrtle recognizes no ideal at all.

     Gatsby, at any rate, does not "want" Daisy as she exists; he wants his
Golden Girl, his Golden Dream of five years before. That this Dream has
actually lived with another man for five years, and - even more intolerable -
had actually borne a child by him - has no part in his vision. One cannot,
after all, imagine a "dream girl" in a state of pregnancy. Gatsby, again , has
devoted all his "magic" to an image which no longer exists; he is indeed
watching over "nothing" - and this defines both the purity of his romanticism,
and the pathos of his innocence.

Chapter VII

Daisy's Little Girl:

     The little girl's appearance is itself a finely wrought irony. For
Daisy's relationship to her child is hardly that of a mother to a daughter;
the role of Pammy in Daisy's life is all too obviously that of a "darling"
little toy - a toy to be "played with" and removed by the hired help when its
presence is no longer convenient. "You dream, you" cries Daisy to the little
girl, and for Daisy Buchanan her child is indeed a "dream" - a mere shape or
decorative object in her life, the echo rather than substance of emotion.

     Daisy's emotions, of course, are completely superficial; indeed, her
very praise of Gatsby (that he looks like a man in an advertisement!) defines
the nature of her "emotion" - or rather, her infatuation with the entire
gesture of "having" a love-affair.

A Voice Full Of Money:

     Daisy, of course, has been rather indiscreet; in the world of impulse,
however, caution is itself vulgar, and Daisy is simply too much of a child
to control her delight in her enchanting new plaything: Jay Gatsby himself.

     The voice of Daisy Buchanan, says Gatsby in one of the most important
sentences of the novel, is a voice "full of money." And we immediately
perceive the truth of this comment-the key to all the "magic" of Daisy
Buchanan.

     It is all a fairy-story, a parody of some child's tale of enchantment
grown more ruthless - and more dangerous-because of the absurd misdirection
of power which resides in wealth itself. And if Daisy Buchanan is "the king's
daughter" of some real-life myth, Gatsby is for Daisy the Enchanted Prince
of some real-life epic; when crisis intrudes, and demonstrates all too
clearly that the Princess is a creature of flesh, and that the Prince is
neither royal nor enchanted, all the dreams must-inevitably-go smash.

Two Cuckolds:

     Where Wilson is deeply hurt, however, almost physically ill because
of his wife's betrayal, Tom Buchanan is merely angry, furious, like an
overgrown infant deprived of "his" property. This is a vital difference
between the two men, and is a basic reason why Tom will ultimately survive.

     Wilson's "weakness" is precisely the fact that he loves his wife too
deeply; for Tom Buchanan, on the other hand, "love" is itself a matter of ego
and appetite, and if he is furious that Gatsby has engaged the affections of
his wife, he is no less angry that Wilson is planning to deprive him of a
mistress. It is men like Wilson and Gatsby-men defined by emotion or
Ideals-who are ultimately destroyed; in the Wasteland of modern America, it
is the flesh-ridden "realists" like Tom Buchanan who accommodate - and
survive.

The Rivals:

     This is not to say, however, that Tom does not care for Daisy-or, for
that matter, for Myrtle Wilson. It is, rather, that his love is on a different
level; incapable of loving (or hating) an Ideal, his very emotions are in a
basic sense pragmatic: that is, realistic. Unlike Gatsby, who tries to
recreate the world according to a dream, and unlike George Wilson, who is
ruled by his emotions, Tom is rich enough, and "simple minded" enough-to
hold only those ideals which are useful to his own position in life, and to
ruthlessly eliminati any emotion which becomes a threat rather than a
pleasure.

The Source Of Gatsby's "Gold":

     The pathos is that while Tom has the "goods" on Gatsby, he has not really
described him at all-for everything that Gatsby did, he did for the sake of
his Golden Girl, his Dream of Purity and Enchantment: Daisy herself.

The End Of A Dream:

     The paradox is one which lies at the very heart of American culture: in
attempting to achieve a Golden Dream of Idealistic Beauty through the only
means available to him, Gatsby represents a world in which means have become
totally subordinate to ends, where "success" is the only moral reality, and
where the end itself-the Dream-is by this very fact reduced to a parody of
any "purpose" whatsoever.

     That Gatsby's Dream is itself a pathetic illusion, is dramatized by the
reaction of Daisy Buchanan-who suddenly finds that her Fabled Lover, her
long lost Prince Charming, far from being "above" the sordid reality of the
world, has spun his "enchantment" from the most sordid and most vulgar element
of the reality itself. And so Daisy Buchanan "withdraws" from Gatsby,
withdraws from the sudden smash of her romantic infatuation like a sorority
girl in white lace avoiding a puddle of grease. Everything is over;
everything, indeed, is "dead."

The Death Of Myrtle:

     The scene is a vitally important one, for two reasons: first, it
demonstrates that for all of Daisy's love of "romance" she is actually far
closer to the brutal selfishness of Tom Buchanan-the selfishness and
carelessness of the very rich than she is to the Idealism of Jay Gatsby.

     The second point of major significance in the scene is the fact that
while Daisy and Tom draw closer together-while they "conspire" to destroy
Gatsby himself-Jay Gatsby remains under the fatal illusion that Daisy is
still "his" girl, his Fairy Princess. And this illusion-as foolish as it is,
and as pathetic as it is-once again defines the paradox of Jay Gatsby both
as a man and as symbol. For it is Gatsby the bootlegger, the man who has
literally sacrificed his entire life to the pursuit of an ideal, and who has
made of material acquisition a shrine for the worship of that ideal, who is
ultimately the one who gives rather than takes.

     All of Gatsby's vulgarity, in other words, all of his "materialism" and
single-minded pursuit of wealth, has been, in a very basic sense, founded upon
his willingness to sacrifice himself for that in which he believes: the Ideal
Beauty to be achieved through work, and effort, and purity of devotion. It is
Tom Buchanan and Daisy who, completely without ideals or any spiritual
dimension, simply "retreat into their money" at any eruption of crisis.

     Such is the nature of Gatsby's purity, that the "something" in him which
Nick perceives as spiritual rather than material, leads him to self-sacrifice
rather than to self-protection; all that he has done-all the evil that he
has perpetuated-has been done not for himself, but for others-for the
sanctification of his Dream. And this, of course, is a paradox not only of
Gatsby, but-as we have indicated-f what sociologists and critics have
termed "The American Dream" - a kind of materialism devoted to spiritual
values.

A Waste Of Power:

     That Gatsby's spiritual value-his Ideal Cause-is the amoral sentiment
and the random impulse of Daisy Buchanan, is itself the deepest horror of his
situation. And this situation, again, is grounded not in "evil," but rather is
wasted goodness: the goodness of devotion, in almost religious terms, to a
"Goddess" made of tinfoil and rotten gumdrops. This theme of waste-a waste of
devotion, a waste of human resources, a waste of ambition-is basic to The
Great Gatsby as a novel. It is also a basic theme of the work of Fitzgerald
and of other American writers as well. From Henry James to John Steinbeck,
from Mark Twain to Sinclair Lewis, American writers have been obsessed with
the image of America as a power for good somehow diverted into an instrument
of the false and the trivial.

     Just so does Jay Gatsby, the pathetic, the vulgar, and yet - in some way
- noble "knight errant," mobilize his own resources to "protect" his ideal:
Daisy Buchanan. And it is for this reason that Nick Carroway remarks, while
Gatsby "watches" over the Buchanan house (where, unknown to him, Daisy and her
husband are "conspiring" for his destruction), that Gatsby is watching over
"nothing" - a nothingness which is indeed the essence of the dream of Jay
Gatsby, and perhaps the dream of American "Success" as well.

Chapter VIII

Flashback To A Holy Grail:

     But something unexpected happened: instead of taking Daisy and forgetting
her, he had found that she became, for him, a total definition of value -
self-value no less than ego-value. He had begun to love Daisy like a man
"committed . . . to the following of a grail": and from that moment Jay Gatsby
conceived of the mysterious world of wealth as itself a magical ideal of
perfection and purity.

Nick's Judgment Of Gatsby:

     As Nick says good-bye to Gatsby, he senses the core of idealism at the
heart of his vulgar ostentation and indeed remarks on the "incorruptible
dream" shaping the nature of Gatsby's material corruption.

     In the final analysis it is Jay Gatsby who tried to keep some sort of
spiritual value alive in the moral "ashheap" ruled by the Buchanans.

The Death Of Gatsby:

     Gatsby's death, like his life, is the product of an illusion; Wilson's
death, like his life, is the product of misplaced faith and a love which-in
the Wasteland-can achieve no greater dignity than hysteria.

Chapter IX

Final Eulogy:

     The last chapter of The Great Gatsby actually serves as an epilogue, a
final comment on the futility and emptiness of all that James Gatz-the
dreaming Minnesota adolescent-had "succeeded" in accomplishing.

     It is Gatsby's father, however-a bedraggled little man from a little
town in Minnesota-who provides the final note of pathos. In New York for
Gatsby's funeral, Henry C. Gatz sadly tells Nick that his son could have been
"a great man." And indeed he could-given a different purpose to his life, or
rather, given a world where dreams need not be confused with reality, and
where material acquisition and material display need not be elevated into some
sort of pseudo-spiritual "happiness."

Gatsby As Symbol:

     For the central truth about Jay Gatsby was that he was a knight-errant
devoting himself to a pilgrimage in which the only "Jerusalem" is the moral
and spiritual vacuum represented by Daisy Buchanan; he was, indeed, a Sir
Lancelot of epic resources, faced with a world in which the Holy Grail had
been reduced to a blinking neon light.

The "American Dream" Wasted:

     Self protection, like self-indulgence, is the only absolute commandment
which the Buchanans, kings and inhabitants of the Wasteland, can possibly
recognize. "Careless" with the power that comes with wealth; completely
self-centered with the total egotism of moral primitives, people like Daisy
and Tom "smashed things up...and let other people clean up the mess they had
made."

Retreat To The Past:

     Ultimately, it is the "capacity for wonder" and devotion to an ideal
which had made America great; and it is the loss of this "wonder," and the
degradation of the ideal, which had turned the "green land" to the ashheaps of
Doctor Eckleburg. Nick understands all too well that the story of Jay Gatsby
represents far more than the fate of a poor boy who had tried to get enough
money to marry his "true love." For the story of Gatsby is also the story of
wonder, and power, and devotion, turned into instruments of a machine of false
values, a machine which first spawns and then eats its own children, and
exists for no other purpose than its own digestion.

     Such is the world which had destroyed "Jay Gatsby" - a senseless
arrangement of vulgar appetites in which motion has replaced direction,
impulse has replaced moral choice, and "love" has become little more than a
process of mutual cannibalism. And the tragedy of the book is that Nick's
return to the Mid-west is, in a profound sense, less a hope for America's
future, than a retreat into America's past.