The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0125/01255.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 26KB | 451 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01255}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Character Analyses, Critical Commentary and Essay Questions}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Simon Fraser University}
$Subject{gatsby
fitzgerald
daisy
own
moral
american
literary
work
nick
buchanan}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book:        Great Gatsby, The
Author:      Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Critic:      Cooperman, Stanley
Affiliation: Department Of English, Simon Fraser University

Character Analyses, Critical Commentary and Essay Questions

Character Analyses

Nick Carroway:

     The narrator of the novel, Nick, represents the traditional moral codes
of America. Himself from the Midwest (which contrasts to the East of Long
Island and the world of the Buchanans), Nick is attracted by the beauty, the
wealth, and the sophistication of "The Wasteland" - but comes to understand
the essential emptiness, the gaudy display of "nothingness" which
characterizes the Wasteland itself. As the critic Arthur Mizener remarks, the
novel is, in a basic sense, Nick's story as well as Gatsby's, for it is Nick
who at last achieves a "gradual penetration of the charm and grace of Tom and
Daisy's world. What he penetrates to is corruption, grossness, and cowardice."

     It is Nick too who perceives the essential pathos of Jay Gatsby, the
romantic idealism which shapes his very materialism, and so sets him off
sharply from the gross and fleshly Tom Buchanan. Nick, indeed, who says that
he wishes the world "to stand at moral attention forever," understands that
Gatsby is motivated not by selfishness, but rather by devotion-devotion to an
ideal rendered false by the appetites and moral vacuum of the Wasteland. Alone
among all of Gatsby's "friends" (with the exception of the character called
"Owl-Eyes") to pay a final tribute to the pathetic bootlegger-Idealist, Nick
sees Gatsby as being a symbol of the American Dream gone sour, an "innocent"
destroyed by a corrupt world. And when Nick leaves the East, he does so with
the hope of finding some remnant of a moral and personal reality "back home."

Jay Gatsby:

     The "subject" of the novel, Jay Gatsby is a dramatic symbol of the
Idealism which makes of materialism itself a type of romantic expectation-a
uniquely American "non-material materialism." Gatsby, indeed, is a kind of
pathetic "Don Quixote" tilting at non-existent windmills and counting his silk
shirts as though they were rosaries; attempting to achieve a glow of vague
spiritual "enchantment" through material acquisition, Gatsby represents the
paradox - and the pathos - of spiritual values reduced to vulgarity and
futility in the moral Wasteland.

     The essential tragedy of Gatsby is, in a profound sense, the tragedy of
American Idealism itself: the waste of enormous energies, even self-sacrifice,
to self-illusion and (as Nick remarks) the service of a "vast, vulgar
meretricious beauty." Gatsby, furthermore, has no means to communicate his
Idealism, or fulfill it, aside from the false standards of the Buchanan world
itself.

     Perhaps the chief element in Gatsby's inevitable destruction is the fact
that his romanticism, his misplaced "faith" in material success (as a kind of
spiritual rite and proof of identity), is so intense, that he ultimately
believes that he can indeed recreate reality according to his heart's desire.
A "magician" in a world of sordid appetite and cowardice, Gatsby's "dream"
is-by the conditions of its own existence-doomed to failure. For he cannot
"regain" Daisy simply because he pursues her not really as a woman, but as an
Ideal. And as an Ideal, Daisy Buchanan - and all she represents - must vanish
like spiritual cotton-candy at the first eruption of crisis.

Tom Buchanan:

     The husband of Daisy and lover of the gross and fleshly Myrtle Wilson,
Tom is both ruler and representative of the moral Wasteland which has replaced
American Idealism. Tom is a creature of brute appetite and direct "action"
based on self-preservation and self-interest rather than any idealism
whatsoever. He is "strong" because in the moral Wasteland idealism itself is a
source of weakness rather than strength; devoted to nothing but the impulses
of his own flesh and the demands of his own ego, completely without any
concept of either a moral code or personal loyalty.

     For Tom and Daisy Buchanan there is no moral responsibility whatsoever;
they "retreat into their money" at any crisis, and "leave other people to
clean up the mess."

Daisy Buchanan:

     Gatsby's "Golden Girl," the dream and "Cause" of his wasted idealism,
Daisy falls into a familiar pattern of Fitzgerald women. These women are
lovely, delicate, and "romantic" - but essentially parasitic, and emotionally
frigid despite (or because of) their sentimentality. Critics, indeed, have
noted that Fitzgerald's attitude toward women is very ambivalent; perhaps
because of his traumatic experience with Zelda, he combined an extremely
romantic "worship" of them (much like Gatsby's) with an equally extreme
distrust of them-a distrust which approaches actual fear.

     Arthur Mizener, for example, notes that Fitzgerald "never loved merely
the particular woman; what he loved was her embodiment for him of all the
splendid possibilities of life he could, in his romantic hopefulness,
imagine." On the other hand, a critic like Charles E. Shain notes the
procession of "mercenary" and "fatally irresponsible" women in Fitzgerald's
work-women who are "as dangerous to men as classical sorceresses." So too
William Goldhurst notes that Fitzgerald imaged the American woman as
"physically attractive," but having a "destructive influence on the man with
whom she is associated."

     Daisy Buchanan, motivated by weakness rather than passion, and by
sentiment rather than emotion, is simply impelled by any force ready to
determine her direction, and to protect her from either emotional discomfort
or emotional commitment. The basic fact of Daisy is her lack of substance, and
The Great Gatsby is filled with images which reinforce this emptiness, images
which follow Daisy Buchanan through Fitzgerald's pages like the gossamer cloth
"floating" around her face. Loyal only to sentiment and the gesture of love,
she deserts Gatsby at the eruption of crisis like a sorority girl in white
lace avoiding a puddle of grease.

Jordan Baker:

     Jordan is no less a creature of the moral Wasteland than is Daisy or Tom
Buchanan. A "lovely" girl who (like Daisy) dresses in "white" and always seems
to be "cool," Jordan is an opportunist in her own way. Nick is attracted to
her, but ultimately breaks with her because he sees in Jordan that same
ability for irresponsible exploitation that he sees in Daisy and Tom.

Myrtle Wilson:

     Myrtle is one of the "users" of the Wasteland-just as her husband is one
of the used. A creature of impulse (she met Tom on a train and just "had" to
have him), she is blood-rich and full, loud and sentimental-with ludicrous
mannerisms of borrowed "refinement." Myrtle too is a kind of parasite on the
misplaced idealism of George Wilson, who appears and reappears in the novel
like a man being slowly eaten by a vampire. It is symbolically fitting that
Myrtle Wilson dies as she had lived: violently, with a gush of blood, killed
by a car driven by Daisy Buchanan.

George Wilson:

     Myrtle's husband, a hapless shadow of what once had been a handsome man,
George-like Gatsby himself-is destroyed by the fact that he holds to ideals
of honor, and actually loves his wife. In the moral Wasteland, those with
ideals and those who truly love are alike vulnerable, and it is ironically apt
that it is George Wilson who shoots Gatsby before taking his own life. Like
Gatsby, Wilson is, in his own way, a romanticist.

Meyer Wolfsheim:

     Wolfsheim is a memorable figure, and his very "sentiment" creates a kind
of absurd horror-like modern "syndicate" gangsters who are "nice" citizens in
their own community, and