If The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

If the Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a morality tale, then its lesson is beyond comprehension. As noted on the blurb on the back cover, the book does take place at the height of the 1920s, a time when ‘gin was the national drink, and sex the national obsession”. And yet, for the purposes of the novel, this is a superficial assessment of the Jazz Age, or else what Fitzgerald really meant to say about the Jazz Age. While much can be said of Gatsby’s decadence, and his gaudiness, and the extravagance of his parties, this is never the center of Nick’s commentary over the course of the narrative. In the aftermath of Gatsby’s death and the overall tragedy of the novel, our narrator never proposes that things could have gone any differently,
The strangest part of his desire for uniformity, and ‘moral attention’, is that he also exempts Gatsby from all blame, even while he “represented everything for which I [Nick] have an unaffected scorn” (p. 2). He says of Gatsby, again at the start: “...there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life… It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness... No-- Gatsby was alright at the end…” (p. 2). His feelings for Gatsby are otherwise difficult to parse through, but, as long as we further realize and define the content of this passage, then what he admires in Gatsby, and Nick’s own sense of tragedy becomes clear. Nick, if anything, lacks a sense of hope, and clearly has some belief that his life lacks ‘promise’; hope and promise are meanwhile Gatsby’s only virtues. Nick often does find Gatsby ridiculous: for instance, when Gatsby tells Nick of his mostly false life story, Nick remarks “With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except of a turban character leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne”. This passage might even reflect flagrant disdain for much of who Gatsby really shows himself to be; but we cannot dismiss the quality of ‘romantic readiness’ which Nick spoke of earlier. In chapter six, Nick further elaborates on what he judges to
Elliot. The Waste land is a highly modernistic and elaborate poem, but, at base, it contains a similar sentiment to Fitzgerald’s novel: that modern life has reduced man to live in a sort of spiritual wasteland. In the first section of the poem, the primary voice announces “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”; and dust is a the very particular word that we find in the Great Gatsby as well: ‘the foul dust’ of the preamble. Taking it further, the description of the valley of ashes in chapter two, and of El Greco’s portrait of the West Egg in chapter nine-- these both speak of a sort of death that rises from the ground and buildings onto the people, without their say in the matter. [It wouldn’t be surprising to note that Elliot gave Fitzgerald his strongest mark of approval, after reading the Great Gatsby]. It’s true that Eliot and Fitzgerald were speaking to their own post-war generation of the ‘roaring twenties’; but the Great Gatsby is not just the novel it’s often said to be, the one that intends to represent about its isolated period in time, the twenties; it gets a bit broader than its decade in