Bloom’s GUIDES F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby CURRENTLY AVAILABLE The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn All the Pretty Horses Animal Farm Beloved Brave New World The Chosen The Crucible Cry, the Beloved Country Death of a Salesman The Grapes of Wrath Great Expectations The Great Gatsby Hamlet The Handmaid’s Tale The House on Mango Street I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Iliad Lord of the Flies Macbeth Maggie: A Girl of the Streets The Member of the Wedding Of Mice and Men 1984 One Hundred Years of Solitude Pride and Prejudice Ragtime Romeo and Juliet The Scarlet Letter Snow Falling on Cedars A Streetcar Named Desire The Things They Carried To Kill a Mockingbird Bloom’s GUIDES F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby Edited & with an Introduction by Harold Bloom Bloom’s Guides: The Great Gatsby Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2006 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. 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Contents Introduction 7 Biographical Sketch 10 The Story Behind the Story 15 List of Characters 18 Summary and Analysis 20 Critical Views 76 G. Thomas Tanselle and Jackson R. Bryer Consider Fitzgerald’s Early Reputation 76 Matthew J. Bruccoli Looks at Fitzgerald’s Maturation as Reflected in the Novel 78 Dan Seiters on Imagery and Symbolism in The Great Gatsby 81 John F. Callahan on Fitzgerald’s Use of American Iconography 97 Milton R. Stern on the American Dream and Fitzgerald’s Romantic Excesses 102 James E. Miller, Jr. Discusses Stylistic Approach to First Person 108 James E. Miller, Jr. on the Meaning of the Novel 111 Scott Donaldson on Gatsby and the Historical Antecedents for Gatsby 114 Joyce A. Rowe on Gatsby’s Relationship with Nick 119 James L.W. West III on the Original Title’s Significance to Theme 121 Scott Donaldson on Possessions and Character in The Great Gatsby 122 Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald 130 Annotated Bibliography 131 Contributors 135 Acknowledgments 138 Index 140 Introduction HAROLD BLOOM The Great Gatsby has only a few rivals as the great American novel of the twentieth century; doubtless they would include works by Faulkner, Hemingway, Cather, and Dreiser. Formal shaping is one of the many aesthetic virtues of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork: style, characterization, and plot are all superbly balanced to achieve a highly unified end. Rereading the book, yet once more, my initial and prime reaction is pleasure renewed; it is as though The Great Gatsby’s freshness never can wear off. Though it is regarded as the classic of what Fitzgerald himself permanently named the Jazz Age, the novel is anything but a “period piece.” Even after many decades, the relevance of The Great Gatsby increases, because it is the definitive romance of the American dream, a concept or vision that haunts our society. Critics differ as to whether the theme of the novel is “the withering of the American dream,” as Marius Bewley argued, or else a celebration of a Romantic hope in America despite all the ugly realities. Fitzgerald himself, as much a High Romantic as his favorite poet, John Keats, was too great an artist not to entertain both possibilities. In one register, The Great Gatsby is a companion work to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a desolate vision of a world without faith or order. And yet, in a finer tone, the novel keeps faith with Jay Gatsby’s dream of a perfect love, of a fulfillment that transcends the absurdity of Daisy, who in herself is hardly a fit representative of Gatsby’s idealized yearnings. Bewley shrewdly sees Fitzgerald’s involvement in Gatsby’s aspirations, but again Bewley argues that Gatsby’s death is also a spiritual failure. A reader can be legitimately uncertain as to exactly how Gatsby ought to be apprehended. Much depends upon how much the reader places himself under the control of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. By mediating Gatsby for us, precisely in the way that Joseph Conrad’s Marlow mediates 7 Jim in Lord Jim or Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Carraway’s consciousness dominates the novel, and Carraway is no more Fitzgerald than Marlow is Conrad. Marlow’s Romanticism is echoed by Carraway’s, though Marlow rarely gets in the way of the story’s progress, while Carraway frequently does. It is not clear how Fitzgerald wished us to regard Carraway’s sometimes less than subtle ironies, but I suspect that they are devices for distancing the novelist from his fictive narrator. Carraway is a very decent fellow, but he does not transcend the fashions of his time and place, as Fitzgerald does. This limitation is one of Carraway’s ultimate strengths, because it allows him his own dream of Jay Gatsby as the Romantic hero of the American experience. Fitzgerald, like Conrad before him, regards the deep self as unknowable; Carraway in contrast finds in Gatsby “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” The English critic Malcolm Bradbury memorably termed Gatsby “a coarse Platonist” yet any Platonist ultimately is not a materialist. Since Gatsby’s dream of love depends upon an alchemy that metamorphoses wealth into eros, we can be reminded of Emerson’s wonderful irony: “Money, in some of its effects, is as beautiful as roses.” Gatsby’s greatest strength is a “Platonic conception of himself,” which gives him the hope that he can roll back time, that he and the unlikely Daisy can somehow be as Adam and Eve early in the morning. Despite the absurd distance of this dream from reality, Gatsby never yields up his hope. That refusal to surrender to reality kills him, yet it also gives him his peculiar greatness, justifying the book’s title as being more than an irony. Gatsby’s refusal of history is profoundly Emersonian, though doubtless Gatsby had never heard of Emerson. Edith Wharton told Fitzgerald in a letter that “to make Gatsby really great, you ought to have given us his early career.” Perhaps, but that is to forget that we know only Carraway’s Gatsby, the finished product of an American quest, and a figure curiously beyond Judgment. Actually Fitzgerald had written what we now know as the short story “Absolution” to serve as a picture of Gatsby’s early life, but he decided to omit it from the novel so as to preserve some sense of mystery about his hero. 8 Mystery certainly remains: Gatsby’s death, though squalid, transfigures him in the reader’s imagination. The dreamer dies so that an image, however grotesque, of the American dream can continue to live. It is not possible that Gatsby dies as a vicarious atonement for the reader, and yet that may be Gatsby’s function in regard to Carraway. Nick goes west at the book’s conclusion still sustained by the Idealism of Gatsby’s effect upon him. It is one of Fitzgerald’s oddest triumphs that we accept his vision of Gatsby’s permanent innocence; the gross reality of Daisy’s love for her brutal husband, Tom Buchanan, is dismissed by Gatsby as merely “personal” and as something that can be canceled by a simple denial. We come to understand that Gatsby is in love neither with Daisy nor with love itself, but rather with a moment out of time that he persuades himself he shared with Daisy. Gangster and dreamer, Gatsby is more of an inarticulate American poet than he is an episode in the later history of American transcendentalism. Since Fitzgerald is so superbly articulate a writer, Carraway again is necessary as a mediator between the author and his tragic hero. Gatsby’s vitalism, his wonderful capacity for hope, is enhanced when Fitzgerald compares him to the endlessly recalcitrant Carraway, whose non-relationship with Jordan Baker heightens our sense of the sexual ambiguity of both characters. What moves Carraway about Gatsby is the image of generosity, of having given oneself away to a dream. Fitzgerald makes us suspect that Gatsby, unlike Carraway, is not deceived altogether by his own dreaming. However inarticulate his own poetic vision is, Gatsby seems to grasp that Daisy indeed is his fiction. To believe in your own fiction, while knowing it to be a fiction, is the nicer knowledge of belief, according to Wallace Stevens, who was not being ironic. Gatsby also transcends the ironies of his own story, and so earns his greatness. 9