Good morning, Hank; it's Wednesday, September
7th. Today, I'm going to introduce you to everything
I find interesting about The Great Gatsby without massive spoilers. It's going to take
a few minutes, but I'm going to go as quickly as I can because life is fleeting... is one
of the themes of The Great Gatsby. So, right at the beginning of the second chapter
of Gatsby, we get two of the great metaphors in American literature. First: the Valley
of Ashes. The narrator, Nick, writes about this huge valley of ashes outside of Manhattan.
This was real, and in 1922 there was this, like, ever-growing depository of the burned
waste of people who lived in and around New York. And in the novel, George Wilson, this
gas-station owner, lives in the Valley of Ashes with his wife, Myrtle, with whom Tom
Buchanan is having an affair. Anyone who's even read five pages of the Great
Gatsby will no doubt remember Tom Buchanan as one of the worlds least likable people.
Yeah, so right there in the Valley of Ashes there are also the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg,
whose irises are like one yard high. They're just these disembodied, unblinking eyes that
see everything below them. Like, they don't have arms to catch you or legs to chase you
down; they can't punish you or kill you, but Dr. T.J. Eckleburg's eyes see everything.
But more of that in a minute. So Tom and his mistress and her sister and
Nick and this random other couple end up in an apartment in New York, just getting drunk
and utilizing servants and creating more ashes for the valley and generally having, like,
the worst time ever. One of the crazy things about The Great Gatsby
is there's always some debaucherous party going on, and no one is ever having any fun.
Like, everybody in that room just wants more money and more class, and they wanna, like,
find a way to get a better life, except for Tom Buchanan who has what they all want except
that Tom Buchanan is, like, an unbearable ass-face. Tom Buchanan makes Paris Hilton
look like charming and grounded. And that's one of the criticisms you hear
about The Great Gatsby: that no one in the book is likable. I don't think that's fair
to Gatsby, or to Nick and to a certain extent I don't think it's fair to Daisy, but more
importantly I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed
to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likable characters with
whom you can have some simple identification. Books are in the business of creating great
stories that make your brain go all like ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr. Sorry, I spend all my time with a baby. Right, so shortly after that horrible party,
we go to an awesome party at Gatsby's house. I mean, there's still a lot of stuff being
created for the Valley of Ashes, but at least Gatsby's party has Gatsby, and even though
Gatsby has this incredibly annoying habit of saying "old sport" all the time as a way
of trying to sound upper-crusty, he's a pretty charming guy: he has a smile that makes you
feel that he is "irresistibly prejudiced in your favor." To quote Nick. But the one thing we know about Gatsby for
much of the book is that no one knows anything about him. Like, there's talk that he might
be a bootlegger or a killer or own a chain of drug stores; no one really seems to know
even though everyone's at his party, drinking his booze, running around his mansion. I should mention that the first party at Gatsby's
house also contains the greatest drunk driving scene in the history of American literature
in which a drunk guy gets in an accident like three seconds after getting in his car, and
even though the wheel has fallen off the car, he keeps trying to drive it. And I think,
at least in the novel, that had become the American Dream by the 1920s. The dream was
to, you know, have a leisurely and debaucherous life where you had enough money to buy fancy
new cars and enough whisky to crash them. But we learn pretty quickly that Gatsby isn't
like the people who go to his parties. He hasn't acquired, like, wealth and social status
so that he can enjoy them; he doesn't drink; and, as he repeatedly points out to Nick,
he's never even used his own pool. He's worked to get this money and build this social status
because he is in love with a woman who lives across the bay, whose dock has a green light
at the end of it. And that woman is Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan's wife. Daisy and Gatsby had fallen in love years
before, but then Gatsby went off to war and she got married and now she lives across the
bay and the green light and he just wants to reach it. So he asks Nick to manufacture
a reunion. All right, and at that reunion everything is yellow. Like, Gatsby's car is
yellow, and Gatsby's tie is yellow, and Daisy Buchanan's dress buttons are yellow. At one
point Nick — who's third-wheeling it big-time at this reunion — describes the smell of
flowers as "pale gold." It's not an accident. In this very chapter Nick refers to the green
light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby's always looking out at and reaching for as
an "enchanted object." And that seems to be a reasonably good definition of symbolism.
Symbols are enchanted objects, and yellow or gold is an enchanted color in this novel.
But not just in this novel, but also, like, in our lives, like "golden opportunities,"
or a "golden age," or "golden youth." God knows the characters in this novel aren't
the first people to ever conflate wealth and beauty. But one of the interesting questions
in The Great Gatsby is whether Gatsby really loves Daisy or if he loves her because she's
golden, you know? Because, as he once famously says, her voice is "full of money." Gatsby
hasn't come by his money honestly. He has no class or family background. Tom Buchanan
calls him, "Mr. Nobody From Nowhere." And maybe Gatsby can never be Mr. Somebody From
Somewhere, but Daisy Buchanan would certainly help with her family connections and her legitimate
money. We see this too when the book flashes back
to the Midwest, when Gatsby and Daisy first fall in love. Is Gatsby falling in love with
Daisy or with her family's mansion? But regardless, before Daisy and Gatsby can run off into the
golden sunset, there is the small matter of her being married to Tom. And the fascinating thing is that by the novel's
climax, it's not enough to Gatsby that Daisy loves him. He needs Daisy to say, "I never
loved Tom. I only ever loved you." Because for Gatsby, it's not enough to get Daisy back.
He has to get the feeling he first had when they fell in love back, that feeling of purity
and innocence. He has to reclaim his past. And that dream- or more specifically the foul
dust that trails in the wake of it- is more than about two characters in a novel; it is
the American dream and the world's dream. There will never be enough money and fame
and love for us in this world because every time we get what we thought we wanted, we
realize that we want more because what we really want is to go back in time to some
place when we felt safe, some time before we discovered violence and corruption, when
we were happy and pure and innocent. We want to go to the Golden Age. But for Gatsby,
the relentless pursuit of that dream leads to only more violence and corruption until
there's this penultimate moment of violence that is witnessed by the eyes of Dr. T.J.
Eckleburg. And then Gatsby finally gets to use his pool. Hank, the last chapter of The Great Gatsby
is, to me, one of the saddest passages in American literature. It shows how muddied
innocence and guilt are, and it shows the vast and intractable unfairness of the society
that was supposedly founded on equality. At one point Nick recalls people who would
go to those great parties and sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor.
Let me submit to you that those of us who would sneer at Gatsby do so on the courage
of his liquor because we all share his ambition. We all believe in that green light that has
long eluded us, that if we can only, "run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And
then one fine morning--" And still the foul dust trails in the wake of those dreams. Hank, I have two non-rhetorical questions
for you today which we must discuss here in comments because Your Pants have been hacked:
First, to what extent do you think Gatsby is a hero? I mean I know he's the titular
character of the novel, but to what extent do you think that his quest is heroic? And
secondly, is your quest heroic? Hank, I'll see you on Friday.
