When we find ourselves dissatisfied with the condition of our lives many of us will sometimes engage in a bit of harmless fantasy, imagining our situation to be a little better than it actually is; perhaps we also then take the actions we think necessary to achieve our dreams and goals. However, it is the unhealthy extremes of this basic human quality which are illustrated in the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, a complex tale about the decadent lives of the rich during the Roaring Twenties. One of the most important elements of this novel was that of self- reation and a mistaken concept of control.
In order to make enlightened decisions about our lives and how to better ourselves, a certain sense of our being is required. How do the members of such a rootless, mobile, indifferent society acquire a sense of who they are? Most of them don’t. The novel presents large numbers of them as comic, disembodied names of guests at dinner parties: the Chromes, the Backhyssons, and the Dennickers. Some, of course, have some measure of fame, but even Jordan Baker’s reputation does not do much for her other than get her entre to more parties.
Gatsby himself has no concept f who he is beyond his colossal wealth, but we are the only one, other than the omnipresent Nick Carraway, aware of this stark fact. Gatsby is pathetically eager to present himself to high society (read: Daisy) as something solidly real in their guilded world and eager to secure a place of significance in this social milieu. However, with whom or what do we lay fault with? Are these people the victims of a corrupted world filled with spiritual dissolution or its creators?
Perhaps in the almost fanatical quest for the American Dream of wealth and the finer things of life, something much greater was sacrificed. The concern here is with the corruption of values and the decline of spiritual life – a condition which is ultimately related to the American Dream. The novel recalls the early idealism of the first settlers. Fitzgerald himself relates Gatsby’s dream to that of the early Americans for, at the end of the novel, Nick recalls the former Dutch sailors and compares their sense of wonder with Gatsby’s infatigable sense of hope.
All of the characters whose very being is wrapped up in wealth, or the accumulation of it, have lost their spiritual purpose as material success wiped out spiritual goals. Gatsby, for instance, thinks of nothing more han his single minded purpose of becoming someone ! worthy, financially, of Daisy. The lives of the Buchanans, furthermore, filled with material comforts and luxuries, and empty of purpose, represent this condition as well. Daisy’s lament is especially indicative of this: What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? ‘… nd the day after that, and the next thirty years? ‘ It is my belief at least that in worlds completely of our own creation, which we endeavor to fabricate from whole cloth, there can be no real meaning and that we are doomed to failure with all we contrived lying broken around ur feet. Daisy and Toms existence was not so much a self creation of an entire domain as was the creation of a protective cocoon to separate themselves from the real world of ashes, squalor, poverty, and death. Gatsby, on the other hand, “sprang from his own Platonic conception of himself”.
He was god, lord, and creator of every aspect of his world and being from beginning to end. When one’s sense of self, indeed ones very being, is self-created and one is present at one’s own creation, so to speak, a paradoxical position exists. In Gatsbys case, he nows everything about himself that can be known, and yet the significance of such knowledge is unclear, for no outside contexts exist to create meaning. The result is that a self-created man turns to the past, for that is something certain, something he can know because indeed it is an inescapable context.
For Gatsby and for the novel, the past is crucial. One wouldnt be going out on a limb to state that perhaps the Great Gatsby has developed a God complex, but then who wouldnt in his case? To Gatsby, if he can breathe life into a fantasy and convince others (or so he would like to think) that it is as real as anything else, if he can create imself as the person he always wanted to be and create and control every aspect of his world and himself, then why shouldnt he be able to control the events and people around him and even time itself?
For example, in one of Nicks few acts of intervention, he comments to Gatsby that he cant relive the past in the present situation. To which, in unaffected surprise, Gatsby protests that of course you can go back; when you are god of your world you believe that nothing is beyond your control. Yet his protesting, however, shows that perhaps e senses the impossibility of returning in the back of his mind and makes at once more poignant and more desperate his effort to win Daisy a poignancy further increased by the futility of his money in achieving this end. I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see. ” He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was His sense of the past as something that he not only knows but also thinks he can control sets Gatsby apart from Nick and gives him mythical, larger-than-life dimensions.
When he tells Nick that “‘of course”‘ the past can be repeated or that Tom’s love for Daisy was “‘just personal”‘, he may be compensating for his inability to recapture Daisy; but he must believe these things because the post-war world in which he, Gatsby, lives is meaningless and almost wholly loveless. A glance at the relationships in The Great Gatsby proves this latter point. Daisy and Tom’s marriage has gone dead; hey must cover their dissatisfactions with the distractions of the idle rich which include sometimes descending from on high to play with the lives of the common.
Tom for instance, considers Myrtle no more significant than the chattel in his stables. Daisy uses Gatsby as a means of escape from her desolate marriage and to another time; perhaps also as a means of vindictive retribution against Tom for his liaison. Fitzgerald stresses the need for hope and dreams to give meaning and purpose to man’s efforts. Striving towards some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvement, a sense of his own identity. Certainly, Gatsby, with ‘his extraordinary gift of hope’, set against the empty existence of Tom and Daisy, seems to achieve a heroic greatness.
Fitzgerald goes on to state that the failure of hopes and dreams, the failure of the American Dream itself, is unavoidable, not only because reality cannot keep up with ideals, but also because the ideals are in any case usually too fantastic to be realized. The heroic presentation of Gatsby, therefore, should not be taken at face value, for we cannot overlook the fact that Gatsby is naive, impractical and oversentimental. It is this which makes him attempt the impossible, to repeat the past. There is something pitiful and absurd about the way he refuses to grow up.
Aspiring to better our condition is something we all do but in The Great Gatsby, we see that attempts to change ourselves, our station, our condition, without the sacrifices made to achieve those rewards is an ill-fated folly. One cannot expect to leap-frog into a position we have not earned from sacrifice. One example, is Myrtles attempt to break into the life of luxury to which the Buchannans belong. Through her affair with Tom she attempts desperately to put on the finer airs of the rich, but only succeeds in becoming vulgar and corrupt (not unlike Tom). She scorns people from her own class and loses all sense of morality.
Yet for all her social ambition, Myrtle never succeeds in her attempt to find a place for herself in a world she never belonged to. Myrtle’s condition, of course, is a weaker reflection of Gatsby’s more significant struggle. While Myrtle’s desire springs from social ambition, Gatsby’s is related more to his idealism, his faith in life’s possibilities. Undoubtedly, his desire is also influenced by social considerations; Daisy, who is wealthy and beautiful, represents a way of life hich is remote from Gatsby’s and therefore more attractive because it is out of reach.
However, social consciousness is not a basic cause. It merely directs and increases Gatsby’s belief in life’s possibilities. Like Myrtle, Gatsby struggles to fit himself into another social group, but his attempt is more urgent because his whole faith in life is involved in it. Failure, therefore, is more terrible for him. His whole career, his confidence in himself and in life is totally shattered when he fails to win Daisy. His death when it comes is almost insignificant, for, with the collapse of his dream, Gatsby is already spiritually dea!
