Appreciating The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is held in high regard throughout academia as a staple of American literature and writing. Renowned for its author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unique descriptions of the people inhabiting early 20th Century America when “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” For the last century this supposedly great American novel has been placed on a pedestal of great literature and used as an example of real, interesting, and delectably controversial writing.

            I would like to explore this novel’s supposed significance and possibly false admiration through the use of a delightfully negative article, “Against The Great Gatsby,” in which Gary Scrimgeour[1] discusses the novel with a rather pugnacious stance (from his introduction): “It is just good enough, just lyrical enough, just teachable-to-freshmen enough (and more than "American" enough) for unwary souls to call it a classic.”[2]

            Scrimgeour focuses on the description and attempted destruction of Fitzgerald’s characters; particularly Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby himself. Most people focus on Fitzgerald’s unique character descriptions and the all too real awkwardness of human interaction. Scrimgeour even goes to accuse Fitzgerald of the “inability to understand the true natures of the characters he has created”[3]; later elaborating on this and how it seems to harm Fitzgerald’s novel. I believe Scrimgeour would not oppose my reduction of his thoughts into the claim that morally undesirable characters harm or negate a novel and its goals.

Firstly, are Fitzgerald’s characters morally undesirable; or at the very least non beneficial as human role models? Furthering this, would undesirable characters harm a novel? One of my favorite descriptions Scrimgeour has is of Gatsby himself:

Gatsby is a boor, a roughneck, a fraud, a criminal. His taste is vulgar, his behavior ostentatious, his love adolescent, his business dealings ruthless and dishonest. He is interested in people—most notably in Carraway himself—only when he wants to use them. His nice gestures stem from the fact that, as one-character comments, " he doesn't want any trouble with anybody." Like other paranoiacs, he lives in a childish tissue of lies and is unaware of the existence of an independent reality in which other people have separate existences. What lifts him above ordinary viciousness is the magnitude of his ambition and the glamor of his illusion.[4]

            Jay Gatsby is one of my least favorite characters in the novel. As Scrimgeour states, Gatsby uses is a suspicious businessman consoled by his wealth and obsessions. Yet he is admired by audiences and Carraway himself due to the grandeur and frill of his “dreams” and elegant life. From assuring himself he has more money than others to befriending Nick to get to romantic fling of years past, Daisy, Gatsby is not quite the archetype of an upstanding human. He then pursues a married woman, unaware or more likely uncaring of how this affair affects her or anyone else. Scrimgeour states: “Like all romantic ideals, he (Gatsby) is what personally we would not be so foolish as to imitate but nonetheless admire for its grandeur.”[5] Concluding Gatsby’s immorality, he uses people to make himself feel better and get what he wants in an uncaring and lack of compassionate foresight way of events.

            Nick Carraway, our narrator, descriptor and vision shaper throughout the novel seems possibly worse than Gatsby. From his vanity and self-proclamations to his cause for and treatment of his romantic relationship, Carraway quickly becomes questionable and undesirable. I believe Carraway’s relationship with Jordan Baker is an often overlooked but revealing piece of evidence towards Nick’s undesirable qualities. He seems to have no real feelings for Jordan but continues to maintain some sort of affair with her because without her he would have no girl to occupy his mind such as Gatsby with Daisy and Tom Buchanan with his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. An example of Carraway’s thoughts is as follows:

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.[6]

This feeling of need for Jordan is imitating Gatsby and his need for Daisy; admiring and attempting to emulate a man due to his outlook on life and glamourous living. This carelessness is present in all the characters. Not only Carraway and Gatsby. Scrimgeour states:

(Carraway) is a moral eunuch, ineffectual in any real human situation that involves more than a reflex action determined by social pattern or the desire to avoid trouble with "anybody.” At one stage Carraway senses that something is wrong and suggests that Tom, Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, and he all " possessed some deficiency in common," but he fails to see that the deficiency is the hollowness in their moral natures that leaves them prey to self-deception and "carelessness."[7]

We see this ineffectual emotionlessness from Carraway later on in his final dealings with Jordan Baker (I will touch on this at a later point).

            With this evidence in mind, I will not be convinced that morally undesirable characters harm a novel. Scrimgeour claims that the weakness of Carraway’s character makes The Great Gatsby a much “blacker”[8] and “pessimistic”[9] novel. This made me only love Fitzgerald’s work more. My love stemming from my appreciation of awkward realism in literature. The characters in this novel are morally undesirable, yes, but real nonetheless. People in real life are going to be immoral and undesirable, and for a book to emulate this realistically still astounds me. There are novels with undesirable characters but these are almost always overdramatized and that’s the only dimension the character has. The Great Gatsby gives us a realistic view of calm immorality. This is what I believe is so common in the real world and thus to be represented so well in this novel only strengthens Fitzgerald’s work. Strip The Great Gatsby of its pomp descriptions and frilly romanticism and you are left with a bleak somber story of human obsession, dishonesty, and selfish carelessness. But this certainly does not harm a novel. If anything, one could worry about an audience hoping to emulate these characters but this would be an immature and foolish way of consuming literature.

We shouldn’t consume literature solely to imitate it. This would be particularly unwise and dangerous. We would be nothing more than the five-year-old watching Power Rangers then running around the house in bright colors kicking our sibling. While that sounds undeniably more fun than reading, we are not children and this literature is not to only consume and mirror. I believe literature calls us to partake in, learn from and be questioned by its contents to better our lives and minds. Some characters may have desirable qualities but this should merely be a call to moral contemplation instead of blind emulation.

Scrimgeour’s main battle is with Carraway’s unreliability. He mentions he may not be able to trust Carraway because that would require us to rely on simply a character’s written word[10]. Before I outright claim Carraway to be an unreliable narrator, I want to discuss what an unreliable narrator is; beginning with a helpful definition:

In terms of the narrator’s unreliable reporting of story elements, it is truly a clash that occurs between story and discourse; but as regards the narrator’s mis- or underinterpretion and evaluation of events and characters, it is rather between the narrator’s explicit discourse and the author’s implicit discourse that the clash be found.[11]

This distinction between the narrator and author’s discourse is what separates an unreliable narrator from others. In terms of The Great Gatsby, we are relayed information through Nick Carraway, yet we are led to believe that he may not be the most trustworthy of sources. From him simply sounding untrustworthy in his self-proclamations (“I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known”[12]) to a clear lack in moral judgment and action, a line is drawn throughout the novel between Carraway’s and Fitzgerald’s discourse. In more relative rhetorical terms to this essay, an unreliable narrator is a narrator we are unable to trust in reporting, interpreting and evaluating the events and problems within the story. Think of a really bad reporter. In our case, Carraway is not a “bad” reporter but one with biases, lapse in moral judgement and perhaps falsified self-confidence. My following discussion into this idea with rely on another written character’s observation of the narrator as well as the narrator himself and his values and morality we see represented.

Jordan Baker, sheds light on Carraway’s unreliability after he, rather unempathetically, “throws her over” or contemporarily, dumps her. I would also like to point out that Carraway’s disinterest in Jordan mirrors and subsequently follows Gatsby and Daisy’s ruined affair. Carraway again romanticizing and copying Gatsby or rather how he feels based on Gatsby. But to Carraway’s unreliability, Jordan accuses him of what the audience may now might have only realized. When Carraway and Jordan first started hanging out, Carraway noticed what a careless driver Jordan was. He of course points this out. Her terrifying reply is that it takes two to make an accident; therefore, as long as no one else is careless, why should she worry. But in their final conversation she reminds him of this. Yet admits she has finally met another “careless driver” in him. She confronts him saying:

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a bad guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."[13]

Here we have no reason to doubt Jordan’s reasoning. We are led to suspect Carraway as a trustworthy narrator.

Trusting another character may not be the best evidence so I draw your attention to Carraway’s love of Gatsby. In the first chapter Carraway describes Gatsby: “…there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…”[14] He obviously holds Gatsby in high esteem and continues to admire him through the novel. Again, his admiration stems from Gatsby’s life of grandeur and hopeful ecstasy. For this point I will recall my first point regarding morality. By now I hope you can bypass Carraway’s man-crush and see Gatsby’s immorality. Gatsby befriends Carraway to get to Daisy, he openly pursues a married woman (in front of her husband at one point), and then is at the very least a witness to involuntary manslaughter and simply goes about life. But my goal here is discussing Carraway’s unreliability. My point to bringing morality back into question is the fact that our narrator is so enamored by immorality. If one is seemingly blinded by childlike veneration, how can we trust him to relay information truthfully? I believe this harms Carraway’s reliability yes, but it does not harm the novel itself.

By not being able to trust his own claims about himself and his honesty, we can conclude that he is a morally undesirable character and more relevantly an unreliable narrator.

            But does an unreliable narrator harm a novel like Scrimgeour suggests? An unreliable narrator easily creates intrigue. That alone, if maintained could be enough to warrant the use of unreliable narrator. This way of perceiving the world requires further thought from the audience, immersing them further into the story. One goal of a writing is to engage an audience and keep them engaged as long as possible. By using an unreliable narrator, a novel invites speculation, mystery and possible frustration. If done well, the author invites curiosity and wonder, not boredom and confusion. An unreliable narrator attracts and keeps an audience as well as benefitting them due to required academic deciphering.

Further, I believe all that I have mentioned in this section is even more important due to the fact that an unreliable narrator is often an example closest to real life. Not only can an unreliable narrator make for an entertaining story, but it can teach and prepare our minds for reality. In the real world, we are often faced with questions like “Is that true?” or “Can I trust that?” And we have to decide our own answers to questions like these. This is a reduction of human life but this is exactly the approach to unreliable narrators. Our world and lives are filled with unreliable narrators, and we must decide whether to trust them or not, and to what degree. I mean that humans are more often than not unreliable narrators. Thus, requiring us to live life much like how we can read a novel with an unreliable narrator; listening with intrigue yet eventually deciding for ourselves with the information received. With unreliable narrators in literature, we are prompted to practice and contemplate real life, perhaps without even realizing it. An unreliable narrator requires beneficial academic thought as well as preparing an audience to interact with the real world.

To further explore unreliable narrators, I want to discuss authors William Faulkner and Shakespeare. Faulkner’s work The Sound and the Fury was published just four years after The Great Gatsby. It gives an example of an unreliable narrator, or four, written in the same time period. Shakespeare’s Hamlet being much older gives a classical and renowned example of the wondrously unreliable protagonist. From mental and developmental issues to prejudice, to possible insanity, these two works represent academically well received unreliable narrators.

The Sound and the Fury gives a glimpse into the hardships of societal, racial, and familial roles while providing an engaging story. This requires thought and discussion to hope to understand the plot of the novel. For most of the novel our perspective is narrated by a child of the Compson family. This arguably dysfunctional family is host to maleficent expectations and subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, hostility. But importantly, each narrator is completely unreliable. The fact that we get multiple perspectives only strengthens this as we observe and are plainly given contrasting views. This leaves us to decipher for ourselves what is closest to the truth (if acquiring truth is even possible). Through this unreliability we are given room to think for ourselves in order to learn from this book. It presents an academic challenge yet, again, prompts us to relate to our real lives and hopefully gain perspectives on the real problems the novel brings to light.

This excerpt from an article exploring The Sound and the Fury approaches this novel in terms of it representing real world problems.

The Sound and the Fury is the story of the Compson family's decline and fall; when Faulkner was asked by a student why the Compsons are such a disaster, he answered: "They live in the 1860s." The novel ranges from 1900 to 1928, but the Compsons remain trapped in the obsolete attitudes and ideas of the South in the years of the civil war, destroyed by their futile attempts to live by dying prerogatives of class, race and sex.[15]

I believe a book incorporating understandable real-world problems and requiring us to think for ourselves about them only reinforces a good novel and benefits an audience that much more. The Great Gatsby does this very well and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is another example of this working in an academically renowned novel.

I feel as though my need to defend Shakespeare’s Hamlet is less than required. Throughout the work we do not know if anything Hamlet says or does is a reliable interpretation. He is an emotionally distraught harmful minded forsaken royal seeking vengeance. Thus, regarding his reliability, I believe caution is not out of the question. Yet Hamlet stands where it does today. Through a rich, provoking story, Shakespeare allows us to enjoy his work and be influenced to think on our own as humans in an uncertain world; benefitting from the entertainment and prompt to think better on our own in the future with the unreliable narrators in our lives.

Both these works represent how an unreliable narrator can be a benefit to both intriguing storytelling, thoughtful academic discourse and perhaps the most important, requiring us to think about our own real lives and the uncertainty it brings. Therefore, finally regarding The Great Gatsby again, even if Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator, it certainly does not harm the effect The Great Gatsby has on an audience or academia in any era. It benefits the novel in this case and thus benefits the audience even more.

Scrimgeour also focuses on the morality behind the reading of The Great Gatsby. He says:

If the story means (as Fitzgerald probably intended) that Gatsby's romantic dream is magnificent and Carraway's change a growth, then we have a somber but reasonably constructive view of life. But if our narrator turns out to be corrupt, if our Adam is much less innocent than we suspected, then despair replaces elegy. Had Carraway been defeated by the impersonal forces of an evil world in which he was an ineffectual innocent, his very existence—temporary or not—would lighten the picture.[16]

Scrimgeour seems to be accusing Fitzgerald of constructing an immoral story in which we are not taught or shown anything beneficial. He is inviting justice to be done as an alternative, which would “lighten the picture” and I’m guessing he believes this would adapt The Great Gatsby for the better. Carraway as well as the Buchanan’s seem to get away, unchanged and just as immature and careless. You would think that with everything that happens in novel these characters would change for the better or at least learn valuable lessons. But no, they go about their ways clinging to their bitingly accurate human selfishness.

            Scrimgeour’s want for a moral work is unrealistic and non-human. The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald being where they are in the 20th Century understandably do not reflect the best image of humanity. Having been in and through WW1, Fitzgerald portrays humanity in a more generous light than most probably would at the time. He has seen how horrible humans can be. I believe The Great Gatsby is being realistic and painfully accurate of human obsession and carelessness. A moral meaning, a fairytale ending, or Scrimgeour’s desired “elegy” would be unrealistic and unfitting. If Scrimgeour wants Carraway to be a more reliable narrator, why does he also desire this false moral optimism and morally just meaning from a work not meant to give it. In other words, if he wants absolute truth and unbiased perspective from Carraway, why would he want unrealistic moral action or meaning to be put in place. This goes back to my point of realistic problems in novels benefitting our thought process for our own futures.

Fitzgerald gave us a view of humanity. Bad people sometimes get away with bad things. This can leave the audience lacking closure but I argue this is even more realistic. This bleak view of humanity certainly does not represent human nature wholly but provides a perspective not commonly seen in literature. Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby give us an uncommon but all too true view of human nature in the medium of an entertaining story.

Through undesirable characters, an unreliable narrator and dissatisfying moral conclusions, Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby to entertain an audience with a story, but much more importantly prepares us to think about life with its immorality and unreliable narrators. In deciphering for ourselves the truth in situations or rather what we decide to believe the truth is, The Great Gatsby certainly is not lacking as Scrimgeour might have you believe. Carraway’s unreliable narration and lack of moral closure is so painfully human, we cannot help but appreciate the honesty. His narration gives the audience an entertaining faulted experience of broken humanity. It requires a thoughtful realistic mind to understand the unreliability and what it accomplishes. Contained ambiguity in narration provides an audience room to speculate and enjoy the work. The lack or moral consequences is realistic in our broken world. Not everyone will get the justice they may deserve. This entertaining realism is what sets The Great Gatsby apart as one of the great American novels and I believe Fitzgerald’s work should remain sturdy on its pedestal of high regard in academia and literature.  

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

Scrimgeour, Gary J. “Against The Great Gatsby,” Criticism Vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1966): p. 75-86, jstor.org/stable/pdf/23094241

Shen, Dan. “Unreliability,” the living handbook of narratology (December 2013): lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/66.html

Churchwell, Sarah. “Rereading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner,” The Guardian, July 20, 2012, theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/20/sound-fury-william-faulkner-rereading

[1] Published author and literary academic.
[2] Gary J. Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” Criticism Vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1966): p. 75-86, jstor.org/stable/pdf/23094241

 
[3] Ibid, p. 78.
[4] Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” p. 78
[5] Ibid.
[6] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925) 80.
[7] Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” p. 83
[8] Ibid, p. 84.
[9] Ibid, p. 85.
[10] Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” p. 77
[11] Dan Shen, “Unreliability,” the living handbook of narratology (December 2013): lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/66.html

 
[12] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925) 59.
[13] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925) 177.
[14] Ibid, p. 2.
[15] Sarah Churchwell, “Rereading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner,” The Guardian, July 20, 2012, theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/20/sound-fury-william-faulkner-rereading

 
[16] Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” p. 85.