So reading and observation are important in a writer’s growth process; it’s why we have CRW classes for all you fiction majors out there. I consider myself a technical writer and I’ve always wanted to dig into the books I really like in order to figure what the writer did on the page and go into detail about how, or why it worked, and now that I’m out of college and temporarily jobless, I don’t have anything better to do.
In my final semester we read Gatsby and now I have time to go back through it and figure out why I loved it so much. Unlike a lot of my classmates who’d read it 2-4 times this was my first time, but Fitzgerald was gentle, so it was cool. This book is heralded as the literary masterpiece of the Jazz age, and from what little I know about the time period it really does feel that way.
The tone, atmosphere and overall feel of The Great Gatsby is derived from the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald knew how to set a fucking scene. The descriptions, though sparse in comparison to other semi-contemporary canon classics, is always poignant and powerful. Near the beginning of the first chapter, once Nick is done talking about himself, his house and his friends, there’s a beautiful and simple description of the Buchanan’s mansion.
“The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens-finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as thought from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with the reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon,”
Fitzgerald is a master of emotional manipulation; from that one paragraph you’re told how to feel as you’re told what to see. The playfulness is subtle but there, the lawn ran and jumped and grew up the side of the house with the momentum. All the descriptions here are warm and vibrant and put the reader at ease. You feel calm and you know Nick’s enjoying himself without the writer ever having to tell you so, you can feel it in the tone.
He does this again and again, each time with the same subtle power of suggestion making you feel and think things you may not have even noticed. The two other scenes of this sort that strike me are the first scene in Chapter Three and the party scene in Chapter Six.
In the first scene in Chapter Three we’re treated to the voyeuristic spectacle that is Gatsby’s routine. Nick describes for two pages in great detail the weekly goings on of Gatsby’s house, the food, the cars, the orchestras, the corps of caterers and the entire time you can feel Nick’s longing, his impressed wistfulness at the majesty of it all. But this description accomplishes a lot. It forces questions into the reader’s mind, who is Gatsby, why does he party so hardy, how can he afford it all, and what does he do? All of these questions well to the forefront of the subconscious and at this point we have yet to actually meet Gatsby. This conjures the shadowy wisp of a man, a man of great wealth and influence; it speaks of everything and substantiates nothing. The strength of this two page lead-in is heightened by the party itself where party-goers jitter and gossip chomping at the bit of any information they can get, and none of it is any more than wild speculation; it builds Gatsby to be more than a man.
Conversely the party scene in Chapter Six, while just as effective, destroys Gatsby’s façade in the reader’s eye. By this point the reader already knows the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby, and we know that Gatsby wants nothing more than to impress her and through Nick’s descriptions we can feel Gatsby’s failure.
“There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.”
All of the previously stated scenes and the majority of Fitzgerald’s description set you up with a feeling, a feeling that he then mires you in utilizing the scene itself, but the descriptions, the set-ups are what allow him to communicate feeling so effectively.
But his use of effective description isn’t confined to scene. Fitzgerald’s characters are extremely well designed and portrayed, both in literal description and characterization. I’d be so bold as to say that with the exception of Nick (maybe) and Gatsby, there are no other real characters in the book, there are stand-ins and plot devices for sure, but not real people; and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Just after the impressive description of the house in the beginning of Chapter Three, we’re introduced to three of the most important characters in the book Tom, Daisy and Jordan. These three are the only characters we ever meet who stay in East Egg and are thusly the only representatives we have of East Egg. All three are self-centered narcissists who stave off reality with wealth and privilege; and while this can be discerned from actions the characters make over the course of the book, it’s also apparent to a degree in how they’re described, especially Tom Buchanan.
“Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body-he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body.”
This description is the only detailed description of Tom we’re given in the entire novel, because it’s the only one necessary. It establishes so much about him and grounds his actions in a presence we feel in that image. The same level of loving detail is given to Daisy’s voice when Nick describes it.
“-but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”
These simple one paragraph descriptions encapsulate so much that makes this book great, it allows you to feel as you see, something so difficult to do in writing.
While the descriptions provide the crux of what I think Fitzgerald does so well, the characters are another important part of this book. As I stated before I think the only truly realized characters in this book are Gatsby and Nick and the only one of real importance is Gatsby. Nick is there to watch and be deluded in one way or another but as the title proclaims, this is about Gatsby; everyone else is there to watch him fall, or push him over.
Gatsby is one of the most intriguing characters because by the end of the
book, when all is said and done, you still don’t really know him. What you see of him you only see through Nick, and I don’t just mean that in the obvious and literal sense. The reader’s perception of Gatsby is always filtered through Nick, through their experiences together and through a miasmic haze of fact and fiction. You see Gatsby as Nick does and it allows the reader to have their own opinions of him. Between the accusations of bootlegging to the unsubstantiated claims of inheritance you’re never given a straight answer about Gatsby, just enough to make an educated guess.
When Gatsby tells the story of how he met Daisy, how he loved her, it becomes apparent to the reader that he did everything for her, that he put on this whole front to get her notice, threw the wildest parties in the hopes she would show up, it’s so sad. What’s so genius about it from a writing perspective is that you don’t find any of it out until after the accident, until after the party, until after everything’s lost but no one knows it yet and that’s really what makes the book so tragic. Everything builds up to that let down, the climax of the narrative is the scene in the hotel and everything after that is the slow painful drop back to reality, and you only get to see the truth until it’s already to late, it’s
brilliant.
This leads me to my final point, Nick. I’ve heard people who’ve read the book argue about Nick and even heard some people say he didn’t need to be there at all. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I think he’s invaluable. As I stated earlier, through Nick you get both delusion and fact. You see Gatsby’s house from afar and speculate along with him about the man who could run such a place. Then Fitzgerald uses the retrospective narrative distance to give you cold hard fact about Gatsby, and manages to use Nick as the ultimate storyteller; shifting seamlessly from the authoritative distance of the past, to the questioning bystander in the moment without ever making the change jarring.
When I think of Gatsby’s structure I think of the tower at the beginning of a game of Jenga; each piece a technique and each technique reliant on the others to keep the whole secure. Fitzgerald’s Description, Character, Point of View and Story, form a rare type of literary harmony.
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