Fiction as Greatness: The Case of Gatsby

Abstract

More than half a century after its publication, The Great Gatsby is still a vexed case, seen variously as a portrait of the 20s, a picture of the American Dream that is at once lyrical and critical, an example of point-of-view narrative that draws shrewdly on James and Conrad.1 All these things Fitzgerald does, no one would deny; what is vexing is what to make of them? Is the novel, ultimately, a critique of either Gatsby or his dream? What, ultimately, does Nick Carraway or the reader learn? Finally, what does the greatness of Gatsby and Fitzgerald's novel consist of?2 In looking at Fitzgerald criticism, one frequently discerns a certain petulancy: Gatsby's dream is itself so meretricious and vulgar, why all the ado? Nick himself is too smug on the one hand (I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known) and too conniving on the other (Jordan Baker's not-so-broad hint at the book's close). Or else, Fitzgerald the author comes up short: unable to see through his tinsel materials, unable to sort out his ironies, unable to curb his rhetoric. The book seems to be imbued with excess: the tawdry excesses of the Flapper Age, the wild parties, the flashy and notso-flashy materialism of Gatsby, the excesses of capitalism, the sentimental and blinding excesses of the rags-to-riches story itself, the American Dream. It is in this light that Gatsby criticism often seems to dig its heels in, roll up its sleeves, and perform analysis, i.e., reveal these puffed-up Appearances and Myths for what they truly are: spurious, specious and inflated. The critical act itself-practiced in all our disciplines--seems imaged here: to see through, to become undeceived, to deflate, to deconstruct. Fitzgerald criticism, even more than most, is marked by the moral fervor of exposure and judgment.3