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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] You loved me too? he repeated. Even then, Gatsby refuses to give up his dream. I don t think she ever loved him, he tells Nick the next morning. Tom had bullied her into saying that she had. Or perhaps, he concedes, she d loved him for a minute, when they were first married and loved me more even then, do you see? In any case, Gatsby adds, It was just personal. For Gatsby, the dream itself mattered far more than the person in whom the dream found expression. Toward the end Nick keeps insisting that Gatsby must have given up his dream, but there is no evidence that he did. He was still waiting for Daisy s phone call when the man from the ashheaps came calling instead. Fitzgerald transferred to Gatsby both a situation from his own emotional life the unsuccessful pursuit of the golden girl and an attitude toward that quest. Like Gatsby and the sad young men of his best love stories, Fitzgerald was 118 remarkable for the colossal vitality of his capacity for illusion. I am always searching for the perfect love, he told Laura Guthrie in 1935. Was that because he d had it as a young man? No, I never had it, the answered. I was searching then too. Such a search worked to prevent him from committing himself fully to any one person, for, as common sense dictated and his fiction illustrated, there could be no such thing as the perfect love, up close. JOYCE A. ROWE ON GATSBY S RELATIONSHIP WITH NICK That Gatsby is not just the mythic embodiment of an American type but personifies the outline of our national consciousness is demonstrated by his structural relation to the other characters and, in particular, to the narrator, Nick Carraway. Despite differences of class and taste, despite their apparent mutually antagonistic purposes, all the characters in this book are defined by their nostalgia for and sense of betrayal by some lost, if only dimly apprehended promise in their past a sense of life s possibilities toward which only Gatsby has retained the ingenuous faith and energy of the true seeker. It is in the difference between vision and sight, between the longing for self-transcendence and the lust for immediate gain for sexual, financial, or social domination that Nick, his chronicler and witness, finds the moral distinction which separates Gatsby from the foul dust of the others who float in his wake. And this moral dichotomy runs through the structure of the entire work. For the rapacious nature of each of the others, whether crude, desperate, arrogant or false, is finally shown to be a function of their common loss of vision, their blurred or displaced sense of possibilities punningly symbolized In the enormous empty retinas of the occulist-wag, Dr T.J. Eckleburg. Thus Gatsby and those who eddy around him are, reciprocally, positive and negative images of one another; but whether faithless or true all are doomed by the wasteful, self- deluding nature of the longing which controls their lives and 119 which when it falls leaves its adherents utterly naked and alone, contiguous to nothing. However, Nick s insight into the distinction between Gatsby and others does not free him from his own involvement in the world he observes. His acute awareness of his own self-division (toward Gatsby as toward all the others) turns out to be the mirror inversion of his subject s unconscious one; it accounts for the sympathetic bond between them. And Just as Gatsby s ingenuous self-dissociation is the ground of his faith that the moral complexity of the world can be subdued to his imaginative vision (Daisy s feelings for Tom are only a case of the personal ), so Nick s self-division leads him to ultimately reject the world ( I wanted no more ... privileged glimpses into the human heart ). They are twin poles of All or Nothing Gatsby s hope is Nick s despair. Nick s kinship to Gatsby is established in the prologue, where his own version of infinite hope the capacity to reserve judgment is implicitly contrasted with Gatsby s extraordinary gift for hope. This latter is not, says Nick, in a self-deprecating reference, a matter of any flabby impressionability, but of a romantic readiness such as he has never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. The phrase tells us that Nick too is a seeker, that the strength of Gatsby s romantic energy resonates against Nick s own muted but responsive sensibility. Indeed, Nick s most immediately distinguishing trait, his consciousness of the flux of time as a series of intense, irrecoverable moments, is keyed to a romantic pessimism whose melancholy note is struck on his thirtieth birthday, when he envisions his future as a burden of diminishing returns leading inexorably to loneliness, enervation, and death. Moreover, it is Nick s own confused responsiveness to his cousin s sexual power and charm that allows him subsequently to understand Gatsby s equation of Daisy with all that is most desirable under the heavens ultimately with the siren song of the American continent. Nick cannot help but be compelled by the buoyant vitality which surrounds her and the glowing sound of her low, thrilling voice, which sings with a promise 120 that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour. But, as the shadow of his double, Nick s response to Daisy is qualified by his discomforting awareness of the illusory and deceptive in her beauty. Her smirking insincerity, her banal chatter, the alluring whiteness of her expensive clothes most of all, the languid boredom which enfolds her life suggest a willing captivity, a lazy self-submission to a greater power than her own magical charms: the extraordinary wealth and physical arrogance that enable Tom Buchanan to dominate her. And Nick s visceral dislike for the man Daisy has given herself to, fanned by his intellectual and moral scorn for Tom s crude attempt to master ideas as he does horses and women, allies him with, as it prefigures, Gatsby s bland disregard of Tom as a factor in Daisy s existence. JAMES L.W. WEST III ON THE ORIGINAL TITLE S SIGNIFICANCE TO THEME Trimalchio, a freed slave who has grown wealthy, hosts a lavish banquet in one of the best-known chapters of the Satyricon by Petronius (c. AD 27 66). In translations, the chapter is usually entitled The Party at Trimalchio s or Trimalchio s Feast ; it is one of the best accounts of domestic revelry to survive from the reign of the emperor Nero. The chapter is narrated by Encolpius, an observer and recorder rather than a participant. Banquet scenes were conventions of classical literature (e.g., the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon). They were occasions for mild jesting and for conversations about art, literature, and philosophy. Trimalchio s party is a parody of this convention: most of the guests are inebriated and are disdainful of learning; their crude talk, in colloquial Latin, is largely about money and possessions. Trimalchio himself is old and unattractive, bibulous and libidinous. His house, though, is spacious; his dining-room contains an impressively large water-clock; his servants are dressed in elaborate costumes. The banquet he hosts is 121 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |