The Great Gatsby Readalong: Update #4

Chapter five – Gatsby’s offer to “pay” Nick for his favor made me think that apart from his choice of getting rich, Jay Gatsby is quite a nice person. He is very polite, hate of asking favor from friends (his intricate ways in asking Nick to arrange meeting with Daisy), and he is the only one who doesn’t drink. And when he loves a woman, he respects her, and is loyal to her to the end.

According to Careless People, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land has major influence in Fitzgerald’s ideas for writing Gatsby—not the plot, but the general theme and atmosphere. I have never read Eliot, and this can be my good excuse to mark him.

Now, I have mentioned in my previous post about Gatsby as a “novel noir”. So We Read On dedicated a chapter titled Rhapsody in Noir to discuss this; and it’s very interesting. First of all, the origin of Gatsby’s real name “Gatz” is gat—a slang for ‘gun’ in the twenties. There are at least three deaths caused by gun in this story. And don’t forget the car crashes that happened too many in such a short story (including Tom Buchanan’s which then revealed his affair with a chambermaid only a week after his marriage with Daisy!). Add it all with the desolate valley of ashes, the abandoned billboard of the oculist, and Wilson’s shabby garage. Yes… this is not a romantic story of unrequited love or the lost of illusion; it is the gloomy image that Fitzgerald felt was happening in America—emptiness and deadliness. Corrigan even questioned about Myrtle’s accident: “Who can say for certain whether Daisy’s hit-and-run murder of Myrtle, her husband’s mistress, is just an accident or a subconscious homicidal drive realized?” Yeah… that has made me shiver a little! And horrifyingly, it made sense to me.

Gatsby-Daisy’s reunion is full of emotion. Daisy was crying, but for what? Remember when Gatsby thrown his colorful shirts and Daisy cried? Of course she’s crying not because she has never seen such beautiful shirts before, but I think, because she lamented her faith of being a wife of the brutal man: Tom. If only she had waited for three more years, she would have had a rich AND loving husband: Gatsby. But after their trip, where Tom confronted Gatsby, and Gatsby persuaded her to flee with him, I think Daisy got so confused… and drunk. I think she realized that Gatsby would never fit in her circle—no matter how she loved him, her husband would always be Tom. But then seeing his mistress on the road… I don’t know whether she knew about Myrtle or not—probably she did—but that is enough to lead her to Corrigan’s homicidal theory.

I am still wondering about the history of Gatsby’s mansion which Nick told us, particularly this passage: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry”. To what exactly did Fitzgerald want to allude with it? What do you think?