|
Study Guide The Great Gatsby
Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby
|
||||||
|
Online Text Available from Project Gutenberg
This short story gave Fitzgerald the idea for The Great Gatsby. Reading it may help with the papers you will write. Fitzgerald uses setting to define character. In The Great Gatsby, the Eggs, East and West, are separated from elegant New York by the hapless land between, the "valley of ashes," where the poor reside. In West Egg, Gatsby is shallow and, like a peacock, must display his opulent splendor to achieve his desire. In East Egg, Tom and Daisy, comfortable from birth with the power wealth brings, wield it to get their way in the world. They are the "foul dust" of the civilized world. In the Valley of Ashes, shadowy figures toil only to disturb the dust that distorts their desperate dreams. George yearns to be free of the valley and Myrtle dreams of romantic escape to New York.. The characters in New York are as vapid as their one-dimensional descriptions. They offer nothing. Like the party goers who flock to Gatsby's weekend soirées, they are leeches, draining life from those around them. Each can be described via setting. In this story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," notice the length to which Fitzgerald goes to establish the presence of wealth and ultimately the attitude about life it engenders. Fitzgerald uses setting to provide insight to character. Read this story on your own.. To impress your instructor, come talk to me after you have read it.
|
||||||
|
Chapter I (1) Online Text Available from Project Gutenberg I. The opening paragraphs teach us a lot about Nick and his attitude toward Gatsby and others. A. Nick introduces himself to us as a young man from the Midwest who has come east to learn the bond business. B. He tells us that he's tolerant, inclined to reserve judgment about people, and a good listener. C. People tell him their secrets because they trust him; he knows the story of Gatsby. 1. Close reading reveals that Nick has ambivalent feelings toward Gatsby. a. He both loves Gatsby and is critical of him. b. Nick is tolerant, but that toleration has limits. c. He hates Gatsby's crass and vulgar materialism, but he also admires the man for his dream, his "romantic readiness," his "extraordinary gift for hope." D. Nick makes the distinction between Gatsby, whom he loves because of his dream, and the other characters, who constitute the "foul dust" that "floated in the wake of his dreams." 1. Nick has such scorn for these "Eastern" types that he has left the East, returned to the Midwest, and, for the time being at least, withdraws from his involvement with other people. E. Having told us about his relationships, Nick now introduces us to the world in which he lived during the summer of 1922: 1. the world of East Egg and West Egg, Long Island. II. Fitzgerald designed The Great Gatsby very carefully, establishing each of the locations in the novel as a symbol for a particular style of life. A. West Egg, where Nick and Gatsby live, is essentially a place for the nou-veau riche. 1. There are two types of people living here: a. those on the way up the social ladder who have not the family background or the money to live in fashionable East Egg; b. and those like Gatsby, whose vulgar display of wealth and connections with Broadway or the New York underworld make them unwelcome in the more dignified world of East Egg. i. Writing assignment: Using the descriptions in the novel, explain the difference between the residents of East Egg and those of West Egg. Discuss the point Mr. Fitzgerald is making with this type of description. a) Page five has an excellent description of the Gatsby mansion, “...a colossal affair by any standard...a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy...” b) On page six, Fitzgerald provides a description of the Buchanan’s house. Note the differences between the gaudy Gatsby and the “white” mansion of the Buchanan’s. The author uses description to distinguish the difference in the residents of East Egg and those of West Egg. c) Answer: East is old money and West is new, and as such can never be accepted into the true world of wealth. The “four dust” is the money attitude and its power to be brutal to all, especially those with neither money nor power. This foul dust stained the gentle, naive Gatsby. 2. Nick describes his own house as an eyesore, a. but it is a smaller eyesore than Gatsby's mansion, i. which has a tower on one side, "spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy." a) Words like new, thin, and raw describe some of the reasons Gatsby's house is a monstrosity. B. By contrast, East Egg is like a fairyland. 1. Its primary color is white, a. Nick calls its houses "white palaces" that glitter in the sunlight. 2. The story actually opens in East Egg on the night Nick drives over to have dinner with Tom and Daisy Buchanan. a. Since Daisy is his cousin and Tom, a friend from Yale, Nick has the credentials to visit East Egg. 3. Their house is "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial Mansion" overlooking the bay. And the owner is obviously proud of his possessions. III. Our first view of Tom Buchanan reveals a very powerful man standing in riding clothes with his legs apart on his front porch. A. He likes his power, and like the potentates of Eastern kingdoms, he expects the obedience of his subjects. B. We are ushered into the living room with its "frosted wedding cake" ceiling, its wine-colored rug, and its enormous couch on which are seated two princesses in white: 1. Jordan Baker and Tom's wife, Daisy Buchanan. C. Fitzgerald controls the whole scene through his use of colors 1. white and gold mainly a. that suggest a combination of beauty and wealth. b. Yet underneath this magical surface there is something wrong. i. Jordan Baker is bored and discontented. a) She yawns more than once in this very first scene. (11) c. There is something cool and slightly unpleasant about the atmosphere i. something basically disturbing. a) Tom talks about a book he has read, The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard. (13) · It is a piece of pure Social Darwinism, advocating that the white race preserve its own purity and beat down the colored races before they rise up and overcome the whites. d. Daisy, who seems not to understand what Tom is talking about, teases him about his size and about the big words in the book. 2. The telephone rings, and Tom is called from the room to answer it. (14) a. When Daisy follows him out, Jordan Baker confides to Nick that the call is from Tom's woman in New York. (15) 3. The rest of the evening is awkward and painful as Tom and Daisy try unsuccessfully to forget the intrusion. a. Daisy's cynicism about life becomes painfully clear when she says about her daughter's birth: “‘I’m glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’” (17) D. Under the veneer of the white world, there is hollowness. 1. Nick has said at the very beginning that "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." Even in this opening chapter, we are getting hints that Tom and Daisy are part of this foul dust. a. In Nick's eyes, Tom and Daisy belong to "a rather distinguished secret society," whose members have powers the outside world can neither understand nor control. 2. Nick finds both of them smug and insincere. IV. The evening ends early, around ten o'clock. A. Jordan Baker, a competitive golfer, wants to go to bed since she's playing in a tournament the next day. 1. Before Nick leaves for West Egg, Tom and Daisy hint that they would welcome his attention to Miss Baker during the summer. B. Nick arrives home, and (in the final paragraph of the chapter) gets his first glimpse of Gatsby. 1. Gatsby is standing on the lawn, stretching out "his arms toward the dark water in a curious way." a. Nick, from his own house, believes that he can see Gatsby trembling. 2. As Nick looks out at the water, he can see ". . . nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock." a. The Green Light As Symbol (22) i. This is the first use of one of the novel's central symbols, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. a) What Fitzgerald seems to be doing is merely introducing a symbol that will gain in meaning as the story progresses. · At this point, we don't even know that the light is on Daisy's dock, and we have no reason to associate Gatsby with Daisy. b) What we do know—and this is very important—is that Nick admires Gatsby because of his dream and this dream is somehow associated with the green light. · The color green is a traditional symbol of spring and hope and youth. à As long as Gatsby gazes at the green light, his dream lives. Online Links A Small site with some good facts
The Great Gatsby CHAPTER II (23) Online Text Available from Project Gutenberg I. The opening description of the valley of ashes, watched over by the brooding eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, has been analyzed again and again. A. How should you approach this famous symbol? 1. Remember, a wide variety of interpretations have been made and defended over the years. 2. Fitzgerald's friend and editor, Maxwell Perkins, wrote to Scott on November 20,1924: a. "In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It's magnificent." b. Later in the same letter Perkins concludes, ". . . with the help of T.J. Eckleburg... you have imported a sort of sense of eternity." 3. It’s best to begin by placing Eckleburg in his geographical context: a. the valley of ashes, i. located about halfway between West Egg and New York City. a) The valley of ashes is the home of George and Myrtle Wilson, whom we'll meet later on in this chapter. b. The valley is also a very important part of what might be called the moral geography of the novel. i. Values are associated with places. a) In Chapter I, East and West Egg, is home to the very rich, the nouveau riche, and the middle class. b) The valley of ashes is the home of the poor, the victims of those who live in either New York or the Eggs. · Men, described by Fitzgerald as "ash-gray," move through the landscape "dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." · Apparently the city's ashes are dumped in the valley, and the men who work here have the job of shoveling up these ashes with "leaden spades." c. On a more symbolic level, these men are inhabitants of what might be called Fitzgerald's wasteland.
i. T.S. Eliot's famous poem "The Waste Land" had been published in 1922, and Fitzgerald had read it with great interest. a) There is no doubt that he had Eliot’s poem in mind when he described the valley of ashes. · Eliot's wasteland—arid, desert like—contains figures who go through the motions of life with no spiritual center. b) Eliot's imagery seemed to express the anxiety, frustration, and emptiness of a post-war generation cut off from spiritual values by the shock of the First World War. · He even refers to the valley of ashes as the “waste land” (24). ii. Read the following passage carefully: a) The eyes of Doctor TJ. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paint-less days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. (23) iii. Some readers interpret this passage as a description of the god of the modern world—the god of the wasteland. a) Keep this description in mind in Chapter VIII when the crazed and jealous Wilson looks at the giant eyes and says, "God sees everything." · For now, early in Chapter II, it is still too early to make any kind of direct correlation between the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and the eyes of God. iv. At this point, we have only hints: a) the size of the eyes, b) the missing face, c) the departure of the original creator of the sign, · All these transform the eyes into something mythic, something suggesting a superior being who no longer cares, who is no longer involved with the petty lives of the pathetic creatures below. d) The eyes "brood on over the solemn dumping ground," offering no help or solace to its inhabitants. · The oculist has forgotten the eyes which he left behind, just as God has forgotten the inhabitants of the valley of ashes. à Many interpretations are possible; you'll want to think about them as the novel develops.
II. The action of the second chapter begins as Tom Buchanan brings Nick to George B. Wilson's garage. A. Both the garage and the all-night restaurant of the Greek Michaelis border the valley of ashes. 1. Wilson's wife, Myrtle, is Tom's mistress. a. Pay close attention to these first descriptions of Wilson and his wife, and you will learn about who they are and what they stand for. i. Wilson a) Wilson is described as "a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome." (25) Dictionary.com b) He is the embodiment of the valley of ashes: dead inside, a living ghost. · The key words are spiritless and anemic. · He has no energy and no faith. · He believes somehow that doing business with Tom will help him; but he understands neither the power nor the cruelty of the man he is dealing with. ii. Myrtle a) Myrtle Wilson is a sensuous woman in her middle thirties who has the energy her husband lacks. · "There was an immediate perceptible vitality about her," says Nick. · The fire inside her has drawn her to Tom Buchanan as a lover who can take her away from the gray and empty prison of the valley of ashes. B. Tom takes Myrtle to New York, the fourth major location in the moral geography of the novel. 1. If the valley of ashes is the home of death-in-life—the place where the spiritless and downtrodden live—New York is the center of the corruption, or, more appropriately, the place where wealth, corruption, and self-gratification openly meet. 2. Myrtle must ride into New York on the train in a separate car in deference to the "East Eggers." (26) a. Why? Because it is important to keep up a facade of respectability. Dictionary.com 3. In New York, however, where anything is permitted, Tom can flaunt his relationship with Myrtle. C. The group goes to the apartment in Morningside Heights that Tom Buchanan has rented for his liaisons with Myrtle. 1. What goes on there and how Nick reacts to what goes on tell us something very important about how Fitzgerald wants us to view New York. a. The party consists of Nick, Tom, Myrtle, Myrtle's sister Catherine, and a couple named McKee who live downstairs. i. Nick is really more of an observer than a participant. ii. He tells us that he has been drunk just twice in his life, and the second time was that afternoon. a) Whether he drinks in order to lose his self-control and join the others or simply to escape this disordered world is something you'll have to decide for yourself. · Perhaps both interpretations are correct. b. All the guests at the party seem to have something unnatural or wrong with them. i. Catherine, the sister, has "a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. (30) a) Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle. Dictionary.com ii. "Mr. McKee is a pale, feminine man who has just shaved and left a spot of lather on his cheek. (30) iii. His wife is "shrill, languid, handsome and horrible." iv. Myrtle Wilson becomes more and more "violently affected moment by moment." (31) v. The conversation is absurd and pretentious; everyone tries to impress each other, and lies flow as freely as the liquor. 2. Nick tries to leave; part of him wants to be somewhere else, but part of him—that part that makes him the narrator of this novel—is fascinated by "the inexhaustible variety of life." (36) a. He is both repelled and attracted toward these people. i. The appearance of Myrtle Wilson's new puppy, "groaning faintly," is like the entire scene, both funny and sad. 3. Then a crisis erupts. (37) a. Myrtle crudely insists that she can say, "Daisy!" any time she wants, and Tom Buchanan, making a short deft movement, breaks her nose with his open hand. i. So this is what happens to those who become entangled with the Buchanans! a) Tom, we see, is strong and brutal and absolutely selfish. b) He is perfectly happy to enjoy Myrtle in bed, but at other times she must know when to keep her place. ii. For challenging the purity of his Daisy, she is punished. a) Later, in Chapter VII during the second New York party, Gatsby tries to cross Tom Buchanan. III. In two chapters, Fitzgerald has shown us two different symbolic landscapes: A. one, a dinner party in East Egg with Daisy, Jordan, Tom and Nick; B. the other, a drunken brawl in New York with Tom, Nick, Myrtle, Catherine and the McKees. 1. The contrast between the two parties tells us much about these two worlds and about the people who inhabit them. 2. Now to complete his introduction to the world of the novel, Fitzgerald gives us in Chapter III a third party—at the West Egg Home of Jay Gatsby. Online Links A Small site with some good facts
The Great Gatsby CHAPTER III (39) Online Text Available from Project Gutenberg I. Though the novel is called The Great Gatsby, we have neither seen Gatsby (except for a glimpse of him at the end of Chapter I) nor been given any idea of why he should be called "great." A. Fitzgerald's method is to introduce Gatsby to us gradually, as a kind of mystery to be solved. 1. We see Gatsby first through the eyes of others. a. Catherine Wilson told Nick (in Chapter II) that she had heard that Gatsby was a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. b. Lucille, a friend of Jordan Baker, thinks that Gatsby was a German spy during the war. i. A man sitting nearby agrees with her. c. The world is full of rumors about Gatsby because no one really knows who he is, where his money comes from, and why he gives these magnificent parties every weekend. B. Our job as readers is to separate fact from rumor and to discover, with Nick, who Gatsby really is and why he behaves the way he does. 1. Our job will be to probe behind the vulgar, violent surface of his world to reveal the man beneath. a. We are able to do that—as in real life—only gradually, for it is never possible to know someone all at once.
II. The process begins in Chapter III with a portrait of the public Gatsby, seen through the eyes of his guests. A. It’s not until Chapter IV that we’ll begin to discover the man beneath. 1. Brightness, confusion, magnificence, daring, vulgarity, excess, excitement—these are the words that describe Gatsby's parties. Dictionary.com B. They also describe one side of life in America during the 1920s, in the years before the Great Depression. 1. Gatsby has a Rolls Royce, a station wagon, two motor boats, aquaplanes, a swimming pool, and a real beach. 2. People come to his parties and use these things. 3. Everything is real. 4. Crates of oranges and lemons are delivered to his door. 5. Beneath canvas tents in the garden are buffet tables glittering with spiced hams and turkeys "bewitched to a dark gold." 6. Gatsby's bar is stocked with gin, liquors, and "cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another." C. The world of Gatsby's parties has an aura of magic about it—not the magic of East Egg, with its fairytale imagery of princesses in ivory towers, but the magic of the amusement park, with the promise of fast rides and expensive prizes. 1. Gatsby's world is a world of infinite hope and possibility. 2. Young girls with laughter like gold wait for the right man. 3. Middle-aged women, tired of their husbands, search for lovers. 4. And ambitious men search for the right contact that will bring them instant fame and fortune. D. Nobody knows the host. 1. Nick is "one of the few guests who had actually been invited." a. Fitzgerald builds suspense by making us wonder when we'll meet Gatsby and what he'll be like when we do. 2. Nick runs into Jordan Baker and the twins, who talk about Gatsby, but have only false information about him. a. Nick and Jordan go off in search of Gatsby, but discover Owl Eyes instead. (45) i. Owl Eyes Owl Eyes is "a stout middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles." ii. He is overwhelmed by the fact that Gatsby's Gothic library is stocked not with the fake, cardboard backs of books, but with the works themselves. a) He knows that Gatsby has never read the books, however, because the pages have never been cut. "This fella's a regular Belasco," Owl Eyes tells Nick and Jordan. "It's a triumph. . . . Knew when to stop, too—didn't cut the pages." iii. The reference to David Belasco, the great playwright-producer-director of realistic plays, is not accidental. a) Owl Eyes, as Nick refers to him, is the first to realize the essentially theatrical quality of Gatsby's world. iv. Just as Belasco was a technician who wanted to get everything right, so Gatsby spares no expense to build the material world necessary to fulfill his dream. a) He has created an extraordinary stage set complete with real books. 1. Owl Eyes, as his name suggests, is one of the few to really see and, in some way, understand Gatsby.
E. Nick and Jordan go back outside to watch the entertainment at midnight. 1. Even the moon cooperates, floating over Long Island sound like the cardboard moon on a stage set. a. In a scene that Nick calls "significant, elemental, profound," Gatsby appears: (47) i. "I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. "What!" I exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon." "I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host." He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. 2. Gatsby is a series of paradoxes. a. He is both a "roughneck" and one who practices "elaborate formality in speech." b. He calls people "old sport," apparently a habit picked up at Oxford, though at this point we're still uncertain whether Oxford is just part of the myth. i. Has he really gone to Oxford? a) We, like Jordan Baker, may not believe it. 1. But then why is he picking his words with care? c. And how did he earn the money to give these parties? 3. As Nick points out: a. people don't just "drift cooly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound." i. A millionaire who gives parties conjures up an image of a "florid and corpulent person in his middle years.”
F. But Gatsby is none of these. 1. Gatsby is—quite simply—not like anyone else in the world of the novel. a. Young, handsome, excessively polite, he seems not to belong to the world he has created. i. His smile radiates an inner warmth that his guests don't have. b. Nick alone senses it. "Anyway, he gives large parties," says Jordan Baker, because the party, not Gatsby, is what interests her. 2. But now Nick watches Gatsby as much as he watches the party. a. He notices Gatsby standing "alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes." i. Here Gatsby is like a director admiring his play or a religious leader blessing his disciples. b. He alone is not drinking. i. As the party grows more frenzied, he becomes increasingly separate from it. a) He is untouched by the corruption of the world. G. The party goes on. 1. People become more drunk and irritable. a. Husbands and wives fight over whether to stay or leave. b. Some wives are lifted, kicking into their cars. c. Gatsby goes to answer a telephone call from Philadelphia at 2 a.m. H. As Nick leaves to walk home, he encounters Owl Eyes, who is unable to get his car out of the ditch. (54) 1. Neither Owl Eyes nor the car's driver— "a pale, dangling individual"—seems to be able to manage. 2. Nick returns to his own home, leaving the guests to struggle with their problems.
III. Nick shifts the focus of the chapter from Gatsby back to himself. (56) A. He wants us to know that he's done more with his summer than go to parties. 1. To correct that false impression, he tells us how he usually occupies his time. a. As he tells us about his work, his walks through New York City, and his fascination for women, he gives us a sense that, in some way he is as hollow as the characters he describes. i. He seems to need adventure as an escape from loneliness, and perhaps that is what draws him to Jordan Baker. ii. He is also sexually attracted to her. a) He became involved with Jordan around midsummer, he tells us, after a short affair with a girl from Jersey City. iii. He knows that Jordan is dishonest—she cheated in her first golf tournament by moving her ball to improve her lie. (58) a) Whatever Nick's reason for being with her, we're made to feel that somehow Jordan is not the kind of woman Nick ought to like. IV. At the end of the chapter Nick says, "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine; I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." A. This is one of the most talked about lines in the novel, and it is a hard one to interpret, coming as it does right after Nick's statement that "dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply." 1. Is Nick using a double standard, arguing that it’s all right for women to be dishonest because they can't help it? 2. How do we reconcile our view of Nick as a reliable and sympathetic narrator when he allows himself to get involved with such a morally unattractive woman? B. These are questions raised by the troubling last pages of this chapter—questions that are answered in a variety of ways by different readers. 1. If you want to question Nick's judgment, you can certainly find evidence to support that point of view. 2. Yet most readers have not been too hard on Nick for his relationship with Jordan. The question is very much an open one.
Online Links A Small site with some good facts
The Great Gatsby CHAPTER IV (61)
|
