Essays

on The Great Gatsby

Is Nick Carraway Gay? Or, Is Daisy Buchanan Slow?

By Marciano Guerrero
9/15/2012


This study contains two parts. First, we will argue that NYC did not corrupt the characters presented in the novel. Second, we’ll show the
writing techniques that F. Scott Fitzgerald employed to depict his characters and their environment. The Great Gatsby will endure simply
because F. Scott Fitzgerald created a literary archetype: Jay Gatsby. While many great writers achieve temporary fame, only writers who
invent archetypes will endure eternal fame, and in this respect Jay Gatsby will join the pantheon of heroes where we find: Heathcliff,
Tarzan, Holly Golightly, Lolita, Mr. Darcy, Gregor Samsa, and Holden Caulfield—among others.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Essay 1 — Introduction to the Great Gatsby

Essay 2 — Nick Carraway, Narrator: Is He Gay? Or, Is he Bisexual?

Essay 3 — Daisy Buchanan: No Golden Girl but a Master of Echolalia and Deceit

Essay 4 — Purple Prose and Objective Correlatives in the Great Gatsby

Essay 5 — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Style: Carpentry, Pulleys, and Scaffolding


Essay 1 — Introduction to the Great Gatsby

While volumes of criticism and book reviews have been written on The Great Gatsby, nowhere
have I read any allusions to the fact that the all the main players in the story are morally degraded and of
low intelligence—or to be charitable: mediocre.

In fact, it is possible that the heroine —Daisy Buchanan— may well be ‘slow,’ as shown by her
own actions, assertions, and in dialogue. This may be construed as harsh criticism, but in my view it is
justifiable criticism which is supported by the text.

This study contains two parts. First, we will argue that NYC did not corrupt the characters
presented in the novel. Second, we’ll show the writing techniques that F. Scott Fitzgerald employed to
depict his characters and their environment.

Contrary to what many might believe, New York City despite all its sins and flawed institutions
doesn’t corrupt people, but the characters in the novel (Southerners and Midwesterners) reached the Big
Apple as adults with their values already formed, stained, and doomed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald presents a study of ill-gained wealth and ambition through the prism of pathetic
characters for which one cannot find any socially redeeming values. What The Great Gatsby portrays is
the sordid story of small band of feeble characters engaged in cheating, adultery, deception, and
debauchery. The lavish parties —Jazz-age style— that Jay Gatsby throws to recover his lost illusions and
perfidious lover Daisy Buchanan, are all but wild bacchanalians.

When one thinks about of the rest of the nation, we can breathe a sigh of relief to see that the rest of
Americans are engaged in productive enterprise, in rebuilding the nation after the waste of resources that
was the First World War. The sordidness of the story applies, almost in its entirety, to that small band of
marginal, misguided, and unsavory characters.

The Great Gatsby isn’t a book about the spiritual dismemberment of America (as many have
interpreted the book to be) caused by the ‘roaring 20s’ and the Great Depression. No such dismemberment
ever occurred; on the contrary, America went to become the leading industrial super power in the world.

The second part of the study unveils the writing techniques that Scott Fitzgerald employs to capture
not only the spiritual nuances of his characters, but also the setting —Manhattan and Long Island— where
the action transpires.

Yet, the Great Gatsby will endure simply because F. Scott Fitzgerald created a literary archetype:
Jay Gatsby. While many great writers achieve temporary fame, only writers who invent archetypes will
endure eternal fame, and in this respect Jay Gatsby will join the pantheon of heroes where we find:
Heathcliff, Tarzan, Holly Golightly, Lolita, Mr. Darcy, Gregor Samsa, and Holden Caulfield—among
others.
Essay 2 — Nick Carraway, Narrator: Is He Gay?

In Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers we experience the objective voice of a disinterested
narrator. The sang-froid objectivity of the narrator is gripping in its iciness and detachment; it is as if a
robotic camera on wheels—free of human operator—follows the events with relentless and faithful
objectivity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is by no means objective.

Can we say that relentless and faithful objectivity is Nick Carraway’s motivation in telling us
Gatsby’s story? Definitely not. What we find in Nick Carraway’s narration is neither objectivity nor
detachment, but the very biased point of view of a narrator who is also a protagonist in the story—an
unreliable narrator of his own impressions, narrator of hearsay, and all told in “novelistic journalism
style.”

Nick Carraway not only has an interesting story to tell, but he also has an agenda; a laundry list of
things “to clean up,” events to smooth over, and a guilty consciousness to cleanse.

In a similar vein as Augustine’s, Rousseau’s, or even Benjamin Franklin’s confessions, Nick
exacerbates other people’s crimes and misdemeanors while obscuring and diminishing his own.
Reliable or Unreliable Narrator?

From the outset of the narration, Nick Carraway makes it clear that the story he’s about to tell is a
very personal story, and that he is going to be a protagonist. So, with these words he begins mentioning
himself:

“In my younger and more vulnerable years…”

Nick’s story is about himself and about young people coming of age, characters who at are in the
midst of finding their own identity, groping for goals and a more certain future. It is a generational story in
which ambitious “Dough Boys” —having returned from fighting a world war— vie for a prominent
position under the sun, vying for a spot not in the tedium of poverty or disenchantment, but for a share of
splendor in wealth and love.

Although Nick makes the calculated decision to come East to pursue a career in Wall Street, his
heart moves him in a different direction; his heart is in literature, and he lets us know what his intentions
are: “I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most
limited of all specialists, the ‘well rounded man’” (Chapter 1, 4).

Having attended Yale University, he is justified in calling himself a ‘well rounded man’ who is fully
equipped by experience, education, and talent to become a writer, a literary man.

As he commences the narrative, he even indulges in the pleasure of even knowing the title of his
book: “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction” (Chapter 1,
2).

Nick, the writer, also engages in moments of meta-narration.

When in the second book of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the hero learns that he is the subject of
spurious adventures by a spurious author, we can only smile and enjoy the pleasures of meta-narration.
Similarly, Nick Carraway also engages himself in bits of meta-narration as when we read that he is
reviewing his work as he progresses with the writing:

“Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that he events of three
nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual
events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my
personal affairs” (Chapter 3, 60).

Indeed they were but mere casual events, yet very much intertwined with his own personal life.
Though Nick presents Jay Gatsby’s life as the main thread of the novel, he weaves his own
autobiographical strands of data into the fabric of the story.

While Meursault—Camus’ absurd-man narrator of The Stranger—chooses a stark, hallucinatory
jargon to depict his alienation from the world, Nick Carraway chooses a lyrical and often incantatory
language to embellish his own alienation from both males and females, given his lack of sexual identity.

What his narrative turns out to be isn’t the great American novel, but a sordid fictional text a low-
level American tragedy.
Narrator’s Biases

Nick takes licenses and reports hearsay, a narrator’s sin that endangers his credibility. This is the
heavy wall that a first person narrator must climb: credibility. How can readers believe narrated events
that the witness narrator hasn’t experienced? So, in some instances he uses the technique —novelistic
journalism— that Truman Capote was years later to master in his book In Cold Blood.

In some sections he becomes a ventriloquist, manipulating the related events by using the voice of
characters such as Jordan and Michaelis.

Nick also commits the sin of omission. What is disgusting is that in the end, Nick doesn't denounce
his cousin Daisy, even though he's privy to the knowledge that Daisy was the driver that fated night, and
that Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson (Tom's mistress). Was this really an accident? Or did Daisy actually run
over Mrs. Wilson intentionally? We can only go by Gatsby’s recollection of the accident as he recounts it
to Nick. Like the proverbial Platonic copies, what we get from Nick are events twice removed from the
true events that happened.

That Daisy was driving and that she was maneuvering to pass a car coming the other way is clear.
What follows is that Daisy first attempts avoid hitting Myrtle, but it is possible that as she recognizes
Myrtle she changes her mind and runs over her. After all Myrtle Wilson has been a constant thorn in her
flesh throughout the summer, causing her much pain, anxiety, and depression.

While Nick tells us there was an inquest, he omits telling us that he didn’t testify, despite the fact
that his truthful testimony would have implicated his cousin Daisy.

Nick then is complicit in the cover up of a hit and run crime. Furthermore, the night of the accident
when Nick plays peeping Tom, he observes Daisy and Tom in a conspiratorial tete-a-tete:

“They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet
they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the
picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together” (Chapter 7,
152-153).

Early Nick Carraway paints Daisy as a southern beauty filled with charm and innocence. But how
can readers sympathize with a character that is not only guilty of vehicular manslaughter, but a character
that is seen “conspiring together” with her husband to flee. And the text shows that both Tom and Daisy
fled the country.

Let’s compare credibility. In Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, when
Remedios the Beauty —a childish, slow, and clueless character— ascends to heaven, the reader accepts
this fact because the woman in her simple mindedness never sees that her beauty hurts people, and in a
few instances unwittingly causes the death of her lover-admirers. That is not the case with Daisy
Buchanan. Daisy, though she is a slow beauty—she does kill Myrtle Wilson and then flees.
Is Nick Gay or Bisexual?
Much has already been written about Nick’s sexual attraction to masculine females (Jordan Baker),
and to feminine men (the photographer McKee), but in particular his attraction for Jay Gastby (“There
was something gorgeous about Gatsby”). My analysis will explore other aspects of Nick’s sexual
propensities.

Nick has a fixation with noses —noses are used by many narrators as phallic symbols— and uses
the image of the nose as a motif throughout the story. In the 1920s, I. D. Yermakov, a Russian critic,
offered a Freudian analysis of Gogol’s short story, “The Nose,” as a psychosexual tale of desire and
repression.

Let’s explore to see in what sense Nick’s preoccupation with the nose imagery reveals his own
subterranean personality.

Nick begins his motif with Daisy’s prattle about the butler: “I’ll tell you a family secret,” she
whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
(Chapter 1, 18).

At one point in the narration, Nick even refers to T. J. Eckleburg’s sign to mention a nose that is not
even there: “They [eyes] look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacle which
pass over a nonexistent nose” (Chapter 2, 27).

However, when describing the shadowy character Meyer Wolfshiem, Nick is quite lavish in his
portrayal of Wolfshiem’s nose: “A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two
fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril” (73). A moment later, Nick goes from the concrete
to the abstract: “As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling” (Chapter 4, 77).

As we can see, the phallic motif continues to weave, bop, and jab. Recalling what Daisy had said
about the butler’s nose, half way into the story, Nick attempts to make a joke, which passes unperceived
by Daisy: “Does the gasoline affect his [Ferdie’s] nose?” (Chapter 5, 90).

And from a flat nose, a non-existent, and non-olfactory nose Nick moves to a blue nose: “I’ve never
met so many celebrities!” Daisy exclaimed, “I liked that man—what was his name?— with the sort of
blue nose?” (Chapter 6, 111).

A symbolic attempt to break with this motif comes when “Making a short movement, Tom Buchanan
broke her [Myrtle’s] nose with his open hand” (Chapter 2, 41). This violent act comes to signify more
than desire and repression in the narrator, for with the image of a broken nose Nick projects a sense of
impotence; not Tom Buchanan’s impotence but his own since he didn’t defend the abused and battered
woman.

Psychosexual desire, repression, and impotence about the narrator are hidden in plain view.
Readers have to connect the dots to see that Nick is a repressed homosexual. Daisy makes the first
allusion to Nick’s effeminacy: "Nick, you remind me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose" (Chapter 1, 19). Is
she implying Nick is a closeted gay?

 And there's a scene in which another male removes his garments.

During a get-together in New York, Nick meets Mr. McKee, a photographer who “was a pale,
feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone” (Chapter 2, 34). Afterwards McKee takes Nick to his home where they spend the rest of the
night. Nick later remembers: “I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets,
clad in his underwear" (Chapter 2, 42).

To confirm McKee's homosexuality and by implication Nick's, we see a phallic image as the
elevator boy warns “hands off the lever” (Chapter 2, 42). To which McKee responds “I beg your
pardon…I didn’t know I was touching it" (Chapter 2, 42). Was McKee touching the lever or the elevator
boy? Early in the Twentieth Century, American literature had certain taboos that an author could only
approach and conquer as the Jews conquered Jericho—around and around and with noise. The noise is
the carefully selected word-codes and phallic imagery.

When the photographer falls asleep, Nick performs a very strange action: “Mr. McKee was asleep
on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action: “Taking out my
handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the
afternoon” (Chapter 2, 41). Now, what manly man takes such liberties with another man he has just met?

But even from the outset of the novel, Nick tells that he rented his West Egg house with a male,
“when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded
like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the
last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone” (Chapter 1, 3).

This act in itself doesn’t provided sufficient grounds to suspect that Nick and the ‘young man’ had a
homosexual relationship; it is, however, the confluence of incidents that leads one to believe that Nick
was bisexual.

When teased by Daisy that he had a fiancée back home, Nick denies it, making it clear to his readers
that the girl wasn’t a girl-friend but a good friend: “You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of
rumors, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage” (Chapter 1, 19). That is
his defense—a rumor. He also tells his readers that he moved around with young males: “I knew the other
clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants
on the little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee” (Chapter 3, 61).

Quickly, he transitions from young men to the other gender with a startling revelation: “I even had a
short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother
began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly
away” (Chapter 3, 61). Clearly then Nick’s sexual interest isn’t just in young males, but he is also
interested in making love to women, even if only in his imagination. As he meanders through midtown
Manhattan, he observes:

“I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and
imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever
know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the
corners of hidden street, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through
 a door into warm darkness” (Chapter 3, 61).

But let’s take a look at Nick’s relationship with Jordan. First of all, Nick never pursues Jordan with
the vigor of a male in heat. From the very beginning of their acquaintance, Nick detects a whiff of tom-
boyishness about her, and perhaps it isn’t out of the text to speculate that he sees in her the manners and
comport of a lesbian: “She was a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she
accentuated by throwing he body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (Chapter 1, 15).

Nick is a careful narrator, and picks his words with care. No word he inserts is useless; each and
every word has a function to perform. Is one to believe that in describing a tom-boyish lesbian the terms
“with an erect carriage” are just thrown in without ulterior meanings? Later, he indirectly tells us that she
is a manly lesbian by noticing “that she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there
was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon gold courses on clean,
crisp mornings” (Chapter 3, 55).

Yet, even knowing that Jordan is a peculiar character —in appearance and dubious morals— Nick
takes a romantic interest in her; not a deep passionate one, but a lukewarm one: “I wasn’t actually in love,
but I felt a sort of tender curiosity” (Chapter 3, 62).

Notice Nick’s self-examination that carries the despairing musings and laments of old maids,
spinsters, and old bachelors: “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new
decade” (Chapter 7, 143).

As he looks down the lane of bachelorhood at this point in his life, Nick considers a life of
diminishing expectations—presumably sexual life expectations—with single men only: “The Thirty—the
promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of
enthusiasm, thinning hair” (Chapter 7, 143). This is a poignant remark that confirms the “haunting
loneliness” of an old maid.



Essay 3 – Daisy Buchanan: No Golden Girl but a Master of Echolalia
and Deceit

Nick Carraway, the narrator, makes much of Daisy’s beauty and her sultry voice. But it is through
dialogue and action —through her own words and duplicitous behavior— that we can detect her mental
flaws.

Lord Francis Bacon in his essay on Beauty said, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some
strangeness in the proportion.” This quality of strangeness is the fact that Daisy is “slow.” As the story
progresses it becomes clear that some things go over her head and as a result she tends to distrust and
doubt what to others are acceptable events. In one instance Nick perceives this flaw when he says, “She
saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand” (Chapter 6, 114).

Understanding doesn’t come easy to Daisy, and when she offers an opinion, it is always an inane
opinion that often verges on absurdity. Notice how she deals with one single idea by repeating the same
idea three times:

"In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all
radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss
it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

If you count the pronoun "it" you will realize that she has mentioned the longest day of the year five
times. Now, how many of us —unless we are physicists or meteorologists— entertain the idea to “always
watch” for the longest day of the year only to miss it? Is it possible that she associates the summer solstice
(June 20-21) with a personal date that she should both simultaneously remember and forget? June seems
to be an ill-starred month in that summer of Daisy’s discontent.

For, “In June she marries Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than
Louisville ever knew before,” Jordan Baker tells Nick. Since she married Tom in June, then Daisy may be
alluding to her wedding anniversary date; a date that she watches for with painful expectancy only to
dismiss it, or rather to “miss it.” One should also recall that on the eve of her wedding day she receives a
letter (presumably from Gatsby) which distresses her immensely, moving her to the point of drunken
stupor.

As the story unfolds, we learn that Daisy is unhappy in her marriage to Tom, knowing that he is not
only a womanizer but also a violent and abusive man—a batterer.

A character that not only repeats the same words with each utterance, but also repeats trivialities
and stutters has to be slow, if not limited. The British philosopher John Locke said of humans, “in their
thinking and reasoning within themselves, make use of Words instead of Ideas.” In our own times, the
linguist Noam Chomsky sees language as something that grows in the brain. In this light, when Nick
portrays Daisy’s with a paucity of speech, we have no choice but to see her as an empty-headed beauty
with little or no intellectual acumen.

 The Renaissance scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his Copia of Words and Ideas—a treatise on the
varying of speech—says,

“ … repetition of the same word or expression, is a vice not only unseemly but
also offensive. It not infrequently happens that we have to say the same thing
several times, in which case, if destitute of copia we will either be at a loss, or,
like the cuckoo, croak out the same words repeatedly, and be unable to give
different shape or form to the thought. And thus betraying our want of eloquence
we will appear ridiculous ourselves and utterly exhaust our wretched audience
with wariness.”

Echolalia, or the repeating of utterances, betrays a ‘want of eloquence.” Nick, in fact uses the term
‘echolalia’: “There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly
above the echolalia of the garden” (Chapter 3, 54).

But let's return to Daisy’s repetitions: "I looked outdoors for a minute, and it's very romantic
outdoors." Daisy’s idealized world is a chimerical, fabulous, enchanted dimension where she hopes
—with enough faith—she might find love in the form of a rescuing prince.

She sees in her cousin Nick a pleasant, unthreatening figure, who is fun to be with, who is discreet,
and who seems loyal to her. Nick for Daisy is someone who will not cause hurt to her as Jay Gatsby did
with their separation, and as Tom Buchanan does in their unhappy marriage. She compares Nick to a rose:

“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t
he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. “An absolute rose.”

“Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”
“You always look so cool,” she repeated.

As she repeats the word ‘cool’ she emphasizes her sentiments that she finds in Nick a benign soul.
When Daisy accepts Nick’s invitation to visit with Gatsby, little did she know that Nick —this benign
soul acting as a Celestina (a pimp)— would be opening the flood-gates of adultery, misery, and much
unhappiness for her.

When Daisy introduces her daughter Pammy to Nick and Gatsby, more echolalia follows:

“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms.
“The Bles-sed precious. Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now and
say How-de-do.”

Here is another instance when she tells Tom the business Gatsby is in: “I can tell you right now,”
she answered. “He owned some drug stores, a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself.”

And when she asks the chauffer:

"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in grave murmur: "His name is Ferdie."

 When Daisy repeats the name Ferdie in a “grave murmur,” what the narrator signals is the gravity of
her actions; we know that has sealed her fate. Once Daisy enters Gatsby’s mansion, there’s no escape
from that castle of doom. Once in Gatsby’s inner sanctum, dazed and dazzled by the opulence, she can
only make trivial observations, as when she sees the collection of shirts:

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.
"It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before"
(Chapter 5, 98).

Oxford buttoned down shirts were imported from London, and were the expensive uniform that
people in Wall Street would wear. Since Nick was a bond trader, he presumably knew about such
beautiful shirts. We can also note a symbolic connection to Gatsby, as he was referred to as an “Oxford
man.”

What is surprising is that Daisy blurts out not only platitudes and commonplaces, but also
absurdities as in the following examples: “I’ll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically.
“It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" (Chapter 1, 18).

It is also fair to note that Nick refers to Daisy’s laugh as absurd: “an absurd, charming little laugh”
(Chapter 1, 13). But again, what appears an absurdity (to talk about noses in a serious book) may be
pseudo symbols to depict the nosy help, just as the houses are pseudo symbols of opulence —Daisy's,
Jay’s, and Tom's— and representative of the "upper crust" people who walk around with their noses up in
the air.

During the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom at the Plaza Hotel we can witness another case
of echolalia:

“He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You are causing a row.
Please have a little self-control” (Chapter 7, 136).

Besides the echolalia, Daisy also stutters: “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness” (Chapter 1, 8). Can
such a woman —a stutterer, slow, repetitious, shallow, and sardonic— be a paragon of beauty and virtue?
Hardly. Yet, for Gatsby she represents the unattainable white bride, the golden girl in the white
convertible that his uneven education and imagination concocted.

Critic Leslie Fiedler in his book Love and Death in the American Girl has this to say about Daisy
Buchanan: “To Fitzgerald, however, her fairy glamour is illusory, and once approached the White Maiden
is revealed as a White Witch, the golden girl as a golden idol.” Now, Fiedler is speaking about the author
—not the character Gatsby.

When Fiedler refers to Gatsby, he suggests that Gatsby in the end realizes that Daisy is the opposite
of what his wishful imagination had conjured up. His [Gatsby’s] reward is, just as in the fairy tales, the
golden girl in the white palace; but quite differently from the fairy tales, that is not a happy ending at all.
He finds in his bed not the white bride, but the Dark Destroyer; indeed, there is no White Bride, since
Dark Lady and Fair, witch and redeemer have fallen together (“Revenge on Woman,” iv).

Gatsby (on the evidence of the text) dies loving Daisy, the White Bride—not the Dark Destroyer. A
White Bride, I will add, that is slow, simple minded, a stutterer, morally depraved, and of arrested
development—totally incapable of growth.

The French moralist, La Rochefoucauld, writes in maxim 207: “People do not grow mentally after
age 25, nor do they grow older mentally. There is little wisdom based on understanding - most wisdom
consists of prettified disillusions and is based on bitter experience.” Within the realm of the story, Daisy
Buchanan is then reduced to another figure in that mass of women who live by the light of prettified
disillusions and bitter experience—unworthy of redemption.

Essay 4 — Purple Prose and Objective Correlatives
Popular, prodigious, and prolific novelist Stephen King has this to say about the writing of novels:

“In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narrative, which moves the story from point
A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and
dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.”

In this section we’ll analyze the ways in which F. Scott Fitzgerald accomplishes description.
Interiors
Nick Carraway —the narrator and writer— pays a great deal of attention not only to human actions, but
also to the surrounding in which the characters move. Description has to be sensuous, it must appeal to all
the senses, or the description becomes abstract and therefore lost in the verbiage.

“Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat either end of the long couch
and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected,
running together in a soothing tune” (Chapter 1, 22).

In the above passage Nick fills space with a large object (a couch) and paints the scene with a loud
color (crimson), which appeal to eye; we also have Daisy’s voice which reaches our ears. Yet, Nick in
his zeal to create a sedate and lyrical atmosphere comes close to writing purple prose.

Immediately in the same scene, Nick switches from the lofty to the mundane, by focusing on Tom
Buchanan’s boots, and from boots to hair and muscles: “The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the
autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with flutter of slender muscles
in her arms” (Chapter 1, 22).
Exteriors
T. S. Eliot in his essay “Hamlet” (1919) coined the phrase “Objective Correlative,” by which he
meant the use of external objects to signify the momentary subjectivity of a character:

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of event which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must be terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

Edgar Allan Poe opens his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a description of the
exterior of Usher’s house, which in effect is the objective correlative of the subjective feelings and
sentiments that will grip the characters mentioned in the story:

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung
oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing along, on horseback, through the singularly
dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within
view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not hot it was—but with the first glimpse of the
building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit …I looked upon the scene before—upon
the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon a few rank sedges—and
upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of the soul …There was an
iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading
of the imagination could torture in aught of the sublime

F. Scott Fitzgerald, has his narrator Nick Carraway employ a variety of external objects among
which we find boats, automobiles, the weather, the landscape (The Eggs and the Valley of the Ashes), and
above all houses as objective correlatives.

In chapter 8, after Nick narrates the accident in which Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson, and Gatsby tells
Nick that he will take the blame by saying that he was the driver and not Daisy. To capture the gravity,
enormity, and darkness of the situation, Nick describes Gatsby’s house:
His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great
rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable
feet of dark wall for electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a
ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as
though they hadn't been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two
stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat
smoking out into the darkness.
The metaphor Nick uses to end the novel is also an apt objective correlative for the subjectivity of
time that seemed to affect not only Gatsby, but all the characters: “So we beat on, boats against the
current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Essay 5 — Style: Carpentry, Pulleys, and Scaffolding

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Marianne Moore
From the citations that follow we can easily see that F. Scott Fitzgerald employed many rhetorical
techniques that many of his contemporaries had abandoned. But is the judicious use of tropes what gives
his writing that air of connectedness to a tradition of literary writing.

Innuendo
“Well, they say he’s a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhem’s” (Chapter 2, 32).

A girl at one of Gatby’s parties says, “There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like
that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody” (Chapter 3, 48).

“somebody told me they thought he killed a man once” (Chapter 3, 48).

“I dont’ think it’s so much that, argued Lucille skeptically; it’s more that he was a German spy
during the war” (Chapter 3, 48).

“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies (Chapter 4, 65).

"One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second
cousin to the devil” (Chapter 4, 65).

There are entire sections in which the first person narrator reports as if it was an omniscient voice.
Naturally, this strenuous injection defies credulity and mars the narration. When Euripides brought gods
into the stage to resolve mysteries and imponderables, the public would scream deu ex machine. Nick’s
smuggling of hearsay is clumsy; the carpentry shows and the reader may be disappointed and cheated.
Alliteration
Master writers use alliteration —the combination of like sounds— not only to achieve cadence, rhythm,
and euphony, but also to underscore words that the writers wishes the reader to remember.

The title of the novel The Great Gatsby itself is alliterative.

Here are some other examples:

“I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my
shelf in red and gold, like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that
only Midas, Morgan, and Maecenas knew” (Chapter 1, 8).

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (Chapter 4, 85).

“He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that--and he must be about
His Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty” (Chapter 6, 102).
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Chapter 9, 189).
Absolute Phrases
No competent writer can ignore the value of ‘absolute phrases.’ Ernest Hemingway employed this figure
in all his works.

By citing a few examples we will show that F. Scott Fitzgerald employed in his novel one particular form
of the Absolute: the combination of noun plus the present participle.
“As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing
and singing” (Chapter 2, 19).
"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy”
(Chapter 5, 94).
“After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed
slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears” (Chapter 9, 176).
As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing
and singing.
Antithesis
Antithesis is a rhetorical device that enables the writer to balance ideas by juxtaposition. Antitheses are
also called binary oppositions, dichotomies, polarities. For example: The heart of the wise is in the
house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth (Ecclesiastes 7.4).

Let’s note how Nick uses this rhetorical figure:

“Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care
what is founded on” (Chapter 1, 6).

“As she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy,
creaking pivot through the smoky air” (Chapter 1, 35).

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of
life” (Chapter 2, 40).
“Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes picked him out obscurely in the
anteroom, talking to another man” (Chapter 4, 73).
Antonomasia
When we refer to a man-charmer as a Casanova or Elvis Presley as the King, or Bill Clinton the
Comeback Kid, we are using the rhetorical figure called antonomasia, which comes from the Greek
“instead of.”

Antonomasia is an effective weapon in a master writer’s hands. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges
wasn’t shy about inserting rhetorical figures in his stories. In “The South,” he ends the story with this
sentence: “Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how wield, Dahlmann went out
into the night.” Night by antonomasia means ‘death.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald in the following sentence uses the noun Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit as
code words for cities where shady deals take place, cities for mobsters and for stock exchanges: “Almost
at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself, a butler hurried toward him with the information that
Chicago was calling him on the wire” (Chapter 3, 53).

When the butler whispers to Tom: “Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir” (p53), what this
really means by antonomasia is “someone wants to talk to you about stolen securities.”

Use of Adjectives
For the most adjectives distract and detract in fiction not because they are to some extent
superfluous but because they are often unnecessary. Harper Lee in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird has
Atticus Finch say to his daughter Scout, “Eliminate all the adjectives and you’ll have all the facts.”

However, a master writer like Fitzgerald uses adjectives in a manner that adds to the reader’s imagination
by making the reader feel or think together with the rhythm of the narrative.

Let’s take this example:

“…I was alone again in the unquiet darkness” (p21).

Here the writer combines the adjective ‘unquiet’ with the noun ‘darkness.’ The adjective and its negation
usually refer to something physical, while the noun is an abstract noun. By juxtaposing the physical and
the abstract the reader is jolted and made feel the clash.

Here is another example:

“Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.” (p140).
Sentence Openers
Americans’ speech, or to be more precise, speech habits that most use from cradle to grave, follow
a strong pattern that often impedes them from writing well-crafted sentences.
“Kay cut her hair.”

Subject (Kay), verb (cut), and Object (her hair): S-V-O

When people write, they bring their speech habits into writing. That is why so much of the English
newspaper articles, essays, journals, legal briefs, and fiction that we read today are so soporific, even
though the themes might be interesting. Just imagine you yourself reading a lengthy paragraph full of these
S-V-O sentences.

How many times have you, as a reader, found yourself putting a book down, never to pick it up
again? Countless times I’d say. And all because many writers tend to write as they speak.

Why should we write in the manner in which we speak?

By writing in the same way that we speak, we take the easiest path to writing—the path of least
resistance—and end up overusing the soporific pattern “John hit the ball.” There’s neither elegance nor
eloquence in boring and disrespecting your reader with the S-V-O pattern.

Follow this excerpt:

She would not tell me what I wanted to know if she had wanted to. She would not take the time to even verify his
date of birth. She was wide-eyed, blond haired, in her mid-twenties, and obviously bored at the job. Her friends had
nicknamed her ‘Bambi.’ I gathered that much, because she greeted my every request with the haunted look of a dear
caught in the headlights. She said no to everything. I finally gave up. I kept thinking that people like that exist only to
make my life miserable.

How boring! The S-V-O pattern gets old in no time. Based on this, I’ve concluded that a serious
writer should think carefully about opening a sentence with a noun or a pronoun of any kind, be they
definite, indefinite, or possessive.

That is not to say that the S-V-O pattern isn’t useful, or that it should never be used. What we are
saying is that master writers must use ‘sentence variation.’ This is the secret of fine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald knew this, and that is why we see a great variety of sentence openers in his novel
The Great Gatsby.

“Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around
rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people.” (p42).

“With Jordan’s slender golden arm in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the
garden.” (p43).

“Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant groaning of the horns, the
apparition stood swaying for a moment before he perceived the man in the duster.” (p54).

If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed I was almost surprise into
murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in (Chapter 1, 13).
 And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago (Chapter 1, 10).

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its
sweep a sunken Italian garden …(Chapter 1, 12).

Foreshadowing
Argentinian Writer in his short story “Three Versions of Judas” cites an example of the stylistic
technique called ‘foreshadowing’ that competent writers use in their fiction:

“For many, the famous words in Isaiah 53:2-3, He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and
as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is
no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief are a foreshadowing of the crucified Christ at the hour of his death.”

Given Tom’s violent and bullying nature, as portrayed by Nick, it isn’t surprising for the reader to
find black and blue bruises in Daisy; they are the first clues that Tom may be not only a wife batterer but a
woman batterer in general.

In an early scene, Daisy reproaches Tom:

‘“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.”

“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did
do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking
physical specimen of–”

This graphic detail pegs Tom Buchanan as a bruiser—a violent man.

In the first foray into Manhattan, that Sunday afternoon when Nick meets Tom’s mistress, Myrtle
Wilson, we get to see Tom Buchanan’s brutality at close range. Not satisfied with taunting and
disrespecting the photographer Mr. McKee, he insults others. Yet, he reserves the worse treatment for
Myrtle: “Making a short movement, Tom Buchanan broke her [Myrtle’s] nose with his open hand”
(Chapter 2, 41). This action marks Myrtle not only as a victim of abuse, but it foreshadows Myrtle’s
eventual demise.

In chapter 4 Jordan Baker tells the story of how Tom gets in an automobile accident in which the
chambermaid (he had picked up from the hotel) ends up with a broken arm. Broken noses, broken arms,
foreshadow Tom Buchanan’s dominant personality: a man who likes to break people’s spirits: Daisy,
Gatsby, Myrtle, and Wilson.

The violent deaths of Myrtle, Gatsby, and Wilson do not come unannounced, for as early as chapter
4, we are told:

“A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn
blinds, and by more cheerful carriages from friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic
eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid
car was included in their somber holiday” (Chapter 4, 73).

Also, as early as chapter 5, we read about death pegged to Gatsby: “Gatsby, pale as death, with his
hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into
my eyes” (Chapter 5, 91).

Let’s look at how subtle foreshadowing can mark a character. The word counterfeit associates
Gatsby with his contrived identity as well as with counterfeit business and securities. Defunct —from the
Latin defunctus, for death— associates him with a time that is no longer viable, that the past cannot be
recreated,
“Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained
counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the
face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy
who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair” (Chapter 5, 91).
Clichés and Similes
A simile is the comparison of one idea to another, which is usually an image introduced by the
words ‘like’ or ‘as.’

Aristotle in Book III, Chapter 4 of his Rhetoric defines ‘simile’:

“The simile also is a metaphor; the difference is but slight. When the poet says of Achilles that he:
Leapt on the foe like a lion, this is a simile. When he says of him The lion leapt, it is a metaphor.

Here are some examples of how Nick Carraway employs similes:

“She was a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing
he body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (15).

“ … I gathered he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s
mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall” (Chapter 2, 34).

“I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on
my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that
only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew” (Chapter 1, 8).

“This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills
and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke”
Chapter 2, 27).

When a simile is continuously used, it loses its value, becoming a cliché. Competent writers avoid the use
of clichés as they are signs of laziness.

“Picking up Wilson like a doll” (141).
Synesthesia
Synaesthesia is a term is used in literature to describe of one kind of sensation in terms of another
sensation. Note in the following passage how ‘sparkling’ —a visual adjective— qualifies the noun ‘odor,’
which has an olfactory quality. With ‘frothy odor’ we have a transfer of sensation from the kinesthetic to
the nasal; with ‘pale gold odor’ we go from the eyes to the nose.
“With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky,
admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum
blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate” (Chapter 5, 96).
Oxymoron
Master writers tend to inject —unobtrusively— the rhetorical figure called oxymoron. An oxymoron
contains at least two words whose meanings are on first appearance contradictory; yet, that apparent
contradiction may leave the writer with a subterranean meaning that the writer wants to highlight.

If we read, “a sober drunk speaks wise nonsense,” though the contradictions are glaring, the meaning that
drunks and children somehow speak the truth is conveyed indirectly. In music when silences are
emphasized, musicians speak of “resonating silences.”

Jorge Luis Borges —the Argentinian writer of deep and cerebral short stories— in his story “The Aleph”
writes: “Beatriz was tall, fragile, very slightly stooped; in her walk, there was (if I may be pardoned the
oxymoron) something of a graceful clumsiness…”

To characterize the shady character Meyer Wolfshiem as a vulgar man, Nick doesn’t just tell the reader
that Wolfshiem is a common lout, that he wears cufflinks which are made of human molars, but he
indirectly comments on the man’s street dialect, and on his table manners:

“A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the
old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy” (Chapter 4, 75).
When describing Tom Buchanan, Nick shows Tom’s hypocrisy and violent nature by means of the
oxymoron:
"Oh, yes," said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering. "So we did. I remember very
well" (Chapter 6, 108).
"You've got to pull yourself together," he [Tom] said with soothing gruffness (Chapter 7, 147).
In some places in the novels, rather than contiguous contradictory words we find oxymoronic phrasing:
For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of
the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's
wing.
Tense Shift
Just as a first person narration gets the reader closer to the story, the present tense also has the virtue of
involving readers as if the events were happening right in front of their eyes.

Nick uses this technique when he narrates one of Gatsby’s fabulous and bombastic parties. F. Scott
Fitzgerald has acknowledged that he got the party idea from Petronius’ The Satyricon in which the
character Trimalchio hosts lavish and outlandish parties.

Nick tells us that the orchestra ‘has arrived,’ that the last swimmers ‘have come from the beach,’ and that
the cars from New York ‘are parked.’

Suddenly the tense shifts from the past to the present:
“The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air
is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and
enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing
yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by
minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly,
swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath--already there are wanderers,
confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,
joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change
of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
“Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for
courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary
hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the
erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies."
Once is objective of offering the description of a live loud party, he then brings readers out of the
party by returning to the past tense: “ The party has begun” (Chapter 3, 44).
16