Lesson Objectives:
- To understand the narrative methods Fitzgerald uses to tell the story in Chapter V;
- Be able to analyse and comment on how Fitzgerald’s use of language and symbolism shape meaning in the text.
Narrative Structure:
- Notably this chapter is placed at the centre of the organisation of the novel. What can we infer about its importance based on its structural position?
- Fitzgerald creates an almost unbearably tense atmosphere at the beginning of Chapter 5.
P79: When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire...Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.”
Characterisation of Gatsby:
P79: “Your place looks like the World’s Fair,” I said.
“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “I have been glancing in to some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport.” (An amusement park in Brooklyn).
P80: “Why, I thought-why look here, old sport, you don’t make much money do you?
Not very much.”
This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.
Q: What can we deduce from this description about Gatsby as a character?
- P80: “I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of side line, you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much -... Well this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.”
} Gatsby’s fabulous wealth is a product of the social and moral disorder of the time, and throughout the narrative he is implicated in the illegal activities that flourished across America.
Nick’s reaction:
P80: “I realise now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises in my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there...I was too absorbed to be responsive.
Q: Why do you think Nick reacts the way he does and what does this suggest to the reader about him as a character?
} Gatsby’s offer lacks gentlemanly tact, and so Nick rejects it on the grounds of good taste or manners.
} He might otherwise have been corrupted by easy money. After all, there were many other young men who would show few scruples (principles), like the young Englishmen at Gatsby’s party:
‘I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.’ (P43)
The day of Gatsby and Daisy’s meeting:
P81: “The day agreed upon was pouring with rain.” – An unmistakable sense of foreboding worked in to the narrative structure through use of pathetic fallacy.
Q: Describe Gatsby’s appearance and behaviour before Daisy arrives at Nick’s (P81 – 83)
Descriptions of Gatsby:
} P81 “An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie, (dual associations of innocence as well as wealth) hurried in. He was pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes...He looked out the window at it, but, judging from his expression, I don’t believe he saw a thing.”
Theme of sight; lack of realistic vision.
Voice and Vision:
P82: Descriptions/adverbs of vacancy and uncertainty in Gatsby’s character:
‘He remarked vaguely...’ ‘he added hollowly...’ ‘Gatsby looked with vacant eyes...’ he spoke ‘in an uncertain voice that he was going home.
} Importance of TIME as an aspect of narrative can not be understated in Chapter V.
P82: ‘Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!’ He looked at his watch as if there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. ‘I can’t wait all day.’ Don’t be silly; it’s just two minutes to four.’
Q: Why do you think Gatsby reacts like this?
Characterisation of Daisy; her use of language
P82: “Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?”
NB: The recurrent use of ‘absolutely.’ Clearly ‘absolutely’ has become one of those empty words that make up part of the bantering argot (slang/jargon) of Daisy’s social set of acquaintances. However, its repeated usage nullifies its seriousness and renders it essentially meaningless.
Clearly though there is in Nick’s narrative discourse a desire for something absolute, something essential, something that is ‘Real’ in a more than contingent (conditional), material or accidental way.
} Daisy’s voice is central to her characterisation:
P82: “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.”
Time
Its complicated treatment is used to develop the present story between the central characters, but time in Gatsby is irreversibly bound up in the past.
Importance of Time
Read P84 closely, underlining any references to time/clocks you can find.
Q: How are the various references to time symbolic? What do you think Fitzgerald is trying to highlight for the reader?
Symbolic significances to time:
} Through his ostentatious house and expensive parties which stand as an impressive advertising display intended to impress Daisy, time is the one thing that Gatsby despite his wealth and best efforts, he cannot ‘fix.’ He cannot even handle time very well.
} A04: Contexts of Production
Yet Gatsby’s certainty that he can repeat the past, owes a lot to the advertising culture of America during the 1920’s. In the marketplace, time is reversible as advertisers can create or recreate whatever they want.
} But for Gatsby’s dream to come true, time must not only be reversed, but erased, and this is what makes its fulfilment impossible.
} P84: Clock is described as being ‘defunct’ – makes it a fitting symbol of how, for Gatsby, time has stopped since he lost Daisy, his dream. It wields symbolic significance to the attempt he is making to stop time and recreate the past.
P84: “Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place.
} ...’I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.’
} Gatsby only seems to have pushed time backwards and destroyed its power. This incident with the clock is symbolic of Gatsby’s need to rekindle the dreams of his past where Daisy stands as a cherished notion which he [foolishly/naively] feels he can recapture and repurchase.
} P89:
Gatsby is compared to ‘an over-wound clock.’
Q: What do you think Fitzgerald is trying to suggest about Gatsby through this image?
} An important image in the novel’s wholly complicated treatment of time.
Gatsby envisages his future in terms of an event that is irretrievably in the past. He longs for a future time when he can live perpetually in the intensity of that moment when he fell in love with Daisy as a teenager.
} However, the intense present that Gatsby longs for is nothing more than an impossible dream. However strong his desire for Daisy is, he cannot alter or arrest the inexorable passage of time.
Ironic reference to time:
} P92: As Gatsby commands Klipspringer to play the piano, he plays a popular song of the day:
‘One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer
The rich get richer and the poor get – children.
In the meantime,
In between time.’
} Gatsby is fully involved in the meantime of history in getting richer by illegal means. Even so, he believes he can step ‘in between time’ into a timeless moment of personal vision where he desires whole-heartedly to convert his past with Daisy in to his future.
Voice shaping meaning as the story continues...
P84:
‘We haven’t met for many years,’ said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
‘Five years next November.’
The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least another minute.
-Reader plunged into Gatsby’s mind. The speech directly attributed to Gatsby gives statement a sense of immediacy.
Change in Gatsby:
P86:
‘I went in making every possible noise in the kitchen...but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears... But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.’
Q:Does Gatsby seem different here than when he is at one of his lavish parties?
Point of View
Used by Fitzgerald to shape how we view characters, particularly shapes our view of Gatsby.
Nick’s perception of Gatsby:
P86: ‘He smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light ...” “It’s stopped raining.”
Nick transforms Gatsby into a larger than life mythical figure. Despite the heightened style of the narrative there are moments that reveal a close personal identification when he seems to share vicariously in both Gatsby’s pleasure and pain.
RECURRENT IMAGES
What recurrent images have you noticed so far in the chapter?
Recurrent Images: the green light:
} P90:
“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock...” ‘Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.’
Symbolic Significance of the green light:
} The green light on Daisy’s house that Gatsby gazes wistfully at from his own house across the water represents the "unattainable dream.“The green light comes to symbolise the distant and unattainable Daisy of his vision.
} Thus, Gatsby’s dependence on this symbol is full of contradictions. While he is engulfed with the glow of fantasy in his own invented world, he is blind to the corruption he has become involved in as he seeks to realise his dream. Daisy ultimately can never measure up to Gatsby’s vision of her.
} Ironically the colour green is typically associated with life and growth. Yet for Gatsby, the nature of his dream has left him clinging longingly to the past in a beautiful, crystalline yet stagnant way and his hopes of converting his past with Daisy successfully to the future are fraught with complications.
Recurrent images: Light
Note the references to light throughout the novel:
P87:
‘My house looks well, doesn’t it? he demanded. ‘See how the whole front of it catches the light.’
‘Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons gleamed in the sunlight.’
Continual references to light help to convey a particularly soft and muted radiance that is associated with a romantic or an idealising emotion. Daisy, as the object of Gatsby’s intense feeling, is associated more often with golden sunlight; the gold however also links with the hard but valuable metal too.
Theme of nostalgia illustrated in Gatsby’s house helps develop the story... The past’s relationship with the present is elemental to both shaping and propelling the construction of the narrative.
} Read P88-89 from ‘Instead of taking the short cut....to ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such-such beautiful shirts before.’
} Q:Why do you think Daisy cries ‘stormily’ when Gatsby shows her his shirts?
} Gatsby’s shirts, described in sensuous detail, become for him the symbols by which to express five years of devotion and struggle. There is nothing Daisy can say when confronted with such helpless devotion and so she cries. However, the narrative allows her no depth of feeling; her personal point of view is never revealed to the reader.
} Throughout the guided tour of the mansion, Fitzgerald keeps Daisy and Gatsby’s conversation with one another to a minimum. What is implicit in their lack of dialogue is that they communicate their feelings for one another through their actions and through what remains unsaid.
E.G:
‘He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.’
} In terms of how Fitzgerald puts the narrative together, the descriptions of Gatsby’s mansion is highly economical; he conveys the opulence in a very compact way.
} NB: All of the rooms through which they progress are referred to in the plural.
‘...we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons...through period bedrooms, through dressing rooms and poolrooms...’
} This plurality gives an impression of their spuriousness (hollowness) and futility (pointlessness), as well as their ostentation.
} You could argue that Gatsby’s mansion is not a home but an extravagant prop in his dramatic presentation of his love and desire for Daisy.
} Daisy enjoys touching the brush of a ‘toilet set of dull gold.’ (P89) The following failed attempt at coherent speech from Gatsby is underpinned by his awkwardness and embarrassment. He seems more akin to an inexperienced teenager in love as the intensity of his feelings are stressed through his descent into inarticulacy as he is overcome by the seductive image of Daisy brushing her hair.
‘It’s the funniest thing, old sport,’ he said hilariously. ‘I can’t – When I try to –’
Emotions:
} P89: Gatsby ‘took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel...’
} Almost as if this action is a measure of his feelings for Daisy.
} As Daisy cries and Gatsby falls silent the lack of speech between the two characters serves to communicate the complexity of emotions that is bubbling under the surface. To have them voicing their feelings might perhaps have instilled a sense of anticlimax into the narrative.
Gatsby’s Dream
The dream that fuels everything....
Nature of Gatsby’s dream:
P92-93:
“As I went over to say good-bye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything...No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.”
} Nick speculates on how/what Gatsby may be feeling. This passage provides a good example of the way Nick, although a first-person narrator rather than an omniscient one, can suggest the inner workings of the minds of other characters, especially Gatsby’s, by entering imaginatively into them.
Nick’s perceptions of Gatsby’s dream:
} Nick infers from an outward sign which he observes – Gatsby’s expression of bewilderment – that Gatsby faintly doubts the quality of the happiness he feels.
} A02: Language shaping meaning:
The word ‘doubt’ sounds ominous; despite Gatsby’s semi-religious devotion to Daisy, ‘doubt’ implies that perhaps Gatsby is starting to lose his faith.
Q:Are hopes and dreams always centred on a future belief?
Is this more important than the actual satisfaction of one’s desires?
Why or why not?
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