Information and misinformation – narrative structure and voice in The Great Gatsby
Nicolas Tredell author of a Continuum Reader’s Guide to The Great Gatsby, explores the tantalising way in which Fitzgerald withholds and releases information and misinformation about his protagonist, making the process of reading a constant process of discovery and re-discovery.
When The Great Gatsby is summarized, it can seem like an improbable fiction, with its coincidences, mistaken identities, and violent deaths. But most readers find the novel convincing from its reflective first sentence to its visionary finale, when the story of Gatsby’s Romantic dream aspires to become the story of the USA itself. Many elements contribute to this remarkable achievement, but two intimately interrelated aspects are crucial: its narrative structure and narrative voice.
Getting to know Gatsby
The key feature of the narrative structure of Gatsby is the fragmentary, sporadic, and sometimes non-chronological way in which it releases information (and misinformation) about its title character, so that we get to know him piecemeal, as we might get to know a real person. This information comes in a variety of forms: Nick’s summative judgements on Gatsby, especially near the start and end of the novel, when he affirms Gatsby’s superiority to those around him; his vivid sensory impressions of the man, his mansion, his parties and his car; his evocations of Gatsby’s consciousness at crucial moments, for example when Gatsby shows Daisy round his mansion for the first time, and when she does not phone on the last afternoon of his life; the rumours and myths that circulate about him; Jordan Baker’s memories of his courtship of Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and its aftermath; Tom Buchanan’s allegations about his criminal activities; Meyer Wolfshiem’s recollection of him as an impoverished ex-soldier; and Gatsby’s own extended accounts of his earlier life, which are mostly modulated through Nick’s voice rather than given in direct speech.
An example: Chapter Four
As an example of this fragmentary release of information, we can focus on chapter four, in which Gatsby becomes truly alive to Nick for the first time. The second paragraph of the chapter recounts more of the rumours and myths which circulate about Gatsby: for example, that he once killed a man who discovered that he was a nephew of Paul von Hindenburg (a First World War German field marshal). These rumours are followed by what Nick presents as hard documentary evidence, the famous roll-call of Gatsby’s guests in the summer of 1922 written ‘on the empty spaces of a time-table’, which vividly conveys the energetic, mobile, sometimes disreputable milieu in which Gatsby has risen to prominence. Nick then evokes his closest encounter with Gatsby so far, when Gatsby drives him to lunch in New York in his ‘gorgeous car’ and announces that he will tell him ‘God’s truth’ about his life. But his cliché-ridden account of living ‘like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe’, ‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to [him] long ago’, and becoming a war hero, fails to convince Nick, who is nonetheless fascinated: ‘it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines’. But his incredulity is challenged when Gatsby shows him a medal from Montenegro which looks authentic and a photograph of himself in what could be an Oxford setting. Moreover, Gatsby intimates that a ‘sad thing’ really did happen to him and that Jordan Baker will tell Nick more about it over afternoon tea.
As Gatsby nears the city, his car is stopped by a motorcycle policeman who quickly apologizes and lets him drive on when Gatsby shows him a Christmas card he has received from the police commissioner. This sign of his connection with the forces of law and order is complemented by the living proof of his ‘gonnegtion’ with organized crime in the shape of Meyer Wolfshiem, ‘the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919’, whom Nick meets when Gatsby takes him to a Forty-second Street restaurant for lunch. After Wolfshiem leaves, Tom Buchanan comes into the restaurant, apparently by chance, and Nick introduces him to Gatsby. But Gatsby disappears almost immediately – an instance of a recurrent pattern in the novel in which he comes close to Nick and to the reader but quickly recedes or vanishes.
In the next scene, Jordan Baker, over tea at the Plaza Hotel, provides an extended flashback to a day in October 1917 when she saw Gatsby and Daisy together for the first time, and then relates some of the subsequent history of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy which culminated in Daisy’s marriage to Tom. Afterwards, Nick remarks on the ‘strange coincidence’ of Gatsby buying a house opposite Daisy’s, but Jordan sets him right:
it wasn’t a coincidence at all [...] Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay
For Nick this is an immensely significant moment:
He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
Reading as discovery
Chapter Four exemplifies the strategic withholding and release of information and misinformation about Gatsby, the rhythm of tantalizing distance and sudden closeness, which operates throughout the narrative. By the end of the novel, we have learnt a lot about Gatsby, and it is possible to construct a chronological summary or chart of his life, though many gaps and enigmas remain. But if the novel itself had employed a straightforward chronological structure, it would have been a different book. The structure that we have involves us in a process of discovery in which we piece together Gatsby’s life and character from the fragments which are released to us. Even on repeated re-readings of the novel, the fascination of the discovery process persists, and fresh facets and configurations can always emerge. This is one of the reasons why, as the leading Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli once remarked, ‘The Great Gatsby is inexhaustible’.
Listening to Nick
It is Nick Carraway’s voice – his first-person narrative discourse – which binds Gatsby’s fragments into a coherent and convincing tale. Twenty-first-century ears will undoubtedly hear race, class and gender prejudices in that voice and may also catch whispers of desire to which Nick turns a deaf ear; but these make his voice more plausible, persuading us that we are – or might be – listening to a real person speaking from a real time and place. Nick’s voice, moreover, is complex, encompassing a range of tones: for example, a romantic, imaginative tone which can identify with Gatsby’s romantic aspirations and disappointments and evoke them in lyrical or bleak prose; a sceptical tone which doubts the sincerity of fashionable poses, such as Daisy’s assertion of bored sophistication; and a censorious tone which expresses the desire that the world should be ‘in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever’ after the Gatsby débâcle. These tones contribute to the movement between identification and detachment epitomized in Nick’s description of himself as:
within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Trauma and transformation
Nick’s capacity for detachment, the poise and urbanity which he maintains whatever tone he adopts, should not muffle the deep trauma which resonates in his voice. The ‘foul dust’ which ‘floated in the wake of [Gatsby’s] dreams’ has ‘temporarily closed out [his] interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men’; West Egg ‘still figures in [his] more fantastic dreams’ in a surreal, nightmarish way; Gatsby’s death leaves the East ‘haunted for [him], distorted beyond [his] eyes’ power of correction’. Voicing the tale of his encounter with Gatsby is a way of working through this trauma, which will never be wholly healed and which will undergo a transformation, in the great final passage of the novel, from a personal to a national wound, when Nick’s voice becomes the voice of the bard who speaks for the tribe, for the descendents of the original settlers who came ‘face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to [man’s] capacity for wonder’ and whose dream foundered on the rock of reality.
Source:
This article first appeared in emagazine 42, December 2008.
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