Ending to Chapter 9

Just to firm up your notes as today's ending was rushed. Hopefully though you all grasped the key points.

Structural importance of the ending to Chapter IX:

Nick’s story of the West

}  Abrupt narrative shifts from the bleak scene of Gatsby’s funeral to Nick’s reflections on his ‘Middle West’ (P167)

}  Such abrupt narrative transitions reiterate how despite Gatsby’s name giving the novel its title, the story contained therein as been as much Nick’s as it has been Gatsby’s. 

FRAME STORY: A story within a story.

}  Nick returns to the Midwest as a refuge after the events in New York. He sketches his state of mind at that time in the beginning of the narrative:

“When I came back...last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.’ (P8) 

Whilst at the start of the novel these comments arouse the reader’s expectations about what is to follow, they suggest that Nick was seeking to escape from the traumas just experienced. His journey towards the sophisticated East, however painful it turned out, has proved a journey towards maturity. (Cf Gatsby and Bildungsroman form of the novel) 

‘That’s my Middle West...the thrilling returning trains of my youth.’

}  Nick cherishes what is essentially a Christmas card vision of a vanished world of childhood and innocence. His memories of the Midwest are filtered now through the glow of nostalgia, and he views them with a moral superiority over the disorientating East which has undermined his sense of his own identity.

}  Reference to ‘my’ Midwest reflects Nick’s psychological need for a stable, comprehensible and secure world after Gatsby’s death.

}  P167: Importance of place in shaping narrative events –

“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

}  Nick confesses that since Gatsby’s death New York has become a source of nightmare which has disturbed him from the first even while it excited him:

P167:

“Even when the East excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the bored sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old – even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.’

New York offers freedom from the constraints and irritations of family life in the provinces, but it is at the same time a worrying liberation for a young man like Nick.

The events of the East lead Nick to conclude that, “After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for [him] like that, distorted beyond [his] eyes power of correction.’ He is haunted by the recent past, unlike Gatsby, who was a man haunted by the dream of an impossible future. 

End of Chapter IX:

P171:

}  As Nick goes back to ‘that huge incoherent failure of a house once more,’ a young boy has scrawled an ‘obscene word’ onto Gatsby’s steps which ‘stood out clearly in the moonlight.’

}  Why do you think Nick draws attention to this and what does it symbolise about him as a narrator?

P171:

}  Reference to the moonlight seems to carry us into the domain of romance;

}  Yet the scene Nick depicts is far from enchanted as the moon illuminates the obscene word. Gatsby’s efforts at self-creation began with a word, the changing of his name. Here we encounter a word which has no power to transform, but instead confronts us with a harsh and unpleasant reality. 

}  The fact that it is a boy who has scrawled the obscenity undermines any romantic notion we may retain that childhood is a time of innocence. Corruption has already entered the life of this child growing up in modern America.

}  Nick, a writer who is sensitive to their power, erases them and so demonstrates how he wants his carefully chosen and organised language to delineate Jay Gatsby for posterity, not this arbitrary and offensive scrawl. 

P171 from ‘Most of the big shore places were closed now...’ to the end of the novel.

}  Initially Fitzgerald placed the reference to the Dutch sailors at the end of Chapter I, but throughout the creative process he shifted it to the end of the novel. Structurally, its final positioning provides a suitably evocative conclusion to the novel which has, throughout, been remarkably textured and rich in meaning.

P171:

As Nick goes to the beach he has a vision that transcends the present moment as he imagines how the pioneers who came to America must have felt when they landed on the ‘fresh, green breast of the new world.’

}  Nick’s vision of America is one loaded with wonder and potential; he imagines that ‘for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent...with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’

}  The America Nick describes here is a Utopia, a land of unlimited potential for every ‘human dream.’

}  Complicated treatment of time in the concluding sentences of the novel. 

}  References to time: ‘somewhere back in that vast obscurity’; ‘the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us’; ‘tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning-’; ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

}  References to time are unspecific and unsecure. What is clear through use of this narrative device is that Fitzgerald indicates that the return to paradise that was envisaged by early American settlers was always an ideal rather than a factual reality. A belief in the ‘orgastic future’, in the ecstatic promises of life's potential is as much a condition of ‘modern’ Americans as it was for the indigenous settlers.

}  NB: Memorable image of outstretched arms; direct parallel to Gatsby in Chapter I. Yet the image Nick presents now is a universal one – use of ‘we’ – which underscores the universality of human desire and the need to strive for some vital, yet unspecified goal.