404 Making It New: 1900–1945the Jazz Age; his Tales of the Jazz Age was published in 1922. “I wanted to be the
historian of that generation,” Fitzgerald explained, “and at first I could only see it as
it saw itself.” That is not strictly true and does less than justice to his earlier work.
Amory Blaine, the protagonist in This Side of Paradise, is presented with glancing
irony along with entranced sympathy, as a representative of the age: as the working
title for the novel, “The Romantic Egotist,” clearly indicates. And Tales of the Jazz Age
includes “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” one of the most corrosive contemporary
accounts of the confusions of capitalism. But it is true that, for this earlier work,
Fitzgerald won fame, fortune, and the title of “the poet laureate of the Jazz Age,” all
of which enabled him and Zelda to lead a life of boisterous consumption. For a
while, the couple lived in New York City, their glamorous lifestyle supported by
a steady production of short stories from Fitzgerald, many of them of stunning
mediocrity. Then, in 1924, they moved to France, where they could live more
cheaply. Two years after their removal there, two more books were published: a third
collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men, and Fitzgerald’s third and probably
finest novel, The Great Gatsby.
In writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald set out, as he put it, to “make something
new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”
And, to achieve this, the first and most important choice he made was to drop the
third-person narrator of his two previous novels: This Side of Paradise and The
Beautiful and Damned (1922). Instead of an omniscient viewpoint, there is a
fictional narrator: Nick Carraway, a man who is only slightly involved in the action
but who is profoundly affected by it. To some extent, Nick is quite like the protagonist
Jay Gatsby. Like so many representative figures of the 1920s, including Fitzgerald
himself, both are young people from the Midwest trying to prove themselves in the
East. The East, and in particular its cities, have become for them a new frontier, a
neutral space in which their dreams of wealth, measureless power, and mobility
may perhaps be realized. Both Nick and Gatsby, too, have a love affair with a
charismatic woman that ends in disillusion: Gatsby with Daisy Buchanan (a charac-
ter modeled in part on Zelda Sayre) and Nick with a glamorous golf professional
called Jordan Baker. This creates a bond of sympathy between the two men. Part of
the immense charm of this novel is inherent in its tone of elegiac romance. Nick is
looking back on an action already completed that, as we know from the beginning,
ended in disaster, some “foul dust that floated in the wake” of Gatsby’s dreams; he is
also recording how he grew to sympathize, like and admire Jay Gatsby – on one
memorable level, this is the story of a love affair between two men. Liking, or even
loving, does not mean approval, however; and it does not inhibit criticism. Nick
has had “advantages” that Jay Gatsby, born to poverty as James Gatz, has not had.
He has a reserve, a common sense, and even an incurable honesty that make him
quite different from the subject of his meditations. That helps to create distance,
enables him to criticize Gatsby and the high romanticism he embodies, and it
makes his commentary vividly plural; Nick is, as he himself puts it, “within and
without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled” by the hero he describes. The use
of Nick Carraway as a narrator, in effect, enables Fitzgerald to maintain a balance forGGray_c04.indd 404ray_c 04 .indd 404 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM