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the first time in his career between the two sides of his character. The idealist, the
romantic who believed in possibility and perfectibility and the pragmatist, the
realist convinced that life is circumscribed, nasty, brutish, and short: these opposing
tendencies are both allowed their full play, the drama of the narration is the tension
between them. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald was later to say in
his autobiographical essay “The Crack-Up” (The Crack-Up (1945)) “is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability
to function.” That is precisely what he does in The Great Gatsby, thanks to the use
of Nick Carraway as a narrator: by his own stringent standards, the book is the
product, not only of a refined sensibility and a strenuous act of imaginative
sympathy, but also of “a first-rate intelligence.”
What this first-rate intelligence is applied to is a story about the reinvention of
the self: the poor boy James Gatz who renamed and recreated himself as Jay Gatsby,
and who sees a woman as the crown, center, and confirmation of this process. Daisy
Buchanan is the dream girl whose voice, sounding like both music and money,
measures the contradictions of the dream, its heady mix of mystery and the material,
moral perfection and economic power. Gatsby had known Daisy when he was
younger, Nick and the reader learn, before she was married to Tom Buchanan. Tom,
incidentally, is a man born into wealth and former football hero, whose sense of
anticlimax since his days of sporting glory has tempted him to embrace racist
ideas for explanation and excitement, to convince himself that he is not stale and
passed it; Fitzgerald is a brilliant analyst of the political through the personal, and
his story, lightly and even comically sketched, is a brief history of what tempts people
into fascism. But Gatsby now wants to win Daisy back – to “repeat the past,” as Nick
characterizes it, and “fix everything just the way it was before.” The erotic mingles
with the elevated in this strange but somehow typically American desire to remold
the present and future in the shape of an imagined past: looking backward and
forward, Gatsby embodies a national leaning toward, not just the confusion of
the ethical with the economic, but a peculiar form of nostalgic utopianism. Quickly,
subtly, the dream Gatsby cherishes begins to fray at the edges. The narrative moves
forward on an alternating rhythm of action and meditation, a series of parties or
similar social occasions around which the moments of meditative commentary
are woven; and Gatsby’s parties – which he approaches with the air of an artist, since
they are momentary realizations of his dream of order, glamour, and perfection –
deteriorate ever more quickly into sterility and violence. Daisy becomes less and
less amenable and malleable, less open to Gatsby’s desire to idealize or, it may be, use
her (part of the subtle ambivalence of the novel is that it can, and does, include the
possibilities of both idealism and use). Quite apart from anything else, she refuses
to declare that she has never loved her husband – something that may seem perfectly
reasonable but that Gatsby takes as proof of her contaminating contact with a world
other than his own.
Economical but also elegant, precisely visual but also patiently ruminative, The
Great Gatsby rapidly moves toward catastrophe. It is a catastrophe that draws
together many of the pivotal images of the book. The initial setting for this concluding
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