406 Making It New: 1900–1945sequence is the Valley of Ashes, a waste land that embodies “the foul dust floating in
the wake of Gatsby’s dreams,” not least because it reminds the reader that success
is measured against failure, power and wealth are defined by their opposites, there is
no victory in a competitive ethos without a victim. Among the victims in this
valley, presided over by the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg – an enormous advertisement
that somehow sees the realities Gatsby is blinded to – is Myrtle Wilson, a resident of
the place and the mistress of Tom Buchanan. Her victim status is only confirmed
when she runs out in front of a car being driven by Daisy and is immediately killed.
Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, makes the easy mistake of thinking Gatsby is responsible
for his wife’s death. Tom and Daisy, when he asks them where Gatsby lives, do not
disabuse him. So, although it is Wilson who actually kills Gatsby at the end of the
story, the Buchanans are morally responsible too. They retreat “back into their
money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them going.” And, with
Gatsby destroyed with the tacit connivance of the “very rich” he has always admired,
his dream shattered thanks to the quiet agency of the woman he wanted to dwell
at its center, the story is almost over.
Almost, but not quite. At the funeral of Gatsby, Nick meets Henry C. Gatz, the
father of the man who tried to reinvent himself. What he learns about, among other
things, is the scheme of self-improvement that Gatsby drew up when he was still
James Gatz and only a boy. The scheme is written on the fly-leaf of a copy of
“Hopalong Cassidy.” And, although it is an anticipation of the later ambitions of the
hero, it is also clearly a parody of the manual of self-help that Benjamin Franklin
drew up. By extension, it is a parody of all those other manuals of self-help that have
thrived in American writing ever since. It does not take too much ingenuity to
see that a link is being forged between Gatsby’s response to life and the frontier
philosophy of individualism. The link is confirmed when Nick confesses that he now
sees the story of Gatsby as “a story of the West after all”; in a sense, Gatsby and the
Western hero are one. But this is not only a story of the West, Nick intimates, it is
also a story of America. That is powerfully articulated in the closing moments of the
story, when Gatsby’s belief in “the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year
recedes before us” is connected to “the last and greatest of all human dreams” that
“flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes” as they encountered the “fresh green breast of
the new world.” Gatsby believed in an ideal of Edenic innocence and perfection,
Nick has disclosed. So did America. Gatsby tried to make the future an imitation
of some mythic past. So did America. Gatsby tried to transform his life into an ideal,
the great good life of the imagination, that strangely mixed the mystic and the
material. So, the reader infers, did America. Gatsby’s dream is, in effect, the American
dream; and Fitzgerald is ultimately exploring a nation and a national consciousness
here as well as a single and singular man.
But who are the “we” in the famous ending sentence of the novel: “So we beat
on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past?” Americans,
certainly, dreaming of the West in particular, but also surely anyone who tries to
search for meaning, realize an ideal, or just make sense of their life – which includes
just about everyone. Even the brutally material Tom Buchanan tries to grope for anGGray_c04.indd 406ray_c 04 .indd 406 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM