Angel Jaramillo Torres
Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel is a tragic romance.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of a work that can undoubtedly compete for the title of The Greatest American Novel. According to Martin Amis, this is a competition in which all American novelists secretly participate. I am referring, of course, to The Great Gatsby. That’s twice I’ve used the word “great” (actually three times) in this reflection. Perhaps it’s inevitable when talking about the United States. The least American philosopher in history, Martin Heidegger, accused that island-continent of the most significant flaw of gigantism.
I believe that Francis Scott Fitzgerald always had the intuition that he was living at the beginning of a great republican and romantic adventure. That he inhabited the land of Walt Whitman: a young democracy, containing multitudes and about to make its mark on the planet.
In a special sense, Gatsby represents the romantic dreams of a country looking toward the green light of the mansion where his beloved Daisy lives: the eternal feminine, full of vitality and naivety.
For a writer—or for someone who thinks that being a writer is the most fantastic adventure in life—The Great Gatsby is not really about Gatsby, but about its narrator: Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald’s most significant achievement in this novel is to have found the voice with which to narrate his tragedy. Carraway is undoubtedly the only man capable of telling Gatsby’s story.
And who is Nick Carraway? He is the spirit that can recognize in Gatsby “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and in Daisy, the young woman who, when she looks at you, makes you feel like you are the most interesting person in the world.
Every experienced reader knows that a good writer hides their final message in all their characters. Thus, Fitzgerald also has something of Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s formal partner, who is unfaithful to her with a woman on the margins of civilization, if we understand civilization to mean Manhattan or its wealthy suburbs, where he, Daisy, and the mysterious neighbor Gatsby live.
But Tom Buchanan is also the burly former football player from his high school. Scholars of Fitzgerald’s life have discovered that his last piece of writing was perhaps about football and that, at Princeton, he used to talk on the phone in the early hours of the morning with the team’s coach to recommend plays he had thought up. Fitzgerald admired athletes and millionaires because they were the archetypes of all possibilities.
Knowing that Fitzgerald was a lyrical novelist and a great reader of poetry, critic Harold Bloom compared sections of The Great Gatsby to the poetry of John Keats. The parallels are undeniable. More interested in the drama of the characters, I find affinities between The Great Gatsby and the film Casablanca.
Rick Blaine and Jay Gatsby find themselves living in a world after having experienced great love with two unforgettable women. Both will have the opportunity to win them back, but they will not be able to keep them. Both will sacrifice themselves for the sake of both women and their ideals. Blaine will live to see the triumph of a just cause, but a vengeful bullet will kill Gatsby. It is Nick Carraway, however, who has the last word:
We will never forget the green light promised by Daisy’s face.
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