Period 4/5 Blog #21

“Nick Carraway is in love with Gatsby”

I’ve read the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic more than any other novel — and with each reading, I grow more convinced

I have read The Great Gatsby more times than any other novel. With each reading, my understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work deepens, and I pick up something I missed previously.

My reading of the book starts with this premise: Nick Carraway is actually the protagonist of the novel. This is not a hard case to make. It could be argued that the narrator of every first-person novel is the protagonist, even if the book is “about” someone else. Nick is the only character who “changes,” in the way they used to teach in high school, and anyway Gatsby is absent for many of the book’s scenes, including the drawn-out ending.

My other premise is less obvious, but no more difficult to argue: Nick is a) gay and b) in love with Gatsby.

Here’s what we know about Nick Carraway, from what he tells us in the first few pages of the book: he was born in 1896, so is about the same age as Fitzgerald; he went to Yale, as his father did before him; he fought in the First World War; he resembles his “hard-boiled” great uncle; his aunts and uncles are worried about him because he is in his late-20’s and still single. Reading between the lines, we deduce that there is something unusual about him, something that concerns his family. So far, Nick’s is exactly the profile of a (closeted) gay young man in a prominent Middle Western family in 1922.

 

From here, we look to Nick’s impressions of the various characters:

 

Daisy Buchanan is the Southern belle with whom Gatsby is so desperately in love that he joins the underworld, amasses a small fortune, and ultimately ruins his life. It is safe to assume that there’s a reason Daisy has been played in the movies by fair beauties like Mia Farrow and Carey Mulligan. Yet here is how Nick, a distant enough cousin to lust for her with impunity if he had such impulses, describes her:

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

Essentially, Daisy, this legendary beauty, this great love of Gatsby’s life…had a nice voice. A voice they later realize sounds like money.

 

Next up, the golfer Jordan Baker. Nick’s take:

I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, disconcerted face.

We can easily imagine Jordan, a prototype of the modern-day female athlete: sporty, fit, trim, and a bit flirty. Other than the word small-breasted—which de-emphasizes the golfer’s feminine attributes—this could be a description of a man.

Nick spends a lot of time with Jordan during the summer when the story takes place—enough so that she is under the impression that he “threw her over.” But we never hear about this. Jordan Baker does not interest him. He is dating her to try and convince himself that he is attracted to her, this boyish woman, but he is not.

 

Then Myrtle, who we can also assume, because a wealthy and athletic man like Tom Buchanan could probably have his pick of available women, is easy on the eyes:

She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.

To Tom, Myrtle is the smoldering portrait of voluptuousness, but Nick is not taken with her at all. Granted, he might not be inclined to like his cousin’s husband’s lover, but I find it curious that he’s so sure her dress is made of crêpe-de-chine.

 

Compare the way Nick views the women of the novel with his description of Tom Buchanan, someone Nick does not particularly care for:

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding boots could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.

Daisy is about the voice, Jordan the erect carriage, Myrtle the crêpe-de-chine. Only Tom is given such an attractive description.

 

Then Nick meets his wealthy neighbor Mr. Gatsby for the first time:

He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you might come across four or five times in your life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

If you came across that passage out of context, you would probably conclude it was from a romance novel. If that scene were a cartoon, Cupid would shoot an arrow, music would swell, and Nick’s eyes would turn into giant hearts.

 

Next, we’ll skip to the part where I believe Nick hooks up with Mr. McKee.

This would be the end of chapter two, before he meets, and falls instantly in love with, Gatsby. He is in Manhattan with Tom, who wanted Nick to meet “his girl,” Myrtle. They are at Myrtle’s apartment with her sister Catherine and some neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. McKee—the former being “a pale, feminine man.” They spend the afternoon together and drink into the night—it is, Nick says, one of the few times in his life he has drunk to excess. There are two couples plus Nick and Catherine, and that arrangement suggests that she is who he should wind up with, but at the end of the night, after Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose, here’s what goes down:

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed.
“Come to lunch someday,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
“Where?”
“Anywhere.”
“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

Then the strange ellipses—the only time in the book Fitzgerald uses them—suggesting action that we’re not privy to. And I do mean action.

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
“Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery House…Brook’n Bridge….”
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station and waiting for the four o’clock train.

 

The Great Gatsby is often praised, and rightly so, for its economy. So much is packed into this slender volume—not much more than 50,000 words, practically a novella. Why would Fitzgerald bother to include this strange interlude, a loopy Nick in bed with the “feminine” Mr. McKee in his underwear at 3 in the morning, if not to show the narrator’s sexual preference? What other purpose can it possibly serve? That Nick is interested in photography?

 

How might Nick’s sexuality affects what we are reading? Gatsby is, after all, an account written by him in Minnesota the year after the events in the book. We see only what Nick lets us see.. If Nick is in love with Gatsby—and this seems pretty clear—then the entire novel operates as a rationalization of that misplaced love. Nick romanticizes Gatsby in the exact same way that Gatsby romanticizes Daisy.

 

Nick wants us to believe, as he does, that Gatsby is different, that “only…the man who gives his name to his book, was exempt from [his] reaction” of scorn because of Jay’s “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such that I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” Translation: “I loved this man.” Unlike Tom and Daisy, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end….”

This is easily disproven when we see that no one comes to Gatsby’s funeral, speaking volumes about how good of a man he really was and how blinded Nick was in his love as he narrated this entire story.

 

 

Your comment must be at least 370 words. Due by Tuesday 3/20 at 11:59pm. Your reply to a classmate is due Thursday 3/22 at 11:59pm.

 

-Do you believe the author made a strong case? Why or why not?

-What were some of the authors strongest arguments? What were some of his weaker points?
-If Nick truly is in love with Gatsby, how does that affect the way the story is told?