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drunken revels—he is symbolically separate from it. Like the quester-hero who saves the imperiled kingdom, he is isolated from the world he inhabits. He lives alone and is close to no one but Daisy. He knows none of the people at his par‑ ties, which he throws only in the hope that Daisy will “wander i[n] . . . some night” (84; ch. 4). And he is pictured, most frequently, alone in a tableau that bespeaks his romantic isolation. For example, one evening Nick observes that Gatsby “emerged from the shadow of [his] mansion” and “stretched out his arms toward the dark water” (25; ch. l), “trembling” toward the “single green light, minute and far away” (26; ch. 1) at the end of Daisy’s dock. The night Myrtle Wilson is killed, he stands guard alone, in a “sacre[d] . . . vigil” (153; ch. 7) outside Daisy’s house, in case Tom “tries to bother her” (151; ch. 7) about their affair. Even at his riotous parties, Gatsby is pictured in romantic isolation: “A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell” (60; ch. 3). In a world of corruption, Gatsby is incorruptible because he has an “incorruptible dream” (162; ch. 8). Gatsby’s early life, too, fits that of the quester-hero who saves the fallen world. His origins are mysterious, and even when he reveals who his parents are we learn that “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby . . . sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God. . . . [A]nd to this conception he was faithful to the end” (104; ch. 6). Gatsby even goes through a kind of baptism by water, typical of the messiah figure. “It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon” (104; ch. 6), but by the time he rowed out to Cody’s yacht anchored off the shore of Lake Superior, “it was . . . Jay Gatsby” (104; ch. 6) who emerged from the water to accept a job as Cody’s steward. And like the sun god who, Frye tells us, “is represented as sailing in a boat on the surface of our world” (192), Gatsby sailed with Cody for five years. Indeed, just as the quester-hero is often “a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or successful on his third attempt” (Frye 187), Gatsby’s travels by boat took him “three times around the continent” (106; ch. 6) before he “landed” in the modern world. The narrative of Gatsby’s romantic quest is embedded within a very different kind of narrative: that of Nick’s summer in New York. We learn about Gatsby because Nick’s relationship with him forms a large part of the narrator’s own experience. However, Nick’s narrative is structured by a genre that is the polar opposite of romance: the genre of irony, which, Frye says, “is consistent . . . with complete realism of content” (224). Irony, Frye argues, derives from the mythos of winter. In contrast to the idealized world of romance, Frye observes, the mythos of winter “attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence” (223). This “unidealized existence” is not a world of heroes but of everyday, flawed human beings. It’s a world in which
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