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associated with the modern novel overrides the structure of romance as if to say that romance is no longer possible. This process finds its symbolic expression in the confrontation scene between Gatsby and Tom in the New York hotel. According to the romantic formula, it is here that the hero wins his bride and reveals his true origins, which are royal or associated with some kind of important parentage. Instead, Gatsby reveals, with Tom’s help, that his true origins are far beneath those of his beloved, and the result is that she abandons him. Thus, from the perspective of Frye’s theory of mythoi, the romantic formula “jumps the track,” ceases to function, and the void is filled by the only structure left in the narrative: that of irony. The structure of irony does not succeed, however, in eradicating the structure of romance. Instead, the structure of irony is “haunted” by the very structure it overrides. Perhaps because he knows that romance is no longer possible, Nick’s narrative is marked by an intense nostalgia for a lost past, for the lost world of romance that Gatsby represents. We see this longing in his lyric descriptions of a virginal, idyllic past: descriptions of Daisy and Jordan’s “beautiful white . . . girlhood” (24; ch. 1) in Louisville and of Christmas in the Midwest of his youth, with its “street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow” (184; ch. 9). This nostalgia for a lost innocence, a lost paradise, for the mythos of summer, the genre of romance, reaches its climax in Nick’s closing description of a literal paradise forever gone. As Nick sits on the beach the evening before his return to Wisconsin, he muses on the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (189; ch. 9)
This passage is emblematic of the structural process that occurs over the course of the novel: the mythos of summer (romance, the successful quest) is overrid‑ den by the mythos of winter (irony, the complexities of reality), which remains haunted by the loss of the structure it has overcome. In The Great Gatsby, then, we see the operations of quite a complex structure. We see a narrative grammar consisting of seek-find-lose and its subset, seekbut-don’t-find. This grammar, I have suggested, reflects a worldview associated with the modernist period and with the modern novel’s rejection of the traditional seek-and-find quest. Analogously, the text is structured by a struggle for dominance
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