Transactional reader‑response theory

[W]hat gave [her house] an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there. . . . There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender, but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. (1–; ch. ) Because, in this passage, Gatsby dreams of a lifestyle that is largely unknown to him and seems unattainable, he idealizes it just as Daisy, Jordan, Nick, and Tom idealize their irretrievable youth. The phrases “breathless intensity,” “ripe mystery,” and “hint of bedrooms” create simultaneously an air of sensuality and a feeling that Gatsby is a little boy with his face pressed against the window of a candy store, longing for the sweets he sees displayed inside, which is, metaphori‑ cally, precisely what he is doing. The imagery here also creates a sense of fecun‑ dity, of a fruition so longed for that it seems about to happen, as we see in the words “ripe,” “radiant,” “fresh and breathing and redolent,” and “flowers.” In fact, such is the power of Gatsby’s longing that it can turn “motor cars” into natural objects: the romances that occur in Daisy’s house are “redolent”—that is, sweet‑ smelling, usually of flowers—of “this year’s shining motor cars.” It should be no surprise, then, that such a longing as this can disconnect itself from its human source and live on its own, as it does when Daisy withdraws from Gatsby during his confrontation with Tom in the New York hotel room: “only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room” (142; ch. 7). One of the more frequently noted images of Gatsby’s longing for future fulfill‑ ment is that of the protagonist standing alone on the beach before his Long Island mansion, “trembling” (26; ch. 1) under the “silver pepper of the stars” (25; ch. 1) with his arms outstretched toward the “single green light, minute and far away” (26; ch. 1) at the end of Daisy’s dock. This image recalls one discussed ear‑ lier: that of Gatsby in Louisville after Daisy’s departure, his hand outstretched toward his lost past. But this time, the image of Gatsby’s outstretched arms merges longing for the past with longing for the future, which, for him, have become one and the same: the fulfillment of his love for Daisy that he has come to Long Island to gain. The light at the end of her dock is green, carrying with it the hope of new beginnings that the green verdure of spring brings with it. And though the green light seems “minute and far away,” Gatsby is, paradoxi‑ cally, geographically and financially closer to Daisy than he has been since he lost her.

Perhaps the densest imagery used to describe Gatsby’s longing for future fulfill‑ ment occurs in the description of the young protagonist walking down a Louis‑ ville street with Daisy, dreaming of greatness to come: Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (11; ch. ) In this remarkable passage, the imagery of unfulfilled longing performs at least two important functions. First, as we saw in the case of Nick’s longing for future success, the imagery here links human dreams to the concerns of nature: the “stir and bustle among the stars” seem in sympathy with the “mysterious excite‑ ment” the characters feel because of the change of seasons, which is linked, in turn, to the threshold of the future at which they stand and which Gatsby longs to cross. In other words, the imagery suggests that human longing is as natural and inevitable as the seasons. Second, the imagery weds the cosmic quality of Gatsby’s longing—his “unutterable visions” of the future in which his mind “romp[s] . . . like the mind of God” and he dreams of “gulp[ing] down the incom‑ parable milk of wonder”—to the mortal “incarnation” of that longing: Daisy. In other words, even when human longing is attached to something as specific and ordinary as the desire for a woman, it is really the incarnation of a cosmic force larger than we are. To put the matter in slightly different terms, even when we think we long for a specific person, event, or object, our longing is fed by something greater than our individual selves, by something inherent in the condition of being human. Indeed, the most frequent images of unfulfilled longing used to depict characters are those in which the longing is vague and undefined, not attached to any specific goal. For example, the vague quality of Nick’s longing is expressed in his comment upon crossing from Long Island into New York City: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” (73; ch. 4). We’re not told what kind of mystery and beauty are promised because Nick doesn’t know. His longing is nonspecific. All he knows is that he wants something new