Subjective reader‑response theory

with which he bought his mansion, the money that pays for Gatsby’s extrava‑ gant parties comes from criminal activities associated with Meyer Wolfsheim, the novel’s most sinister and one of its most vulgar characters. And as Nick points out, Gatsby’s guests “conducted themselves” in extremely vulgar fashion, “according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks” (45; ch. 3). Almost everyone is rude and obnoxious. They gossip mercilessly about their host, whom few have met or care to meet. And the crowd, itself in varying degrees of drunken hysteria, is frequently treated to a drunken display by one or another of its members. There is, for example, a young woman who “dumps” down a cocktail “for courage” and “dances out alone on the canvass to perform” (45; ch. 3); “a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter” (51; ch. 3); a driver so drunk that, when his car winds up in a ditch beside the driveway, “violently shorn of one wheel” (58; ch. 3), he doesn’t realize it has stopped moving; and a drunken young girl who has to have her “head stuck in a pool” (113; ch. 6) to stop her from screaming. The setting is described, however, in an intensely romantic fashion: “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham‑ pagne and the stars” (43; ch. 3). The “premature moon” is “produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket” (47; ch. 3), and even the refreshments seem enchanted: a “tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight” (47; ch. 3), and on “buffet tables garnished with glistening hors‑d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold” (44; ch. 3). The setting is thus described as if it were a quiet pastoral scene—“blue gardens,” “whisperings,” “stars”—in a mythical king‑ dom where the moon is somehow magically produced “premature[ly]”; where cocktails “floa[t]” toward those who desire them; and where food is “bewitched.” Of course, we must remember that Nick is our narrator. We see the settings in the novel through his eyes. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that, in those scenes in which setting and action are at odds, the unfulfilled longing evoked is Nick’s. He yearns for a world of pastoral beauty, like the world he knew as a youth in Wisconsin, but that world is gone. The combined effects of adulthood, World War I, and his own lack of purpose have wiped it out for him. But opulence creates romantic possibilities. What Nick said of Gatsby is also true of himself: he “was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves” (157; ch. 8). Nick longs for the romantic possibilities he sees in the world of the wealthy although most of the people who inhabit that world seem blind to, or take for granted, its idyllic quality. As these examples illustrate, The Great Gatsby’s haunting imagery tells us that unfulfilled longing is universal and inevitable. No matter who we are or what

we have, we cannot be long content: we will inevitably long for something else. We may attach that longing to an object and believe that we are longing for something, whether that something lies in our past or in our future. Or we may not attach that longing to an object, in which case we will experience it as a vague restlessness, the kind of restlessness that sends Melville’s Ishmael to sea “whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul” (21). But unfulfilled long‑ ing, in one form or another, is inescapable. Even on that afternoon when Gatsby finally reunites with Daisy and “glow[s]” with “well‑being” (94; ch. 5) because he has learned that she still loves him, “there must have been moments . . . when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because . . . [n]o amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (101; ch. 5). This sense of inescapability, this feeling that unfulfilled longing is inherent in the human condition, is reinforced in the novel by the static quality of its imagery of unfulfilled longing. Each of the images we’ve analyzed—indeed, most of the imagery in the novel—seems to exist in a timeless present, a fixed tableau, frozen forever like the lovers carved on the Grecian urn in Keats’s famous Ode: “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (11. 17–20). For just as wealth “imprisons and preserves” forever “youth and mystery” (157; ch. 8), unfulfilled longing imprisons and pre‑ serves forever that for which it longs. Let’s take a look at two images of unfulfilled longing that illustrate this quality of timelessness with particular clarity. When Tom and Daisy finally attend one of Gatsby’s parties, Daisy is attracted, at the beginning of the evening, by the sight of a “celebrity of the movies,” a “gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree” with her director “bending over her” (111; ch. 6). At the end of the evening, Nick notices that “the moving picture director and his Star” are “still under the white plum tree . . . their faces . . . touching except for a pale thin ray of moonlight between” (113; ch. 6). He says, “It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity” (113; ch. 6). This is an image of longing—literally, a physical leaning toward the object of desire—that seems to exist in a dimension beyond time, like the moment frozen forever on Keats’s urn. The characters seem barely to move over the course of an entire evening, and the timeless quality of the image is increased by the otherworldliness of the pictorial details: the woman is a “scarcely human orchid,” the only vegetation in sight is a “white plum tree,” and the only light is a “pale thin ray of moonlight.”

A similar tableau of unfulfilled longing is presented when Tom, Nick, and Gatsby, waiting outside the Buchanans’ house to drive Daisy and Jordan to New York City, see a single sailboat in the distance. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. . . . Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog days alongshore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles. (1; ch. ) The unfulfilled longing represented here is the longing for paradisal fulfillment, the longing to escape the real world. The extremely slow movement of the boat, insisted on twice in this short passage (it “crawled slowly” and “[s]lowly the white wings of the boat moved”), the great distance the boat seems to be from land (from where the characters stand, it looks like “one small sail”), and the classic colors of the seascape (white sails against blue sky) freeze this image as it would be frozen by paint on canvas. The sense of timelessness this image evokes is increased by its mythical quality: the “fres[h],” “cool” world in which the boat sails is contrasted sharply with the real world in which Tom, Nick, and Gatsby stand, with its “stagnant . . . heat,” “hot lawn,” and “weedy refuse of the dog days alongshore”; the boat’s sail turns into “white wings”; and its destination is some mythical never‑never land, “the abounding blessed isles.” It is interesting to note in this context that time seems almost literally to stand still at the very center of the novel, when Gatsby and Daisy, whose relation‑ ship embodies unfulfilled longing, reunite. The clock on Nick’s mantlepiece— which Gatsby leans his head against, knocks over, and catches in his hands—is “defunct” (91; ch. 5): time has stopped. As the scene progresses, Gatsby’s exis‑ tence in time stops, too: he “run[s] down like an overwound clock” (97; ch. 5). And as he and Daisy sit silently together in the gathering dusk, “remot[e]” (102; ch. 5) from the real world in which time passes, the timeless dimension they inhabit is foregrounded by its sharp contrast with the bustle of the real world outside: “Outside the wind was loud and . . . [a]ll the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men‑carrying, were plunging home” (101; ch. 5). It is the universal theme of unfulfilled longing, so powerfully carried by the novel’s magnificent imagery, that has made The Great Gatsby the enduring mas‑ terpiece it is. As publisher Charles Scribner III said of the novel in 1992, “to the present day its place at the top of Scribner bestsell[ing paperbacks] has never been challenged” (205). The Great Gatsby doesn’t have this kind of enduring value because of its social commentary on the Jazz Age, though an excellent social commentary it surely is. The novel has maintained its “hallowed place in American literature” (Scribner 205) because it speaks to something deep in the heart of human experience: the unfulfilled longing that is at the core of the human condition. Like Daisy’s voice, which “held [Gatsby] most with its

fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over‑dreamed,” the lyric mel‑ ancholy of unfulfilled longing is a “deathless song” (101; ch. 5), and Fitzgerald’s superb novel has captured that song as no other novel has.

Questions for further practice: New Critical approaches to other literary works

The following questions are intended as models. They can help you use New Criticism to interpret the literary works to which they refer or other texts of your choice. 1. In Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” (1898), how do nature imagery and point of view support the theme that individual circumstances, not abstract rules, determine what is right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy? 2. In Alberto Moravia’s “The Chase” (1967), how does the characterization of the narrator, the story’s opening and closing scenes, and the use of nature imagery support the theme that adultery is a form of emotional distance that signals the end of intimacy in a marriage? 3. How does Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1926) use geographical, historical, and biblical allusion, as well as nature imagery, to forward his theme about the negro race? How would you state that theme? 4. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), how does setting work to create sympathy for Willy as the victim of forces beyond his control, thus contributing to the theme that the needs of the individual are often sacri‑ ficed to the demands of society? 5. In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” (1972), how is the topic of initiation suggested by the point of view from which the story is told, the narrator’s tone of voice and use of slang, and the imagery used to describe the toy store and the children’s response to it? What theme do you think is implied by your analysis of these formal elements? Is that theme borne out by the story’s characterization of the narrator? How? (If not, try to find a theme that is supported by all of these formal elements.)

For further reading

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York:

Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. (See especially “Gray’s Storied Urn,” 96–113; “Keats’

Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” 139–52; and “The Heresy of Para‑ phrase,” 176–96.)