Deconstructing our world

It might be interesting to think of the seek‑find‑lose grammar of The Great Gatsby as the modern novel’s rejection of the traditional quest formula. The traditional quest is structured by a seek‑and‑find grammar. Even if the hero dies achiev‑ ing the goal of his quest, or attempting to achieve it, the world is transformed in some way by his effort: something important is found. Thus, the basic plot formula Todorov isolated consists of an attribute transformed by an action: (1) attribute (for example, the protagonist is unsuccessful), (2) action (he seeks suc‑ cess), (3) attribute (he is successful or, at least, has learned something important as a result of his quest). The traditional quest is thus redemptive in some way. As we have seen, in Fitzgerald’s novel, the characters’ attributes are not trans‑ formed by the hero’s action nor by their own actions. At the novel’s end the characters have the same attribute—the same lack—with which they began, and apparently nothing is learned in the process. Gatsby is dead, presumably without having admitted to himself that Daisy has abandoned him and with‑ out living long enough to benefit from that insight had it occurred. Myrtle and George are dead, without having learned anything from their experience. The last time we see Jordan, she’s putting up her usual false front, lying to Nick that she is unmoved by his withdrawal from their relationship and is engaged to someone else. Finally, Tom and Daisy, true to form, flee the chaos they helped create, “retreat[ing] back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together” (188; ch. 9). The only exception to this rule is Nick, who is transformed by his experience in New York. As the narrative opens, he is very optimistic, feeling that “life was beginning over again with the summer” (8; ch. 1). He’s excited by his new job and his new life in New York. By the end of the summer he is utterly disil‑ lusioned, abandoning his plans for a new career and a new life in the East: “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (6; ch. 1). However, Nick’s transformation is not redemptive. Although he certainly learns some‑ thing important about human nature over the course of that summer, the lesson produces in him a dark vision of human life. His attitude, as the novel closes, is hopeless and despairing: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (189; ch. 9). If the traditional quest formula—seek‑and‑find (or seek‑and‑be‑transformed)— can be associated with a worldview that includes the possibility of redemption, then perhaps the seek‑find‑lose (or seek‑but‑don’t‑find) grammar can be associ‑ ated with a worldview in which redemption is impossible or highly unlikely. This more pessimistic, or some would say realistic, vision of human experience is the vision associated with the modernist worldview, which dominated Anglo‑

European literature from the beginning of World War I (1914) to the end of World War II (1945) and which The Great Gatsby epitomizes. We can certainly find numerous examples of this grammar in modern novels, for example, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and Women in Love (1920), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Presumably, the readers of these works, rather than the characters that populate them, are supposed to undergo whatever transformation is possible, but the texts do not offer a worldview that could be called redemptive. (Analogously, we might char‑ acterize the grammar of the postmodern novel as don’t‑bother‑to‑seek. Certainly, it might be argued that novels such as Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays [1970], Joseph Heller’s Something Happened [1974], and Don DeLillo’s White Noise [1985] are structured by such a grammar.) My speculation that The Great Gatsby’s seek‑find‑lose grammar reflects the mod‑ ern novel’s rejection of the traditional quest formula is compatible with the way in which I think Fitzgerald’s novel requires us to apply Northrop Frye’s theory of mythoi. For according to Frye’s framework, The Great Gatsby embeds the struc‑ ture of romance (Gatsby’s narrative, the mythos of summer, the quest) within the structure of irony (Nick’s narrative, the mythos of winter, realism), and the second structure offers a kind of running commentary on the first, which, by the novel’s close, forces Nick to realize that the structure of romance (Gatsby’s narra‑ tive) is no longer possible in the modern world. That is, in Fitzgerald’s novel, the structure of irony contains and eventually overrides the structure of romance. Gatsby is, of course, the hero of the romantic quest. Although all the other characters have “quests” of their own, only Gatsby’s occurs within the mode of romance. In Anatomy of Criticism Frye notes, “[t]he romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish‑fulfillment dream, and for that reason . . . [i]n every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance” (186). For the get‑rich‑quick Jazz Age of the American 1920s, the kind of meteoric financial rise Jay Gatsby achieved was emblematic of the American dream, which clearly was and still is a romantic dream of wish fulfill‑ ment. Typical of romance, too, is Gatsby’s persistent search for a past Golden Age, which, for him, was his courtship of Daisy Fay in Louisville before he was sent to war. Upon his return to America after the war, he devoted himself to amassing a fortune and following her social activities in the newspapers. When he was able, finally, to buy a mansion across the bay from hers, he arranged to meet her again so that he could “fix everything just the way it was before” (17; ch. l), so that he could return to the Golden Age. In fact, all of Gatsby’s activities between the time he met Dan Cody to the moment at which he is reunited with Daisy at Nick’s cottage constitute the series of minor adventures the romantic hero must undertake before the major adventure—