Deconstructing literature

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

human misery is the result not of fate or of some kind of cosmic intervention but of sociological and psychological causes. In other words, this is the real world, warts and all. In the real world, in which Nick and all the other nonheroic characters live, it isn’t easy to amass a fortune or find your one true love. Sometimes it isn’t even easy to find a satisfying career, as Nick knows, or survive financially, as George Wilson knows. In this world, people don’t look “gorgeous” in their “pink rag of a suit” (162; ch. 8) or throw lavish parties in the hope that their lost love will appear, as Gatsby does. Instead, like Gatsby’s guests, they go to parties to sponge off a host they’ve never met and get obnoxiously drunk on his liquor. Their clothing “stretch[es] tight over . . . rather wide hips” (31; ch. 2), like Myrtle’s, and they have “sticky bob[s] of red hair” (34; ch. 2), as Myrtle’s sister Catherine has. In the real world, “grey, scrawny Italian child[ren]” (30; ch. 2) live in places like the “valley of ashes,” and people enjoy standing around the scene of an accident to watch human misery. In the real world, furthermore, a woman doesn’t always wait for her knight in shining armor, even when she knows who he is. Sometimes she marries Tom Buchanan instead. Even when she has a second chance at happiness, because her knight is faithful to her to the end, a small bend in the road to true love might send her scurrying home, as Daisy scurries back to her selfish, brutish, unfaithful husband. And when her knight dies protecting her from a charge of hit‑and‑run homicide, she might leave town before the minister arrives for the funeral. In the real world, a man doesn’t always remain faithful to his woman, even when he’s married to her. Sometimes he has frequent extramarital affairs and parades them in public places, as Tom does with Myrtle, and sometimes he breaks his mistress’s nose. Here, “bad guys” like Tom Buchanan and Meyer Wolfsheim call the shots. A simple, honest man like George Wilson is deceived by his wife and manipulated by her lover into killing an innocent man. And a “great sportswom[an]” like Jordan Baker, who Gatsby believes would “never do any‑ thing that wasn’t all right” (76; ch. 4), cheats at golf, lies about damaging a borrowed car, and “deal[s] in subterfuges . . . in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body” (63; ch. 3). Perhaps most important, in the real world the death of a romantic hero is not a martyrdom that saves humanity. It’s a sign that humanity is beyond saving, beyond hope. And once that sign is given, Nick knows there is nothing to do but go back home: forget his plans for the future, give up his optimism, cut his losses, and get out. In this way, Nick’s narrative, grounded in the structure of irony, closes the door, so to speak, on the romantic tale it tells, that is, on the structure of romance. In other words, in The Great Gatsby, the ironic structure