11 African American criticism

neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual? Depending on the literary text in question, we might ask one or any combina‑ tion of these questions. Or we might come up with a useful question not listed here. These are just some starting points to get us to look at literature through a lesbian, gay, or queer lens. Remember, not all these critics will interpret the same work in the same way, even if they use the same theoretical concepts. As in every field, even expert practitioners disagree. Our goal is to use lesbian, gay, and queer criticism to help enrich our reading of literary works, to help us see some important ideas they illustrate that we might not have seen so clearly or so deeply without these forms of criticism, and to help us appreciate the history and literary production of nonstraight people. The following reading of The Great Gatsby is offered as an example of what a queer interpretation of Fitzgerald’s novel might yield. I call my reading queer in both the inclusive sense of the term—my discussion will not be limited to char‑ acters of a single sex or a single sexuality—and in its deconstructive sense: my reading explores the vagaries and instabilities of the novel’s representation of sexuality. Specifically, I will argue that The Great Gatsby is a sexually ambiguous novel: it raises a number of questions about the sexuality of its characters, but it does not answer them. And I will argue that this ambiguity results from the deliv‑ ery of a heterosexual plot through the medium of a closeted gay sensibility, that of narrator Nick Carraway. Finally, I will suggest that the novel’s sexual ambiguity is a reflection of Fitzgerald’s apparent conflicts concerning his own sexuality.

Will the real Nick Carraway please come out?: a queer reading of The Great Gatsby

Certainly, we couldn’t ask for a more overtly heterosexual plot than that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel’s narrative progression is driven by Jay Gatsby’s tragic love for Daisy Fay Buchanan and by three overlap‑ ping heterosexual romantic triangles: Gatsby‑Daisy‑Tom, Tom‑Myrtle‑George, and Myrtle‑Tom‑Daisy. This heterosexual narrative is shadowed, however, by a homoerotic subtext, which, though it remains closeted, so to speak, by the spectacular twists and turns of the heterosexual plot, is a pervasive presence in the novel. Specifically, I will argue that the novel’s treatment of sexual transgression and its proliferation of gay and lesbian signs work together to create a homoerotic subtext that disrupts and destabilizes the heterosexual narrative, creating, in the process, a sexually ambiguous novel. And as we shall see, this homoerotic subtext finds its most complete embodiment in the characterization of narrator