F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby/Tender is the Night

Nicolas Tredell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780230292222
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350310452
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night are F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known novels. They draw on Fitzgerald's own vivid experiences in the 1920s but transform them into art. This stimulating introductory guide analyses their accomplished style and their concern with the promise and perplexity of modern life.

Part I of this indispensable study:
- Provides interesting and informed close readings of key passages
- Examines how each novel starts and ends
- Discusses key themes of society, money, gender and trauma
- Outlines the methods of analysis and offers suggestions for further work.

Part II supplies essential background material, including:
- An account of Fitzgerald's life
- A survey of historical, cultural and literary contexts
- Samples of significant criticism

Also featuring a helpful Further Reading section, this volume equips readers with the critical and analytical skills which will enable them to enjoy and explore both novels for themselves.

PART I

ANALYSING THE GREAT GATSBY AND TENDER IS THE NIGHT

1

Beginnings

On a first reading, the beginning of a novel gives us an initial idea of the style, tone, narrative technique and themes of the whole work, initiates a relationship between reader and narrator, and raises expectations about the text, the reading experience, which is to come. These expectations will not necessarily be fulfilled; indeed, they are likely to be modified in significant ways. On second and subsequent readings, our knowledge of the novel as a whole inevitably influences how we read the beginning and we are likely to understand it differently – to grasp more clearly how it prepares us (sometimes by indirection or misdirection) for the rest of the work. In analysing the beginnings of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, it will enrich our enjoyment and understanding to aim to develop a kind of double vision: to see the beginning both as it might appear to a first-time reader and as it might appear to someone rereading the book.

We shall look first of all at the beginning of Gatsby and consider how it might appear on a first and then on a subsequent reading.

Gorgeous Gatsby: The Great Gatsby, pp. 7–8

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just re member that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought – frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. 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 for ever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’ – it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No – Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.

If we imagine ourselves reading Gatsby for the first time, with little or no knowledge of its plot or characters, what might we say about this opening? It introduces a first-person narrator but does not tell us the narrator’s name, gender, marital status, family background, financial situation or geographical location (except that he has come ‘back’ from ‘the East’). The only details it gives for Gatsby are his surname and gender (‘the man’). But a first-time reader could make some inferences. The opening use of comparative adjectives to describe the narrator’s past self, his reference to ‘my younger and more vulnerable years’, sets the novel in the dimension of time and implies that he is hardened by experience, older and less easily wounded psychologically than was once the case. But the narrator then invokes his father’s advice and stresses how he has continued to think about it, which could imply that he has not in fact quite acquired the mature adult identity which the opening of his sentence implies. His father’s words, in direct speech, take up almost all the second paragraph, reinforcing the impression of a strong and persistent paternal influence.

After these two short paragraphs, two much longer ones follow. In the first sentence of the third paragraph, a multiple sentence in which three clauses are linked by conjunctions (‘but’, ‘and’), the narrator affirms the deeper significance of his father’s declaration that not everybody has had the advantages that his son has had. Our first assumption might be that his father is talking about material privileges. But the narrator indicates there is more to it, although he does not immediately say why. This increases the impression of evasiveness and indirection which the narrator’s reticence about his personal details has already conveyed. Instead of explaining his father’s deeper meaning, the narrator shifts to a statement of the effect of his father’s declaration upon him; it has made him inclined to hold back judgements upon people. Coming in the first long paragraph of the novel, this seems an important statement about himself, and he goes on to elaborate it by saying that his nonjudgemental attitude has made him into a person in whom other people confide – particularly those who have an ‘abnormal mind’; the narrator is quick to distinguish himself from such people, however, identifying himself as ‘a normal person’. We learn that he has been to college but that his openness to confidences led to accusations that he was a ‘politician’ – not in the most common modern sense of the word, where it refers to a person who practises politics as a career, but in the sense of someone who acts in a manipulative and devious way, typically to gain advancement. He makes it clear that he regards these accusations as unjust. But his choice of words makes his position as confidant seem intriguing and romantic: ‘privy to’, ‘secret’, ‘unknown’ suggest the thrill of sharing in concealed knowledge about someone’s life; ‘wild’ is an adjective which indicates excess and freedom from constraint. To some extent, this romantic, thrilling vocabulary casts doubts on the narrator’s claim that he did not seek out most of these confidences and often tried to avoid or discourage them – he seems to find them quite exciting.

The narrator then goes on to claim that reserving judgements is a matter of ‘infinite hope’ – the adjective ‘infinite’ suggests he has an unconstrained element – and he implies that he refrains from being judgemental because he might miss ‘something’ – some glimpse of human possibility, perhaps. He returns to his father’s maxim but now makes it clear that the ‘advantages’ of which his father spoke were not (at least in his son’s interpretation) the primarily material ones of wealth and social standing, but ethical and what we might today call genetic: ‘a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth’. He does not, however, specify the nature of the ‘fundamental decencies’.

In the next paragraph, the narrator asserts the limit of his tolerance and suggests that proper conduct is important. But rather than putting this in an abstract way, he employs two metaphors: ‘the hard rock’ and ‘the wet marshes’. This suggests a certain poetic quality in the narrator’s utterance, a liking for imagery rather than plain statement. He then provides some more definite information about himself, though much is still vague. As in his opening statement, he starts a sentence with an adverb which indicates a definite, if undated time (‘When’) and a place, even if very loosely specified (‘the East’) where he has had a set of experiences of which he speaks only in general terms, again using a romantic vocabulary – ‘riotous’, ‘privileged’, ‘the human heart’ – which links up with ‘secret griefs’, ‘wild’ and ‘unknown’ in the previous paragraph. Just as the romantic diction in the previous paragraph made the confidences of ‘wild, unknown men’ seem attractive, so his vocabulary here endows the ‘excursion’ he mentions with appeal, even as he asserts that he wants no more such excursions and expresses a desire for moral discipline and alertness in military metaphors, ‘in uniform’ and ‘at … attention’.

Much as he seems to react against his experience in the East, however, the narrator still admires Gatsby – this is the first proper name in the novel – and speaks highly of him, again using romantic terms: ‘gorgeous’, ‘some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’. But he then uses a technological image to suggest this sensitivity; it is as if Gatsby ‘were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away’. This is the first sign in the novel of the narrator’s readiness to draw on technological imagery to describe a romantic sensibility. He defines this sensibility more precisely as ‘an extraordinary gift for hope’ and we can link this with his use of the word ‘hope’ in the previous paragraph; its repetition, in a different context, suggests that hope, of a limitless (‘infinite’) or unusual (‘extraordinary’) kind, is important to the narrator. He starts the next sentence with ‘No’, as if he were arguing with someone (perhaps himself), pre-empting an objection, and affirms his view that ‘Gatsby turned out all right at the end’. The problem was ‘what preyed on Gatsby’; again, he does not specify the nature of this but uses metaphors – ‘preyed’ (which suggests a predatory creature) and ‘foul dust’. It is this which has, for a time, made the narrator lose interest in the fluctuating emotions of human beings. It seems, then, that the narrator has been through some extraordinary experience involving Gatsby which has left him chastened but which is also, in some ways, attractive and significant.

Rereading the beginning of Gatsby with an awareness of the novel as a whole, we know that the narrator is called Nick Carraway; that he is now in his early thirties and presumably still single; that he comes from a prosperous family in the US Midwest; and that he has gone back to his native city after trying, in the spring and summer of 1922, to make a career as a bond salesman in New York, in the American East, and undergoing a spectacular encounter with Jay Gatsby, who was in love with Daisy Buchanan (née Fay), Nick’s second cousin once removed. We know of Gatsby’s dream, of his extraordinary and doomed attempt to realize it, and of his violent death. How does this knowledge influence our rereading? It enables us to see more clearly how Nick’s narrative voice, as established in these first four paragraphs, is characterized by features which will recur in the novel: by circumlocution – the use of many words where fewer would do; and by euphemism – the substitution of mild or less direct words for ones that are harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing; we can make an intratextual link – that is, a link between two parts of the same text – between the circumlocution and euphemism we find in the opening and its recurrence at other key points of the novel, for example in Nick’s account of the discovery of Gatsby’s body, which we shall consider in chapter 5 of this book. We can also make an intratextual link between the romantic vocabulary and imagery in the opening of Gatsby and the similar vocabulary we find later on in the novel, for instance in Nick’s retailing of Gatsby’s early courtship of Daisy, which we shall discuss in chapter 3. Nick does not say at the start of the novel that the events of the summer involved drunkenness, adultery, organized crime, manslaughter, murder and suicide.

When we reread the beginning of Gatsby, we may find we question the assertions that Nick makes about himself there. Is it true that he is ‘inclined to reserve all judgements’? He seems, for example, to judge Jordan Baker quite harshly, condemning her as ‘incurably dishonest’ on scanty evidence (GG 58). Is it true that he is, as he implies, ‘a normal person’? Although he hardly mentions his father again after the start of Gatsby, there is nonetheless a sense, which plays through the novel, that he has not quite acquired an autonomous masculine identity of his own and this might seem odd in a man who turns 30 in the summer of 1922. Moreover, he remains unmarried and apparently unable to form a stable bond with a woman (or a man); his relationships with the girl back home to whom he writes weekly letters signed ‘Love, Nick’ (GG 59), the girl who works in the accounting department of the Probity Trust (GG 57) and Jordan Baker all come to nothing. Is it true that he is not a ‘politician’, in the sense of someone who invites confidences in order to increase his own advantage, or has his encounter with Gatsby been advantageous, in a sense, in giving him a privileged glimpse into the human heart (or simply gratifying his voyeuristic impulses)? Is it true that he is a person who tries to avoid confidences, or does a part of him like learning the secrets of others, perhaps as a compensation for his own inhibited approach to life? Nick is not an unreliable narrator in the sense of a narrator who is definitely shown to be wrong in his interpretation of events and characters (including himself); but he cannot be seen as a wholly reliable one either.

The beginning of Gatsby raises many questions for a first-time reader. Reading the rest of the text answers some of these questions but, as we have seen, raises others. We shall now turn to the opening passage of Tender:

On the Edge: Tender is the Night, pp. 11–12

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hôtel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood – she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

Let us first approach the beginning of Tender as we did the start of Gatsby and ask what a first-time reader, with little or no knowledge of its plot or characters, might say about it. Tender begins with a third-person rather than first-person account, gives a definite sense of location in time and place (a June morning in 1925) and introduces two characters, though these are initially identified not by name but by their family relationship – a mother and daughter. The leisurely description of the hotel, beach and seascape, running across two paragraphs, could suggest that this location is going to play a significant part in the story. In the second paragraph, the beach is called, in a metaphor, a ‘bright tan prayer rug’, a mat used by Muslims for praying; to a first-time reader, this might be no more than a passing flourish, but it does introduce a religious reference.

In the third paragraph, in the description of the daug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Quotations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Analysing The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night
• Part II: The Context and the Critics
• Further Reading
• Index