F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of "The Great Gatsby"

Chapter 4. Once by the Atlantic: Nick Carraway’s Meditation on the Course of History and Its Ideological Context

4 Once by the Atlantic Nick Carraway’s Meditation on the Course of History and Its Ideological Context When in the summer of 1923 Fitzgerald began to revamp a first draft of the beginning of the manuscript of his third novel,his deliberate attempt to write “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned” (Correspondence 112) eventually culminated in the act of moving his narrator’s vision of “the old island [. . .] that flowered once for Dutch sailors’eyes”(GG 140) from an inconspicuous place at the end of chapter 1 to its capstone position at the very end of the book.The climactic conclusion of the narrative has drawn much attention, from countless readers, many critics, as well as not a few fellow writers.The suicide of Lilly Berry in John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), committed out of despair for not being able to write something commensurate to Fitzgerald’s ending, dramatizes and epitomizes the powerful appeal of the passage and its potential to engage the reader. What is the secret of the enduring appeal of this ending?What is it that entices readers all over the world to respond to it with immediate acclaim? Most answers credit the evocative power of Fitzgerald’s style. Evocative of what, however?There can be no doubt that the singular appeal of the ending lies in its deliberate evocation of both an archetypal situation and an archetypal experience: Man’s epiphanic recognition of his own historicity, of his being placed in the stream of historical developments, as well as the nar- once By the atlantic 107 rator’s resulting application of this lesson in a deliberate meditation on the destiny of his own nation.In the ending of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald finally and wholly transcends the role of the perceptive chronicler of contemporary events,even that of the enlightened historian,to assume the position of the sagacious philosopher of history. This fact emerges more clearly once we examine the ending of the novel in the context of a number of similar dramatizations of the same archetypal experience,eachofwhichcanclaimaprominentplaceinthehistoryof Western thought and literature.There is sufficient evidence,moreover,that nearly all of these can actually be counted among Fitzgerald’s potential sources of inspiration as he brought his text to a closure and in doing so made his bid to be admitted into the very circle of these renowned authors who had previously pondered the course of human history.  A convenient way to describe what happens when,on the last night before his return to the Midwest, Nick Carraway “wandered down to the beach” of Long Island Sound “and sprawled out on the sand” is to look at the scene in terms of cinematographic technique.The technique of dissolve had just been developed when Fitzgerald wrote his text, and as an early and ardent admirer of the movies he was certainly familiar with the process in which one image is slowly made to fade away while another one is forming to take its place. In transferring his scene from its original position in the manuscript, as well as in further revising it in proof, the author worked to bring out and to emphasize the slowness of the change that is taking place before his narrator ’s eyes.Three stages can thus be made out.The initial version reads: “as the moon rose higher the inessential houses seemed to melt away until I was aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes” (MS 38).This is revised as follows: “as the moon rose higher the inessential houses themselves began to melt away until suddenly I became aware of the old island” (MS 257–58, emphasis added).And finally the adverb “suddenly” is replaced by “gradually” (GG 140). Slow to emerge, the resulting juxtaposition of the present and the past in two views of the same location of necessity implies discovery and acute awareness of the course of history:“the big 108 chapter 4 shoreplaces,”“theinessentialhouses”ofthepresenttime,havetakentheplace of the trees that once had formed the “fresh, green breast of the new world” as perceived by “Dutch sailors’ eyes.” It is the identity of the view that propels the experience of historicity: the “vanished trees” are, as the author had stressed in the first draft of the passage, “the very trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house” (MS 37, emphasis added...