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c h a p t e r o n e Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby L ike many readers of my generation, I first became a fan of Fitzgerald ’s fiction when I read The Great Gatsby in college. At the time I thought it was the best book I had ever read, and indeed at the time it probably was. Some fifty years later, it is still one of my favorite American novels and Fitzgerald my favorite American fiction writer. Before reading Gatsby the first time, I had only been as deeply moved by a work of fiction once before in my life. In my senior year of high school, when I should have been studying for midterm exams, I stayed up three nights in a row reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. What has remained with me from my first experience of these two books is the uncanny equivalence of their heroes—the high romantic Sydney Carton and the late romantic Jay Gatsby. In each case the attempt to preserve a self-sustaining image of desire, the category of Desire per se, turns out to be a matter of greater importance in the characters’ respective stories than their attempt to possess the object of their desire. Sydney Carton renounces the possible possession of Lucie that might result from Darnay’s death in order to keep his desire intact as desire, even if that means dying to save Darnay’s life. Perhaps he suspected, being a good romantic, that the object of desire, even if wholly possessed, could never be as personally, as privately, his own as his self-created image of that object. Death protects Carton not only from the disillusion of possession but also from the wandering or waning of desire through prolonged nonpossession, a simultaneous foreclosure of the object of desire and of Desire itself. But that foreclosure involves a characteristic foreshadowing. Dickens says that at the moment of his death Carton “looked sublime and prophetic” (357), and the subsequent description of his prophetic vision centers on Carton’s survival in the memories of Lucie, Darnay, and their descendants, a mnemic survival embodied in Lucie and Darnay’s child, a son named Sydney: 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement —and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. (358) Not only a son but a grandson as well to bear his name and be the custodian of his story, the living vessel of memory. And this ghostly fathering requires not the loss of his seed but simply the loss of his head. In imagining what Carton ’s vision at the moment of death might have been, the omniscient author gives Carton (and us as the guardians of his interest) the prefigured compensation for his sacrifice, which is to say, gives us a compensatory prefiguration. As I said, looking back on my first reading of A Tale of Two Cities and The Great Gatsby, what I remember most is the equivalence of their emotional impact. And yet at first glance what seems most striking now is the difference in the deaths of the two heroes. True, each loves an idealized woman who is married to another man, and each loses his life for that woman’s sake; but where Carton willingly sacrifices himself to save Darnay and preserve Lucie’s marriage, Gatsby unwittingly gives up his life for Daisy and Tom. This is not to say that Gatsby wouldn’t have done everything he could to shield Daisy from the consequences of the hit-and-run accident, even to the point of sacrificing his life to protect her from George Wilson’s revenge, but rather that Gatsby would never have intended his death to cement the marriage of Tom and Daisy. Yet it seems to do just that by turning that relationship into one of mutual, though differing...

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