Re-reading The Great Gatsby

During my final years in Cambridge, my college would run a Great Gatsby themed formal dinner, which of course offered marvelous opportunities for dressing up. I even went to a costume party shop and asked for a suitable head band. But I wonder how many people at those dinners, students or Fellows, had actually read the novel. I had read it, I read it when I was very young, and I had vague memories of it. Therefore I included it in my 2020 re-reading challenge.

What I remembered was what anyone might know even without having read the book. It takes place in the 1920s, Gatsby is tremendously rich and gives huge parties, there is a romantic mystery, and he dies in the end. If you had asked me a week ago how he dies, I would have claimed with confidence that he commits suicide. (No spoilers, but he doesn't).

In many works of literary criticism The Great Gatsby is used as an example of witness-narrator: a first-person narrator who tells someone else's story. I have repeated this false statement many times. Nick Carraway is a highly self-centered narrator and occupies significantly more space in the novel than Gatsby. I was surprised to notice that Gatsby is only present marginally in the first third of the book, as a neighbour with a dubious reputation. Encounter with Gatsby shatters Nick's worldview, makes him abandon his career – Nick is doubtless the main character in his own story, while Gatsby is what narratologists would call a catalyst, a character who affects the protagonist's fate. A substantial bit of the plot also revolves around Nick's romantic involvement. In other words, Nick is in no way an objective biographer. It is his story, not Gatsby's. And as a narrator, he is totally unreliable, not least because he repeatedly admits that he dislikes Gatsby. What I did, however, notice and appreciate with my critical, narratological eyes, is how the narrator accounts for something that someone else tells him, but not in direct speech, and not in reported speech, but as if he really witnessed it, suddenly interrupted either by direct speech or abrupt temporal shift. There are also recurrent flashforwards of the type: All this I learned much later…

My memory of Gatsby was of a romantic figure. I think the reason is the unhappy love story. As readers we are conditioned to emphathise with unhappy lovers, and although I did not remember the details, I had the sense of his actions justified by love. Yet as it turns out, he is a liar, a hypocrite, a financial criminal and ultimately a murder accomplice. Nick has all the reasons to dislike him.

I had completely forgotten Gatsby's father who comes to his funeral. The pathetic funeral episode made me in a way reconcile with Gatsby; I felt genuinely sorry for him.

It is brilliantly written, and I enjoyed every page. I may re-read it soon again.