Nick Carraway and the Romance of Art

Abstract

N IC K C A R R A W A Y A N D T H E R O M A N C E O F A R T K. G. PROBERT University of Regina E rn est Hemingway’s character Frederic Henry, attempting in A Farewell to Arms (1929) to narrow his world down to manageable proportions, rejects pre-war America’s faith in naive slogans and ideals: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . . There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the other hand, responds in The Great Gatsby to the post-war world’s frenetic pace by directly investigating the modern fate of old words such as glory, honour, courage, and hallow through an examina­ tion of his hero’s exemplary rise and fall in contemporary America. Whereas Frederic Henry, like other Hemingway heroes, deals with the modern world’s confusions by retreating into the existential resources of the self, Gatsby is paired with an historically conscious narrator who articulates Gatsby’s relationship with America’s most powerful hopes and dreams. And he performs this task within the context of the romance, the genre tradi­ tionally associated with the virtues identified by Frederic Henry’s rejected old words. I shall argue that Nick Carraway, operating as a highly self-conscious and manipulative narrator, makes use of the norms provided by three types of traditional romance in his attempt to understand the shape and meaning of Gatsby’s life. More specifically, Fitzgerald appears to have combined aspects of the Odyssean seafaring romance, the Arthurian quest romance, and the medieval romanticized forms of the Troy story found notably in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Gatsby’s story is placed within these traditional con­ texts because their themes and motifs are the same themes and motifs that Fitzgerald wants to invoke and investigate in this portrait of his own world. Gatsby’s character recalls the literary and historical avatars of the romance E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x , 2, June 1984 tradition, but his sad end and Nick Garraway’s response to his career illus­ trate the dangers and contemporary fates of idealism, heroism, and romance­ writing itself. No one seriously doubts that The Great Gatshy deals centrally with America’s dream and history as it examines the career of Gatsby, the em­ bodiment of what is best and worst in the country. The existence of the national theme in the novel has been clearly established by an extensive body of influential criticism, even though commentators do disagree about Fitzgerald’s and the book’s attitudes toward America’s history and destiny.2 Nevertheless, Gatsby’s portrayal as the heir of powerful American selfimprovement myths, the evocation of warm midwestern social mythology, the extensive description of rich, trend-setting Eastern social life, and the concluding paean to the wonder of America as it appeared to European explorers all make it clear that The Great Gatsby is a social commentary on the past, present, and future of America. Gatsby’s story is in part recounted within a framework provided by the ghostly presences of American folk heroes. His mentor Don Cody’s name is calculated to invoke the mythic frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody, and his youthful schedule for the day is found in the back of a book about Hopalong Cassidy, whose particularly American virtues can ade­ quately be described only in French: “[il] magnifie l’ideal chevaleresque des justiciers de la prairie.”3 The great self-made men of nineteenth-century American industry and commerce, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Hill, are also mentioned. And behind them looms the never named but ubiquitous ideal of industry and self-improvement, Benjamin Franklin. Although these models of Gatsby’s Horatio Alger-like rise provide a con­ text within...