Evaluating the Great Gatsby by Monty J Heying
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8,529 words © 2018, all rights reserved Evaluating The Great Gatsby by Monty J Heying Following are four extracts from discussion topics I authored on Goodreads.com supporting the premise that The Great Gatsby was a critique of American Capitalistic Society framed within a romantic tragedy. The critical aspects of the novel been downplayed in all four of the story’s film interpretations, Films are financed by people who want to make money, and a latter day Romeo and Juliet sells better without complications that reflect poorly on The American Dream. But in academia, hard evidence of another reason is found in Yale University’s esteemed professor of literature, Harold Bloom, whose published comments on the novel glaringly fail to mention that Gatsby partnered with Wolfsheim in an illicit bond scheme. He even invents the notion that Gatsby’s parties were “solely” to attract Daisy instead of for marketing his illicit bonds. Absent a logical explanation, given Prof. Bloom’s high professional standing, such an assertion can only be taken as apple polishing for the Wall Street benefactors who fund the school’s endowments. There’s almost no evidence in the book to support such a claim other than an offhand speculation by Jordan, who knew nothing of the bond scam. These links will assist in navigation: Social Critique in The Great Gatsby Gay Implications in The Great Gatsby Proof Gatsby Was Driving The Plaza Hotel Scene Gatsby’s Criminality Social Critique in The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is often lionized, even by academics who know better, as a romantic celebration of the American Dream, but it is equally, if not more so, a critique of corruption during the Roaring Twenties' run-up to the Great Depression. And how a twenty-six-year-old alcoholic college dropout could pull this off so masterfully is nothing short of genius. Corruption symbols abound in Scott Fitzgerald's timeless encapsulation of the “Jazz Age” as he likes to call it. The valley of ashes, an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s elegy “The Waste Land”, appears in every chapter, mentioned eight times outright and poetically invoked more than fifty 1 Gatsby and Social Critique 7 November 2018 with terminology such as: flash, wash, dust and powder. Six more counting references to Nick's Finnish housemaid, an alliterative back-flip to remind readers of ashes. The judging eyes of Dr. Eckleburg and the owl-eyed man are mentioned no less than nine times. Crime boss Meyer Wolfsheim's name crops up thirty-two times. Chicago, Al Capone's headquarters, twenty times. The main characters are all adulterers. Tom Buchanan has an affair with Myrtle Wilson. Tom's wife, Daisy, has an affair with Gatsby. Nick, the narrator and Daisy's cousin, enables Daisy and Gatsby's affair and has a gay tryst with McKee while dating Daisy's confidant Jordan Baker, a cheating professional golfer who is a careless driver and habitually lies. The only honorable character is Michaelis, proprietor of the cafe next door to the Wilsons. The hard- working, henpecked and cuckolded George Wilson is honest until, driven insane by grief, he guns down Gatsby in his pool for running down Myrtle in his Rolls and failing to stop. Both Michaelis and George saw a man driving, but Nick chooses to believe his "gorgeous" criminal neighbor Gatsby's lie that Daisy was behind the wheel. Nick believes him despite the mountain of evidence of Gatsby's low character—bootlegging, securities fraud, his failure to stop and render aid after his yellow Rolls hit Myrtle. Gatsby exploits Nick’s adulation to get to Daisy. He even tries repeatedly to recruit him to sell his illicit bonds. It wasn't his social class that made Daisy reject Gatsby; it was his criminality, revealed to her by Tom at the Plaza Hotel. In front of Daisy, Jordan, Nick and Tom, Gatsby narcissistically mocks the man he cuckholded: "'I used to laugh'--but there was no laughter in his eyes--'to think that you didn't know.'" Most telling is that Gatsby never declares his love to Daisy, but instead claims she loves him and never loved her husband, saying this to his closest friends in front of Daisy and her husband. Criminals must avoid the law at all costs and the lie about who was driving was so easy, the way Nick trusted him. Besides, a heroic pose might sway Nick enough to join his sales team. Gatsby's execution by Wilson is the righteous result of Gatsby's failure to stop his yellow Rolls--a bullet for running down Myrtle. At the end, Gatsby stunk so badly only a handful of people came to his funeral, not even the ungrateful Wolfsheim, who "made him." Readers idolize Gatsby for his determined pursuit of a dream to be a millionaire and reclaim Daisy. Yes, Gatsby dreamed, of riches, but those helium-filled ambitions were evident long before he met her. Did he love? In Nick's naive romantically charged mind he did. But how much can we trust Nick's judgment after he fawned over Gatsby, calling him "gorgeous," and swallowed his lies about family wealth and being educated at Oxford? Daisy could be just a trophy, like the castle and the Rolls Royce that ferried gullible guests like moths to his glittering parties through the valley of ashes. Love? If Gatsby truly cared about Daisy he would have asked Nick if she was happy in her marriage before approaching her. As if to obliterate any doubt as to his message in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald alludes in the final jaded line to the Jazz Age's current of corruption: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Yes, we keep repeating the same mistakes. Ivan Boesky. Bernard Madoff. There have been dozens like them. In the Twenties it was counterfeit bonds. More recently, sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. What will tomorrow bring? We can pursue dreams, but it is a morally bankrupt grail if we are corrupted in the process. Unwilling or unable to face the broader implications of this poetic social critique, the incurious seem mesmerized by Gatsby's capacity for romantic imagination. Is it the novel's dark warning they shrink from or have they been misled by Bloom's Guides: The Great Gatsby, a 2 Gatsby and Social Critique 7 November 2018 notoriously poor literary analysis which could have been written by a graduate student bent on keeping the trusting public unwary of Wall Street shenanigans. The book is about Nick, not Gatsby. Nick represents the gullible average American with an inflated admiration for the top socioeconomic class, people like Donald Trump. Nick's overblown perceptions of Gatsby are a window into his own character. Nick is so awed by Gatsby he's unable to comprehend the man's obvious flaws, such as lying about his family pedigree, bootlegging, adultery, running over and killing Myrtle, and partnering with crime boss Meyer Wolfsheim to manage an illicit bond scam. Whatever the reasons for downplaying Gatsby's corruption, the trail of evidence will always be right there on the page. But you have to read every word comprehend its meaning. # # # Gay Implications in The Great Gatsby [My sincere apology to anyone in the gay community offended by the content of this article. It is not out of prurient curiosity or an intent to provoke unwanted attention and deny privacy that I wrote this article; it is the honest pursuit of a more thorough understanding of what Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Existing literary criticism has largely ignored the depth of narrator Nick Carraway and misclassified this social critique as romantic tragedy. Look deeper. A latter day Romeo and Juliet it is not.] The Great Gatsby was written a time when homosexuality was not only condemned socially, but was illegal throughout the United States and most of the world (and still is today in some places.) Authors had to exercise extreme care about portraying homo-sexuality in a way that didn't conform to prevailing mores, if at all. Yet with Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald took a step outside that box in two controversial scenes--in the elevator with Mckee at the end of Chapter II and on a commuter train early in Chapter VII. The homosexual implications of these two scenes are supported else-where, such as (also in Chapter VII) when Nick mulls over turning thirty, "a decade of loneliness. a thinning list of young men to know..." and in the distinctive way he describes and reacts to men versus women, Jay Gatsby in particular. At the end of Chapter II, Carraway ends up in McKee' s bedroom after a night of partying with Tom Buchanan, his mistress Myrtle Wilson, her sister Catherine, and the McKees. After Tom breaks Myrtle's nose, McKee leaves his wife behind and Carraway follows, leaving Catherine, Nick's ostensible date, and they go down together in an elevator: (p.30) Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. 3 Gatsby and Social Critique 7 November 2018 ...(p.36-38) Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action.