The Great Gatsby and Money
The Great Gatsby and Money
Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) also shows what Dreiser calls the "impotence" of money. But it shows money's other side as well. It is perhaps the most effervescent, champagne-fizzy vision of wealth ever realized in literature. It is the delicacy and fatality with which both visions are balanced that makes "The Great Gatsby" unique, and makes it literature's most haunting study of money. Literature after "Gatsby," in what Harold Bloom calls the "Chaotic Age," deals with money in myriad fascinating ways, from Tom Wolfe's hilarious and sharp-eyed enumeration of why a rich New Yorker needs $500,000 a year to get by in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" to Martin Amis' pell-mell, onanistic wallow in "Money." But no work captures money's double nature, its sadness and allure, like "The Great Gatsby."
Jay Gatsby sums up, for good and evil, the American vision of money. He is a self-created man, a parvenu whose big yellow car and big mansion and easy, golden style hide unsavory secrets. But what makes him a tragic figure is that he is an utter romantic, obsessed with a woman, Daisy, whose very laugh had money in it -- a woman whose wealth, unlike his own, is unquestionable. Gatsby buys his mansion simply so that he can look at Daisy's mansion across the water.
In the most obvious sense, Gatsby loses Daisy because he is an upstart: She rejects him -- if her drifting, what Fitzgerald calls her great "carelessness," can be said to add up to anything as clear as rejection -- when her thuggish, rich husband, Tom, exposes his past. But in a deeper sense, he never had her. He has been pursuing a chimera. "The Great Gatsby" is about the delusiveness of memory -- and its inescapability. The green light across the water that Gatsby stares at, the "orgiastic future," never arrives.
You escape the past by living in the present -- but the present is always escaping, too. Money is what "Gatsby's" characters use to hold onto the present. "The Great
Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) also shows what Dreiser calls the "impotence" of money. But it shows money's other side as well. It is perhaps the most effervescent, champagne-fizzy vision of wealth ever realized in literature. It is the delicacy and fatality with which both visions are balanced that makes "The Great Gatsby" unique, and makes it literature's most haunting study of money. Literature after "Gatsby," in what Harold Bloom calls the "Chaotic Age," deals with money in myriad fascinating ways, from Tom Wolfe's hilarious and sharp-eyed enumeration of why a rich New Yorker needs $500,000 a year to get by in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" to Martin Amis' pell-mell, onanistic wallow in "Money." But no work captures money's double nature, its sadness and allure, like "The Great Gatsby."
Jay Gatsby sums up, for good and evil, the American vision of money. He is a self-created man, a parvenu whose big yellow car and big mansion and easy, golden style hide unsavory secrets. But what makes him a tragic figure is that he is an utter romantic, obsessed with a woman, Daisy, whose very laugh had money in it -- a woman whose wealth, unlike his own, is unquestionable. Gatsby buys his mansion simply so that he can look at Daisy's mansion across the water.
In the most obvious sense, Gatsby loses Daisy because he is an upstart: She rejects him -- if her drifting, what Fitzgerald calls her great "carelessness," can be said to add up to anything as clear as rejection -- when her thuggish, rich husband, Tom, exposes his past. But in a deeper sense, he never had her. He has been pursuing a chimera. "The Great Gatsby" is about the delusiveness of memory -- and its inescapability. The green light across the water that Gatsby stares at, the "orgiastic future," never arrives.
You escape the past by living in the present -- but the present is always escaping, too. Money is what "Gatsby's" characters use to hold onto the present. "The Great