The Great Gatsby: A Level York Notes

Near the end of ‘The Great Gatsby’, the narrator Nick Carraway refers to ‘the last and greatest of human dreams’ experienced by some European sailor who has discovered ‘a fresh green breast of the new world.’ That image of a ‘fresh green breast’ suggests that America combines nature and nurture. This new land seems to offer a kind of maternal care. A similar image, at the end of Chapter VI, makes a clear link between a nurturing America and Jay Gatsby. In the excitement of his love for Daisy Fay, Gatsby imagines climbing to a secret place above the trees where ‘he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.’

Fitzgerald’s use of the word ‘breast’ at the close of the novel appears ironic, however, in light of an event earlier in the novel. Following the hit-and-run incident that kills Myrtle Wilson we are told, in Chapter VII that ‘her left breast was swinging loose like a flap.’ That image of a mutilated breast conveys a brutal reality that has replaced the dream of America as a fresh start.

Like Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, Jay Gatsby no longer has a mother who is alive. But whereas Huck shows a capacity to grow and to show care for others (most notably Jim the escaped slave), Gatsby remains trapped inside his own feelings. His imagination is fixated on the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock. This light is like a parody of the ‘fresh green breast’, a trivialised version of the American dream. For Gatsby it is a symbol of his love for Daisy, but she repeatedly shows herself to be unworthy of his devotion. Daisy is a mother, but a poor one. In Chapter VII she calls her daughter Pammy an ‘absolute little dream’, but her only aspiration for the child, expressed in Chapter I, is that she will become ‘the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’

Whereas Huck starts to grow up and to develop a sense of right and wrong in relation to the world around him and real events, Gatsby, we are told in Chapter VI, ‘sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.’ James Gatz bases his new identity upon an idea of who he should be rather than upon the physical realities of his life, growing up on a farm.

Jay Gatsby might be compared to Tom Sawyer, whose wild imagination distorts reality. Twain depicts the American South as a place where there is a lot of distortion and deception. Huck meets a pair of con men who pretend to be a King and a Duke, and the feuding Grangerfords and Sheperdsons see themselves as aristocratic families. America doesn’t seem to be able to escape Old World values. Jay Gatsby lives in a large house modelled on a French town hall. He owns a British Rolls-Royce and he orders clothes from Europe. He also makes a lot of the short time he spent at Oxford University and it is a mannerism of his speech to call people ‘old sport’, as a fashionable British person might. Huck Finn’s speech, on the other hand, makes no attempt to disguise his Mississippi dialect. His down-to-earth way of speaking reflects his fundamental honesty, although he tells lies if he needs to. Gatsby is very polished by comparison, but his whole life is a lie, based on an assumed identity and dedicated to a dream.

By the end of Twain’s narrative Huck has learnt to see things more clearly, but he still declares that he intends to ‘light out for the Territory,’ in search of an unspoiled place where he can start a new life. By the time Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Great Gatsby’ the American continent had been settled. Nick Carraway has returned to the Middle West, feeling old at the age of thirty, and Gatsby is dead, his dream unfulfilled. All that is left is for Nick to reflect on what has happened and to try to come to terms with the past. In the process he tells the story of Jay Gatsby, an archetypal American hero.