A Gatsbean Odyssey: The Compact Marvel (3/7)

Structurally, there is no doubt The Great Gatsby is a compact marvel. Watching Baz Luhrmann’s film, I was struck by the mirroring love triangles. One is the married couple Tom and Daisy plus Tom’s lover Myrtle. The other is Tom and Daisy plus Daisy’s love Gatsby. Each extramarital couple engages in a tryst, and Nick Carraway is an observer on both occasions.

These similar affairs are also contrasted. Socially, Tom reaches down to Myrtle, while Gatsby reaches up for Daisy. When the former meet, it is a haphazard and drunken affair that, at least in Luhrmann’s treatment, includes noisy screwing. When Gatsby arranges to meet Daisy, the reunion is tightly choreographed and leads to quiet conversation. These encounters show the difference in the two men’s characters: Tom loses his temper and grows violent, but Gatsby maintains control even under duress.

Fitzgerald and his cinematic interpreters also make heavy use of echoes. Tom and Daisy’s marriage is regularly interrupted by phone calls from his mistress. Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship is disturbed by phone calls from his business partners. When Nick first attends a party at Gatsby’s mansion, he witnesses a fender-bender involving drunken revelers, and of course, this is foreshadowing for the deadly accident toward the end.

The latter accident is a good car accident. The Car Accident has long been a deus ex machina for many a pretentious author and filmmaker. Just when all the plots and subplots have tied themselves into a knot--bam!--one of the characters is in a car accident. It’s shocking, tragic, easy and can cut through any dramatic impasse. Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but in The Art of Fiction she wrote that random accidents are the perfect tool for a lazy writer, and she was right.

The Car Accident in The Great Gatsby is coincidental, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere for the reader because Fitzgerald has laid groundwork. As mentioned, a previous accident foreshadows it, and automobiles and the danger they present appear as a motif throughout the book, such as when Gatsby takes Carraway for a wild ride into the city. Decisions made by various characters lead to the victim running out into the street, as well as to who is riding with whom and who is driving when the hit-and-run occurs. Then, the accident itself leads the characters to decisions that further define them.

Also skillful is the pairing of opposites through which Fitzgerald pulled within this book as much of Roaring-Twenties America as possible: fidelity and infidelity, self-control and self-abandonment, true love and false, city and country, black and white, rich and poor.

All of that is very well and good, but marveling at the structure of a book isn’t the same as grasping its essence. Like Odysseus, I’m still trapped in the darkness of the giant’s lair, wracking my brains for a way into the light.

A cover from 1925:

 

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