A Literary Exploration of Ambition, Satisfaction, and Artificiality in The Great Gatsby.
How might a man, by conscious action, justify the extraordinary yet terrible privilege of his existence? The answer to this question, in the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, lies not in merely staying alive, but in finding something to live for. Thus, is the structure of life into which human mortality is fundamentally ingrained not rationalised by the pursuit of meaning, the prospect of greatness; the attainment of satisfaction?
In his seminal work The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald grapples with such weighty questions through the story of Jay Gatsby and his quest for satisfaction in his attainment of the American Dream, his interpersonal relationships, and ultimately, within himself. Yet the downfall of Gatsby lies not in his pursuit of satisfaction itself, but rather in an inability to recognise that the people and things from which he chased a sense of fulfilment were unable to live up to his expectations. After all, Gatsby turned out alright in the end, as Fitzgerald writes; it was what preyed on him, the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams; it was that which sealed his fate forever. Of course, the seasoned heart laments for Jay Gatsby; the hopeless romantic, the unwavering existentialist, the only genuine person in a fake, plastic world; but the tragedy of The Great Gatsby serves as a cautionary tale; if ambitious, well-intentioned individuals seek out meaning and satisfaction in the wrong places, they are soon to find themselves but hollow shells amidst the eternal sorrow and malevolence of the human condition, for their ambition is wasted from the second of its conception.
Throughout the novel, Gatsby is driven, perhaps more so than anything else, by the pursuit of the American Dream; a pillar of the American cultural ethos that professes a belief in the equal opportunities of men and the hope that, with hard work, any individual might be able to attain success. However, Fitzgerald argues that Gatsby’s faith in the American Dream is misplaced and unfounded, for the dream itself has become so corrupted and so lost to its original meaning that it now encompasses little more than a series of shallow, materialistic visions of wealth and haughty grandeur. He argues that, while the circumstances of Gatsby’s birth and the tribulations of poverty left him convinced of his inevitable ascendency into the upper echelons of society – provided, of course, the luxury of time, hard work, and golden opportunity – true satisfaction lies not in materialistic pursuits but in genuine human connection, and Gatsby’s inability to recognise that means he is doomed from the very start.
This point is demonstrated perhaps most fervently by the glamorous parties Gatsby throws every weekend, where hundreds of guests flock to his West Egg mansion to indulge in asinine luxuries without ever caring to meet Gatsby himself, going so far as to spread terrible rumours about him and his past. When the narrator, Nick, first attends one of his parties, for example, he learns of Gatsby’s reputation not through Gatsby himself but rather through the gossip of various party guests. Captivated by his alluring mystique – or perhaps simply out of a sense of jealous scepticism – they spew such ridiculous claims as the idea that he was a German spy during the First World War, or even a relative of Kaiser Wilhelm II, thus explaining his shroud of secrecy. Some even claim he ‘killed a man’, which only further illustrates how little his new-moneyed guests knew about him.
The rumours had so much influence over his reputation that, in his first real conversation with Nick, he feels the explicit need to expel those rumours without even being prompted to do so. In the absence of meaningful human connection, Gatsby is left lonely, dissatisfied, and without substance. The extent of his loneliness – and in a sense, his failure in life – is revealed after his death, when essentially none of his party guests (despite having taken advantage of all his generosity) attend his funeral.
In addition to the attainment of material wealth, Gatsby’s corrupted American Dream also encompasses the idea of class ascendency. His Midwest family’s poor background conjured an unchecked ambition within him that left him desperate for change, captivated by possibility, and searching for satisfaction; an ambition that only grew upon his meeting of Dan Cody and later upon his short-lived romance with Daisy Fay in Louisville. Gatsby focused his efforts upon building a life for himself that would be worthy of high society’s expectations; one that would fit into the cookie-cutters of the old-moneyed aristocracy; and he was willing to accomplish this goal by any means necessary, going as far as to turn to immoral acts like the smuggling of illegal alcohol. However, his unwavering belief in the American Dream made him blind to the carelessness and perfidy of the social class he so desperately dreamed of becoming a part of. He failed to realise that, in a lost, meaningless 1920s America, not all men are created equal, and that the circumstances of his birth would forever prevent him from attaining that sense of class satisfaction to which he had essentially devoted his life.
This is represented, in a subtle, yet profound manner, by the pink suit he wears to the Plaza Hotel in the latter half of the novel. Fitzgerald uses the pink suit in this context to convey the idea that, despite his great wealth, Gatsby is still a parvenu; an outsider of sorts who is trying to ‘win over’ the rich and buy his way into the aristocracy. He argues that, like wearing a pink suit, Gatsby’s attempts to solidify his place in a social class to which he does not belong leaves less of an impression of social finesse and more an impression of irredeemable vulgarity. In the world of The Great Gatsby, the American Dream was designed to be out of reach for all except those at the very top. In failing to recognise this, Gatsby was left constantly dissatisfied; his life in perpetual disarray as he attempts to find meaning in his insatiable thirst for greatness. Yet, in doing so, he became obsessed with the status, the possessions, and the American Dream promises to a select few and thus became blind to the emptiness of such pursuits. He remained focused on the wrong things and, by the end of the novel, his efforts to attain satisfaction leave him with nothing.
In many ways, Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy Buchanan may be thought of as a mere extension of his American Dream. Like his futile pursuits of material wealth or his ill-fated visions of class ascendency, his stubborn devotion to Daisy is a prime example of how his naiveté and sheer immutability prevents him from attaining satisfaction. At the moment of their initial meeting in Louisville, in 1917, Gatsby formed an idea of Daisy in his mind. To him, Daisy was a paragon of perfection, the epitome of elegance, charm, and beauty – and indeed, during her ‘beautiful, white girlhood’ as Fitzgerald writes, she did possess many of these qualities. Perhaps most importantly, however, she was effectively a physical representation of all that the young James Gatz had dreamed of in North Dakota, for she had wealth, sophistication, and a luxurious, aristocratic lifestyle.
However, Gatsby would leave Daisy to fight in the First World War, and even after the war had ended, he strived to make a life for himself and to re-align his reality such that it might satisfy the exorbitant impression he had left on the young Daisy. In essence, he made her the central object of his quest for satisfaction, and he remains faithful to her even after he learns of her marriage to Tom Buchanan. When he finally meets her again, however, he is unable to understand that she has changed from the person she once was; his forlorn ambition leaving him blind to her newly-acquired artificiality. Her ‘shallowness’ of sorts is revealed by her obsession with material wealth, displayed most evidently in the way she becomes emotionally distraught – presumably at the realisation of having married Tom so hastily – over something as trivial as the beauty of Gatsby’s shirts. It is worth noting here that Nick, unlike Gatsby, is able to see past Daisy’s elegant façade and expose her for the fickle, careless cynic she has become. He demonstrates this point most evidently in the rather poetic description he offers of Daisy’s voice, where he writes; ‘I think it was that voice that held [Gatsby] most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed; that voice was a deathless song.’ In saying this, Nick (and vicariously, Fitzgerald) is attempting to convey that her chronic insincerity, while obvious to other characters, is not immediately obvious to Gatsby simply because he remains fixated upon all that she represents in his mind; that youthful allure, that ‘feverish warmth’ in her voice. In seeing this, Nick tries, albeit pathetically, to warn Gatsby by telling him that he ‘can’t repeat the past’ to which Gatsby famously proclaims ‘why, of course you can!’
To harken back to an earlier point in the novel; when Gatsby reunites with Daisy over tea at Nick’s house, Gatsby’s inability to come to terms with the possibility of change is symbolised by the broken clock on Nick’s mantlepiece. This represents Gatsby’s obsession with creating a perfect restoration of his past with Daisy, and perhaps even with reliving a moment in his life when he was most open to the allure of greatness – and it is this obsession that ultimately pushes Daisy out of his reach forever. Because he is unable to adapt to the changes Daisy has undergone in their years apart, he insists on the revival of a version od Daisy that exists solely in his mind, going so far as to force her to admit that she never loved Tom at any point in her marriage, even after she had agreed to leave him for Gatsby. When she falls short of this expectation, the impossibility of Gatsby’s ambitions overwhelms him and he is left at a loss for meaning. Out of sheer desperation, he even takes the fall for the death of Myrtle Wilson, who was murdered by a distraught Daisy driving Gatsby’s car. What he fails to realise, however, is that despite his unwavering devotion to her, Daisy had already betrayed him and chosen to stay with Tom. Nick, having witnessed all these events taking place, describes Daisy as a careless person who ‘smashes up things’ before ‘retreating behind her money’ a characterisation to which she holds true when she skips Gatsby’s funeral and moves away with Tom in her final act of treachery. Gatsby chased satisfaction from a fake, insincere version of Daisy, unable to escape the perfect vision of her he had in his mind. As a result, he lost her and was left to die a disgraceful death at the hands of George Wilson, with virtually no-one to attend his funeral. Harrowing as it is, it works to provide a meaningful commentary on the supposed malevolence of human beings and on the futility of chasing satisfaction from shallow, meaningless relationships.
In evaluating the influence of satisfaction on Gatsby’s actions throughout the book, one must consider the ways in which Gatsby’s inability to accept the impossibility of his ambitions affect himself and the world around him. His failure to recognise opportunities for change within himself, as well as the possibility for change in other characters, is perhaps the single most consequential factor leading to his physical and figurative death. Moreover, it serves to provide a commentary on how a misalignment of priorities and a lack of introspection can suck the meaning out of an individual’s life, leaving him vulnerable to all the sorrow and malevolence present in other people, in the human condition, and in society at large.
Perhaps the greatest example of this in Gatsby’s character arc lies in his relationship with Daisy. The discrepancy between the image of her he has in his mind and the person she is in reality is so immense that it is difficult to argue if Gatsby is even thinking of the same person. His inability to recognise the change Daisy has undergone in shaping herself to Tom dooms him from the very start. Even as she, time and time again, falls short of his goals, and even as the more pragmatic, albeit rather dishonest characters like Nick warn him of his dangerous aspirations, Gatsby remains fixated on his goal. His obsession with a perfect restoration of the past leaves him blind to much of Daisy’s manipulative ways, and his perpetual need for something more ultimately prevents her from admitting that she never loved Tom, leaving Gatsby in a state of complete, utter confusion because such a scenario was never even remotely conceivable in his mind. The encounter at the Plaza Hotel leaves Daisy in a state of shock, causing her to strike Myrtle Wilson with Gatsby’s car, thus indirectly securing his fate at the hands of George Wilson.
It is worth noting here that the divide between the rich and the poor is never as ambiguously defined as it is during these final chapters of the novel, demonstrated perhaps most evidently in the way Nick writes, in reference to the way Tom and George reacted following Myrtle’s death; ‘It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.’ In many ways, Gatsby and George’s motives in these concluding moments are one of the same; both were betrayed by the American Dream and drained of their vigour by shallow, artificial people, leaving them but empty shells at a loss for meaning. With little left to live for, they turn to desperate measures as means by which to justify the now-meaninglessness of their existence.
For Gatsby, this manifests itself as a sort of further retreat into the comfort offered by his benign and naïve thoughts. In his self-imposed, blissful ignorance, he sorrowfully reaffirms a quixotic vision in his mind; that Daisy will return his calls, that everything would be alright, that they might be able to run away together and escape all the madness they had caused. For George Wilson, on the other hand, this shock sends him down a spiral of despair. As he slowly awakens to the terrible reality of his situation, so too does he awaken to the darkness of the world around him. Out of spite for the sheer malevolence of human beings, he searches for an object of his hatred, which leads him to Gatsby’s house; where he shoots him in cold blood before pressing that terrible steel barrel to his lips.
The only characters who were unaffected by this unravelling of events were Nick, Tom, Daisy, and Jordan, who were all, in essence, shielded from judgement and blame by the invulnerability guaranteed by their social class. In these moments of sorrow and malevolence, it matters not what possessions one has to his name, what great things one has done or attained, for the abortive sorrows of men are as universal as the crimson blood they spill.
Gatsby was always committed to the pursuit of greatness, be it in his constant improvement of his character or in his search for meaning in a lost, misguided world. Many of his motives were in fact noble, and in many ways, he was one of the only genuine characters in the fake, plastic world of The Great Gatsby. Indeed, one must commend his hopefulness in a world of despair, his bright ambitions for an apathetic society, and his search for satisfaction amidst all the suffering in life. Yet it begs the question; what is it all worth if he is unable to escape his own mind, to see things for how they actually are, to come to terms with that which is unobtainable? Is he not, in his perpetual hopefulness, merely a boat beating against the current, doomed to be ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past?’ Just as Gatsby reached out to a certain green light across Long Island Sound, so too might individuals reach out to things in their lives that call them to greatness and the promise of satisfaction. Yet if they are unable to see past its charming allure and if they chase such things in the wrong places – if they search for meaning in that which is meaningless – they are soon to find themselves enveloped within the sorrowful darkness that comes when that green light finally burns out.
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