Untitled - Skilliter

New Criticism 151
John Keats. Yet there has been little analysis of how the imagery in Fitzgerald’s
powerfully poetic novel structures the meaning of the text as a whole.
It might be argued that this oversight has resulted from the critical focus on The
Great Gatsby as the chronicle of the Jazz Age—as a social commentary on a
specific period in America’s past—which has diverted attention onto historical
issues and away from the text’s formal elements. Most critics agree that Fitzgerald’s
novel offers a scathing critique of American values in the 1920s, the corruption
of which is represented by Wolfsheim’s exploitativeness, Daisy’s duplicity,
Tom’s treachery, Jordan’s dishonesty, Myrtle’s vulgarity, and the shallowness of
an American populace—embodied in Gatsby’s parasitical party guests—whose
moral fiber had declined with each passing year. This is a world run by men like
Tom Buchanan and Meyer Wolfsheim, and despite their positions on opposite
sides of the law, both characters are predators consumed by self-interest, capable
of rationalizing their way around any ethical obstacle to get what they want. It’s
an empty world where selfishness, drunkenness, and vulgarity abound, where
the graceful social art of dancing has become “old men pushing young girls
backward in eternal graceless circles” and “superior couples holding each other
tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners” (51; ch. 3). And it’s a world
of impermanence and instability. The Buchanans are forever “drift[ing] here and
there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together” (10; ch.
1). Jordan is always on the move among hotels, clubs, and other people’s homes.
And even George Wilson, with the scant means he has at his disposal, thinks
he can solve his problems by pulling up stakes and moving west. Anonymity and
isolation are the rule rather than the exception, and superficial values put the
pursuit of social status and good times above every other consideration. Indeed,
one could say that the “valley of ashes” (27; ch. 2)—the name Nick gives to the
dumping ground near which George and Myrtle Wilson live—is a metaphor for
the spiritual poverty of this world:
a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and
grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys
and rising smoke and finally . . . of men who move dimly and already
crumbling through the powdery air. (27; ch. 2)
Because Jay Gatsby is clearly portrayed as a romantic figure of rather mythic proportions,
a good deal of critical attention has been given to the narrative tension
between the corrupt world of the novel and its title character. And for most critics,
Gatsby’s capacity to dream and to devote himself to the woman who embodies
that dream, including his blindness to the fact that she doesn’t deserve his
devotion, give him an “innocence” that he “maintain[s]” to the end (Gallo 43).
Indeed, there is considerable critical consensus with Marius Bewley’s opinion
that Gatsby represents “the energy of the spirit’s resistance” and “immunity to
the final contamination” of “cheapness and vulgarity” (13). As Tom Burnam puts