Fragmentation In The Great Gatsby

Fragmentation in The Great Gatsby

Fragmentation and Modernism

Early in the twentieth century, developments in art, philosophy, psychology, drama, music and literature, which came to be known as Modernism, changed the idea that authors could any longer seek to represent the world with a confident and unifying voice . In the wake of the turmoil that characterised the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, division, fragmentation and multiplicity took the place of the apparent certainties of the late Victorian and Edwardian worlds. The poet and critic T.S Eliot, a major influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, wrote of the author voice not as a unified but rather as a unifying construct, seeking to make sense of the words, the meanings and the writers of the past and forging from these a new language a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn (Selected Essays, p.206). The violence of Eliot s language is in itself suggestive of the brokenness of the world he and the Modernists were exploring and seeking to represent.

Always alive to the spirit of his times, Eliot explores this idea in The Metaphysical Poets (1921), where he urges the writer as a medium (with its spiritualist overtones) to force, to dislocate if necessary language into meaning . It is, therefore, peculiarly appropriate that Eliot s seminal poem The Waste Land should be such a shaping influence on The Great Gatsby. Eliot suggests that the works of other authors become for subsequent writers an available resource& fragments, ideas, styles and forms adopted from other writers can be appropriated as elements within the creative voice.

Fragmentation of the authorial voice

The Great Gatsby makes a number of direct allusions to one of the greatest works of Modernism: T.S. Eliot s The Waste Land employing just the methods Eliot suggests in appropriating and forcing the language of the literary tradition into a new construct. When the Buchanans ill-fated New York party ends with a round of Good night. / Good night. / Good night. , Fitzgerald is specifically echoing the final lines of Eliot s The Burial of the Dead which is, in its turn, an echo of the final words of Ophelia in Shakespeare s Hamlet. The valley of ashes recalls the grey and destroyed world of Eliot s imagination a world peopled by hollow men such as Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, a generation left emptied by their experiences during WW1. The Hollow Men is the title of another of Eliot s seminal works of 1925. And in one scene Tom Buchanan, further hollowed out by his failed marriage to Daisy and his empty relationship with Myrtle Wilson &goes to a medium, calling to mind Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, / the wisest woman in Europe, / With a wicked pack of cards ( The Burial of the Dead , ll.43-6).

These are specific examples, but serve to illustrate the broader point that the fragmented events of Fitzgerald s narrative are artfully combined to create an aesthetic unification and in so doing reach a disrupted aesthetic unity. Indeed, the narrative is self-consciously reflexive. Nick Garraway observes early in the novel that: Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer . He is aware that as much as Gatsby s personality, the human psyche and the post-war world, his narrative is a false and uneasy reconstruction.

Fragmentation of the personality

Within this fragmented world, it is not surprising that settings and personalities should also be sites of brokenness and incompleteness. Nick Garraway tells us at the outset of the novel that his move to the East coast is prompted by the realisation that [i]nstead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe . His migration East is part of his personal search for meaning an attempt, perhaps, to reconstruct himself in the wake of what he with dark humour calls that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War . A similar focus on fragmentation emerges when Nick first goes to the Buchanans house. He observes that its fa ade is broken by its windows, and this becomes a metaphor for Tom s fractiousness and, indeed, the broader fractiousness of the novel.

The Valley of Ashes is another significant location in the novel. As we have already observed, it inevitably recollects Eliot s The Waste land it is a place deprived of life: a certain desolate area of land a place of ridges and hills and grotesque gardens & a place where ash-grey men move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air . It is a place of decomposition, of brokenness, of desolation and of fragmentation where people and objects are reduced to a sludgy grey and where definition ceases. The space of Fitzgerald s narrative is characterised by its very lack of coherence and certainty.

Within this space , biographical fragments and rumours about the eponymous Gatsby proliferate. He is a kind of composite man of mystery. On one level he is the brilliant Gatsby, the glitzy party host. But rumours abound. Some of the many eager tongues of the novel present him as a German spy during the war , while others pronounce him in the American army during the war . He is also Jay Gatz, confidence man, dealer in dodgy shares and a member of the criminal fraternity according to two of the young women at one of his parties and Tom Buchanan, a bootlegger . And for others, he is an Oxford man in spite of his pink suit. Rumours abound, even going so far as to suggest that Gatsby killed a man who had found out he was a nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil , but the fact is that Gatsby is not uniquely any of these things. He is a composite of fragments, regardless of whether or not those fragments reflect any sort of truth. He is not James Gatz any more than he is an infantry officer, an Oxford man, a German spy or a party host. The one thing that emerges with certainty is that there is nothing we can be certain of in Gatsby s life, other than that his existence has become increasingly confused and disordered since losing Daisy. The nature of his personality is reflected in Nick s descri ption of his library an elegant fa ade, full of books with uncut pages a place which if one brick was removed was liable to collapse .

So it is that Gatsby s words are reduced to meaninglessness. He is captured by the verbal catchphrase old sport , and elsewhere, when recounting & how he lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe Paris, Venice, Rome , Nick observes & [t]he very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned character leaking sawdust at every pore . It is as if Gatsby s image of himself including his tall tales about his war record ( when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration even Montenegro ) is falling apart. For all this, however, like Daisy we cannot but be impressed by the colossal vitality of his [Gatsby s] illusion , and when we see Gatsby for what he really is the dead James Gatz, the sum total is so much less that the outward show of parts suggested. Gatsby is a man of parts , not only in that he is fragmented, not only in that he is a significant figure in the Eggs, but that he is also an actor, a construct, a deceiver.

Fragmentation of the body

Given the novel s focus on Fragmentation, it is appropriate that so often it takes recourse to synecdoche a device whereby the whole body is represented by one or more of its constituent parts. The Valley of Ashes, for example, is watched over by the disembodied eyes of Doctor Eckleberg a kind of reverse Tiresias whose eyes are always open and who sees exactly what goes on. The guests at Gatsby s parties are rarely seen as whole people, but are reduced instead to parts or properties: the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile . &Similarly, when we are introduced to James Gatz he is, appropriately enough, wearing a torn green jersey (p.94) his raiment is incomplete and fragmentary.

When Nick first meets Gatsby, we are required to focus not on the man, but on his face and his smile: one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in a life. It faced or seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. But then that smile, Cheshire-cat like vanished and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald makes almost obsessive use of body parts. For example, when Gatsby meets Daisy: His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place. Then he sat down rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand . When Myrtle is killed by Daisy, Fitzgerald again focuses on body parts: her left breast was swinging loose like a flap . The mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners . And when, towards the end of the book, Nick sees Tom Buchanan again, he highlights body parts: his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there adapting itself to his restless eyes. (My emphases throughout.)

A Broken World

Fitzgerald functioned within an artistic milieu experimenting with means by which a new voice , a new individuality could be found for the twentieth century. Christopher Butler, in his book Early Modernism, sees this and emphasises how important were new ideas of psychological division which led to an innovation for the language of the arts In destroying univocity [a single voice] . Modernism, as such, presupposes the idea of division and fragmentation as apt aesthetic constructs for the turbulent and dislocated world the Modernists seek to capture. Such ideas are fundamental to The Great Gatsby.