The Contrastive Techniques in The Great Gatsby

[Abstract] The Great Gatsby, with it’s depiction of “the Jazz Age”, marks the highest point of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s artistic achievement. T. S. Eliot once concluded that it was the “first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”. In this novel, the author successfully employed the contrastive techniques, which endow the novel with artistic glamour and profound connotation. This paper intends to illustrate the contrastive techniques in terms of scenes, characters as well as dream and reality. The significance of these contrasts lies in the fact that they help the readers to have a better understanding of the Jazz Age, the personalities of the main characters and the American dream. The careful deliberate employment of contrastive techniques not only testify to Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship in planning and developing the novel, but also contribute a great deal to the reveal of the tragic theme, that is, the disillusion of American dream.

[Key Words] contrast, scene, character, dream, reality

1 Introduction

2 The employment of contrastive techniques

2.1 The contrast of scenes

The author gives us a vivid description of various scenes in the novel, among which the most impressive are the sharp contrast between Gatsby’s parties and his funeral and the strong contradicts between the east and the west. These two pairs of contrastive scenes foreshadow Gatsby’s tragical destination.

2.1.1 The parties vs. the funeral

The Jazz Age is a time of broken dream, a time of flapper, a time of changes and a time of financial boom. It’s clearly reflected in the description of Gatsby’s parties. These parties are fashionable, but pointless. It is only a show-off of Gatsby’s riches and material success. The crowds hardly know their host; many come and go without invitation. The music, the laughter and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, show the purposelessness and the loneliness of the party-goers beneath their marks of relaxation and joviality. All this is typical of “the Jazz Age”, when many people lose belief in American dream and indulge themselves in drinking and dancing. The great expectations which the first settlement of the American continent brings vanish, and so despair and doom set in.

In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars….On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York----every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.” (Chapter 3, 52)

The exavagent life, the noisy people constitute Gatsby’s parties. However, the depiction of the fashionable and meaningless parties serves to highlight Gatsby’s tragedy by contrasting the grandeur of his party with his violent death, with the frustration of his dream. Gatsby’s funeral is rather deserted and cheerless compared with his parties. It’s a record of human coldness. Nick has invited some people to come to Gatsby’s funeral. These people are all Gatsby’s so-called friends. They find a lot of excuses for their absence because they know clearly that Gatsby is no longer useful for them. Gatsby’s generous parties have not brought him even one friend. What’s more, Daisy, once Gatsby’s lover, the real killer, “hadn’t sent a message or a flower”.(Chapter 9, 233)

The sharp contrast between the exavagence of the parties and the coldness of the funeral reveals the hypocritical relationship among people and the moral degradation of the Jazz Age.

In one sense, the moral conflict in the novel is resolved into a conflict between East and West----the ancient and corrupt East and the raw but virtuous West. Nick attributes his moral attitude to his Middle Western background. Nick’s experience in the East results in his return with relief to the West: “After Gatsby’s death, the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line, I decided to come back home.”(Chapter 9, 236) “Home”, it seems clear, is a place where the fundamental decencies are observed and virtue is honored. The East is a representation of sophistication and moral degradation while the West is the embodiment of virtue and harmony.

In the novel, the author fabricated the East Egg and the West Egg whose geographical contrast shows the conflicts of different values.

Their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilation in every particular

except shape and size. (Chapter 1, 6)

The Buchanans live in white palaces of fashionable East Egg while Gatsby and Nick who comes to New York to deal with bond business live in less fashionable West Egg. East Egg is a paradise for upper-class society. It’s more degraded and amoral. However, West Egg symbolizes hope, promise and reinvigoration.

2.2 The contrast of main characters

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald successfully delineated many impressive characters such as Gatsby, Tom, Nick, Daisy, Wilson, and etc. The contrast of their character and personality is striking in this novel, among which the contrast between Gatsby and Tom, between Nick and Gatsby are especially noticeable.

Gatsby is sensitive and idealistic, almost divine in his dedication to his love and faith. Although his wealth came from his criminal activities, Gatsby manages to hold the readers’ sympathy throughout. The whole-hearted dedication of Gatsby and his sincere belief in what he does make him heroic, and this submerges the unpleasant details so that they don’t seem important in the final outcome.

Compared with Gatsby, Tom is sinister and sly. “They are careless people,” as Nick describes them, “Tom and Daisy----they smashed up things and creature and then retreated back into their money or their carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess----they had made.” Tom is more sophisticated. When he finds that things are not moving to his favor, he is determined to arrange things to suit himself, no matter whom he hurts in the process. When he finds out Gatsby’s interest in his wife, for example, Tom is quick to force Gatsby to a showdown. It is not certain that Tom wants Daisy because he loves her. His desire to keep his wife may just reflect the pride of a man who refuses to have his wife taken away from him by another man. And added to this pride is Tom’s social consciousness. To surrender Daisy to a man who is his social inferior is too humiliating to bear. Gatsby, therefore, finds himself up against Tom’s ruthlessness and social arroganceTom, however, does not only smash up Gatsby’s dream. After the accident, Gatsby’s sentimental outlook prevents him from safeguarding himself against blame. Tom is quick to take advantage of this. He makes Gatsby bear the responsibility for Myrtle’s death. So Tom does not only destroy Gatsby’s idealism, but also Gatsby’s life.

It is true that Nick Carraway begins by merely recording events and keeping a distance between himself and characters such as Buchanans and Gatsby. But he is soon caught up with the people and events around him. His sympathy for Gatsby grows until he not only feels responsible for him at his burial; he understands what Gatsby stands for. All this, however, does not mean that Nick can be totally identified with Gatsby against the Buchanans. On the contrary, Nick is completely different unlike Gatsby in most respects.

Nick Caraway is sensitive and intelligent; he alters his evaluation of others as he learns more about them. He preserves a rational mind that makes him also realize what is wrong with Gatsby. Gatsby, on the other hand, is idealistic and romantic. His personality remains unchanging and static. His view of life remains one-sided and unreal at the end. For Gatsby, the material world has always been amorphous and only the world of dreams essentially real. Born in a society where inexhaustible possibilities seemed to dwell in the white palaces of the rich, Gatsby saw their accumulated booty as the instruments of their secret charm. His dream is timeless and incorruptible, but the woman and the world to which he weds his dream are both mortal and corrupted. So his dream is doomed to fail.

While Gatsby and the Buchanans guard their interests single-mindedly, Nick learns to see matters from others’ point of view and achieves moral insight and wisdom, which make him a more complete person. For example, Nick Carraway is the only person who is aware of the destructive flow of time and of the spiritual death that has overtaken Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and the people around them and Gatsby. In the afternoon that Gatsby fails to hold Daisy, Nick remembers suddenly that it is his birthday.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

2.3 The contrast between dream and reality

The most conspiring contrast in this novel is the conflict between dream and reality. American dream means that in America one might hope to satisfy every material desire and thereby achieve happiness. It is deceptive because it proposes the satisfaction of all desire as an attainable goal and identifies desire with material. Fitzgerald said, “American’s great promise is that something is going to happen, but it never does. American is the moon that never rose.” This indictment of the American dream could well serve as an epigraph for the protagonist Gatsby, the true heir to the American dream. He pursues an elusive dream, which even though sometimes within his grasp, continues somehow to evade him. With great magnitude of his glittering illusion and the single-mindedness, he tries to make it a reality. Nowhere is Gatsby’s romantic idealism more evident in his determination to conquer time, to make one instant of his life immortal. Throughout the novel, Gatsby seeks the recovery of his moment of fulfillment; he wants to obliterate time, to expunge the years of separation from Daisy, to annihilate everything except the instant that wed the fulfilled future and the wistful past. When Nick Carraway tells Gatsby that the past can’t be repeated, Gatsby is incredulous: “Can’t we repeat the past?....Why of course you can!”(Chapter 6, 148) In truth, his doomed hope is not only to repeat the past but to seize a never-ending magical moment with Daisy that would join pursuit and capture, seed-time and the harvest. But the tragedy of Gatsby is that he fails to understand that he can’t recapture the past (his fresh, new love for Daisy) no matter how much money he makes, no matter how much wealth he displays. Daisy, despite Tom’s coarseness and open unfaithfulness, refuses to leave the security of her established position for Gatsby’s adoration and precarious wealth. Gatsby scarifies his life on the alter of his dream, unaware that it is composed of the ephemeral stuff of the past

The cruel reality smashed Gatsby’s dream. Fitzgerald’s comment on the failure of Gatsby’s dream is also a statement on the failure of American dream. The contrast of the dream and the reality significantly indicates a moving away from faith and hope in a world where material interests have driven out sentimentality and faith. What is more, dream, even if it persists, is utterly helpless and defenseless against a material society. It can only be defeated. Gatsby is an example. Owing to his unrealistic dream, Gatsby’s fate turns out to be a tragedy. Because he isn’t conscious of his unrealistic dream of love and he doesn’t correctly handle contradictions between ideal and reality, Gatsby sinks into this kind of unreal dream so deeply that he can’t wake up. And the final result of Gatsby is surely miserable.3 Conclusion

Bibliography

[1] Chang, Yaoxin. A Survey of American Literature. Tianjing: Nankai University Press, 1991.

[2] Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Qingdao: Qingdao Press, 2003.

[3] Miller, James E. F. Scott Fitzgerald----His Art and Technique. New York: New York University Press, 1964.

[4] Tang, Soo Ping. York Notes on The Great Gatsby. Beijing: World Publishing Corporation, 1989.

[5] Wu, Dingbai. An Outline of American Literature. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1998.

[6] Yang, Qishen. Selected Readings in American Literature, Volume 2. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Press, 1987.