unfortunately you have touched the subject that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I was twelve
The main point of the matter is: Nick Carraway is both a fucking liar and an uninformed narrator.
There are so many things that are cut out of the final draft that add much darker shades to Jay Gatsby—things that absolutely CRUSH me that they were removed. What you need to know was that the Jay Gatsby Nick meets is a goddamn zombie. Not literally, obviously, but he is an absolute shell of the dreamer he used to be.
He planned to go to war to die. He’d essentially been banging his head against the wall of wealth inequality for TEN WHOLE YEARS by the time he met Daisy—his whole adult life—and he’d reached a point where it just seemed impossible to make his way the way he dreamed as a child (see Absolution by Fitzgerald; it was originally written as Jay’s backstory before fitz cut it down so much to retain that air of mystery, but it explains SO much)
Daisy was the last hope in a dwindling supply.
That’s what I meant by ‘do you love your life raft?’. If he didn’t have her, he had nothing, and it was all pointless, and it was because she was a symbol of all the things he’d wanted for so long and she was unattainable so he never had to worry about catching up to her.
Until he did. And he had to face that she had changed and so had he and it was irreparable and perhaps that was for the best.
The whole Princeton draft is a fantastic read and I’m working on transcribing it for those who can’t read Fitz’s handwriting, but the scene I feel is most important for this point is this, the garden scene:
After that I watched for Gatsby, and found him several evenings later, coming across my own lawn. He had lost a little of his ruddy tan and his eyes were bright and tired. We sat down on a bench in the yard.
“No, old man. Why do you ask me that?”
“I hear you fired all your servants.”
“I had to have somebody that could keep their mouths shut,” he replied after a minute. “These two towns are pretty close together.”
“Where’d you find these?” I inquired, a little startled by the romantic revelation. ((Side note, why are you so excited that jay would be willing to fire his whole staff to keep a relationship secret? Closeted ass behavior))
“They’re some of Wolfshiem’s people.” He broke off. “Can you come to lunch at Daisy’s house next Saturday?”
We sat for a few minutes in silence. Then he asked me if he could tell me about something that was on his mind, something that had happened to him when he first knew Daisy several years ago.
“Will I bore you?” He looked up quickly. “For God’s sake tell me if it’ll bore you.”
They had been walking together down the street one autumn night when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year and Gatsby became aware that everything was alive. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and a bustle among the stars. He took a step toward her, perceiving out of the corner of his eye that the blocks of the sidewalk formed a ladder and mounted to a roof garden above the trees where one could suck on the pap of life, gulp fown the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the humming and the song. Then he kissed her. At his lips touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
…He didn’t really say any of this. What he said was that she had been an “ideal” of his, and that he’d never have such ideals about things or girls anymore.
“Well, you have Daisy,” I said. “After all she ought to be a pretty satisfactory incarnation of anything.”
“She is,” he answered without conviction. “But it’s a little like loving a place where you’ve once been happy.”
“You don’t know what you want,” I told him impatiently. “You wait three years and then after three weeks you’re tired.”
“We all grow old,” I told him. “It seems to me you’ve come pretty close to getting all your desires.”
“I haven’t got anything,” he said simply. “I thought for a while I had a lot of things, my house—“ He looked up at it for an instant— “and things like that. But the truth is I’m empty and I guess people feel it. That must be why they keep on making up things about me, so I won’t be so empty. Why,— Daisy’s all I’ve got left of a world that was so wonderful that when I think of it I feel sick all over.” He looked around with wild regret. “Let me sing you a song—I want to sing you a song!”
He began to sing a song in a low unmusical baritone. The tune seemed to be a rough compendium of all the tunes of twenty years ago. It went about like this:
“We hear the tinkle of the gay guitars
We see the shining Southern moon;
Where the fire-flies flit
Drones the cricket’s single tune.
We hear the lapping of the wavelets
Where the lonesome nightbirds sing
The Dreamy Song of Spring”
“I made it up when I was fourteen,” he said eagerly, “and the sound of it always makes me perfectly happy. But I don’t sing it often now because I’m afraid I’ll use it up.”
Through all he said, even through the doggerel of the song, I was reminded of something that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what it was that I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever.
So we come to the point of Nick being a fucking LIAR. He outright admits that he made up most of the past love affair between Jay and Daisy—and then narrates that he pressured Jay into pursuing Daisy even when he said he didn’t think he should anymore.
I wish wish WISH some of the Princeton draft had been preserved in the final novel but then it wouldn’t really fit Nick’s narrative of Jay being a paragon of hope and devotion, right? Nick in all his middle class glory wouldn’t have this beautiful tragic man to put on a pedestal, right? Nick looks like he had more of an obvious hand in Jay’s death, right?
Jay reached out, begging for Nick to snap him out of it, and he didn’t. Which is why it matters so much in this version if Jay loved the real woman or the ideal, because he didn’t love the real woman anymore at all. And someone told him to cling to the ideal—reaffirmed that Daisy was his last and only hope.
2087
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
