![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Gatsby's Choice
Jul. 5th, 2011 07:55 amBefore putting Gatsby back on the shelves, I want to suss out a key passage. Daisy and Tom Buchanan came to one of Gatsby’s big, wild, open-mansion parties. After five years of relentlessly pursuing his dream lover, Gatsby finally has her within arms’ reach. After the party, He is giddy and chatty, and he relates some of the background of this romantic saga to his new friend and confidant, our narrator, Nick Carraway.
Fitzgerald beautifully encapsulates Gatsby’s romantic obsession in one episode, in two paragraphs. Gatsby, recall, was a golden boy, handsome and sharp, but who came from impoverished origins. Through wit, charm, and fierce ambition, as well as some luck naturally, he climbs America’s social ladder. Along the way, while still poor, he met Daisy, the golden all-American blonde, rich and beautiful, whose voice musically chimes with the sound of money, whose gravitational attraction pulled all his desire and ambition into her orbit:
I am glad that I did not find “Of Human Bondage” and had this opportunity to rediscover Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby”. It is a rather poetic novella. Hard realists and postmodernists may prefer to pass over it, but it bears repeated readings across the years if you have a little tragic romance in your soul, if you like the idea of fatal love.
Fitzgerald beautifully encapsulates Gatsby’s romantic obsession in one episode, in two paragraphs. Gatsby, recall, was a golden boy, handsome and sharp, but who came from impoverished origins. Through wit, charm, and fierce ambition, as well as some luck naturally, he climbs America’s social ladder. Along the way, while still poor, he met Daisy, the golden all-American blonde, rich and beautiful, whose voice musically chimes with the sound of money, whose gravitational attraction pulled all his desire and ambition into her orbit:
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street 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. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.It is gloriously mythic. Gatsby is given a cosmic choice: continue to build your destiny and achieve true greatness, or pursue love with this woman and live or die by her. He kissed her; he chose love. And he dies violently, miserably, and young.
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 tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
I am glad that I did not find “Of Human Bondage” and had this opportunity to rediscover Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby”. It is a rather poetic novella. Hard realists and postmodernists may prefer to pass over it, but it bears repeated readings across the years if you have a little tragic romance in your soul, if you like the idea of fatal love.
