The Great Gatsby

We read The Great Gatsby in English class. It is my favorite, so far of the novels we have read in class. Anyway, I was really proud of my essay, so I'm posting it. I think one of the reasons I felt the way I did about the book was that I had been meditating on Ecclesiastes, and Fitzgerald does a fantastic job of showing the vaporous, nature of life.

In the Great Gatsby, emphasis is placed on the emptiness of modern life. The characters float here and there, trying to fill their purposeless lives, but continually finding themselves bored by everything. Gatsby is in contrast to the bored masses of people he collects around him. However, it is Gatsby's differentness, the very purpose in his life, that dooms him to misery and loneliness in the end,

Throughout the book there is a great contrast between East Egg and West Egg and between Daisy and Tom's tranquil, soporific life and Gatsby's fantastic, lively parties. Daisy's life could be said to simply happen to her, she is a passive observer and although she is somewhat dissatisfied with her life as it is, she does not like to take action to change it. Jordan Baker exemplifies the carelessness of this set of people. When Nick speaks to her about her careless driving, she says in that case the other drivers had better be careful. Daisy, Tom, and their friends are essentially careless, and leave other people to clean up the messes they make.

Gatsby, on the other hand is not so careless. He has been planning his life in grand detail since his childhood, as Nick discovers from reading the schedule Gatsby had written in the back of “Hopalong Cassidy.” Everything he has done for the past several years has been with the purpose of getting Daisy. He has a purpose in his life which is everything to him, and he will do anything to gain his object. In the end, however, all of Gatsby's attempts at control fail miserably, his sense of purpose is insufficient to make him happy, and after his death his former friends desert him. Gatsby is, indeed, “great” in some ways, but he is ultimately as pathetic and lonely as the others.

Meanwhile, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg look down on everyone. The old billboard represents God. Mr. Wilson points to it when he is speaking about God seeing what goes on. The billboard was put up by an optometrist who has long since disappeared. Likewise, God is apparently absent from the empty lives of the residents of the East and West Eggs. The empty eyes of a missing deity look down on the empty lives of people below. It would appear that, not only is there no immediate purpose in their lives, but neither have they any greater hope than whatever enjoyment can be drawn out of their own dull lives.

The Great Gatsby is an honest book, that presents truthfully the horribleness of a life without God (and thus without meaning). Lives may be bright, even beautiful, but they are brief, without meaning, and often destructive. There is no interconnectedness in life, people are not connected with one another, or with anything- there is no accountability for the damage people cause one another, and there is no change. Everyone continues as they were before, until the light goes out and they die.

Reading through Winston Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples today, as I am wont to do (mostly because if I didn't, I would be in trouble- I'm reading it for school.), I came at length to the French Revolution (or at least to the beginning of it. A phrase about Rousseau struck my already troubled brain.

"Rousseau in his famous Social Contract and other essays had preached the theme of equality. Every man, however humble, was born with a right to play his part in the government of State. This is doctrine long since acknowledged by all democracies, but Rousseau was the first to formulate it in broad and piercing terms."

This idea of the right of everyone to play a part in government appears to me to be deeply ingrained in our culture and completely unexamined.

It seems to me if an "accident of birth" is not enough to entitle someone to be a king, millions of such accidents can hardly be sufficient to entitle millions of people to vote. I mean, from whence came this right?

Furthermore, when such an idea is accepted without question, it is not surprising that the populace of European countries have been known to complain that they cannot vote in US elections. After all, are they not our equals? I demand justice!

Of course, the use of the words preached and doctrine is apposite. After all, the religion of democracy grew from such ideas. I have read The Social Contract and I must admit, I merely thought it foolish. It is entirely made up, reality plays little part in the formulation of his ideas, including his history of mankind. As Chesteron wrote "[T]hey really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, 'I will not hit you if you do not hit me'; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, 'We must not hit each other in the holy place.'" And that is probably a better history of the evolution of government than Rousseau ever made. In any case, I still think it's rather nonsense. There was a lot of stuff about the "general will" or something, which is NOT the same as majority rule, only if someone doesn't agree, we must make him agree, which DOES sound like majority rule, and on it goes.

What I was saying in the last paragraph is this: Whether it makes sense, whether it is poorly reasoned is irrelevant; it is doctrine, and it may not be questioned.

Of course, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." but self-evident is not the same as obvious, and that argument depends on, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." The thing is that, while men are created equal, they are never born equal. This is why fairness and justice rarely look the same. It would be fair to take Jimmy's eight blocks and give half of them to Stephen, but it would hardly be just, because it's stealing. In any case, I think everything goes crazy when you abandon simple rules (you shall not steal) in favor of "the greater good" 'cause from then on, you're just making stuff up.