Gatsby
THE GREAT GATSBY
THE STRUCTURE OF THE DREAM by M M Green, Rand Afrikaans University
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and believe in it willingly. - Wallace Stevens
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas -in the mind at the same time and still retain the abi1ity to function. –
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up
Miles Donald echoes and summarizes many critics when he calls The Great Gatsby 'the novel of the American dream'. Let us consider what this claim involves.
It is perhaps best to begin with the closing passages of the book, where its narrator, Nick Carraway, most overtly expresses Gatsby's significance for him. It is only Nick's evaluation, after all, that pronounces Gatsby 'great'. His account of "Gatsby's story is told in such a way as to explain this evaluation, to erase the 'obscene word' scrawled on that 'huge incoherent failure of a house1 which, while it is the material monument to Gatsby's career, is finally 'inessential ' along with all the other houses, and 'melt(s)' before a visionary view of the world:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
We may compare
THE STRUCTURE OF THE DREAM by M M Green, Rand Afrikaans University
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and believe in it willingly. - Wallace Stevens
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas -in the mind at the same time and still retain the abi1ity to function. –
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up
Miles Donald echoes and summarizes many critics when he calls The Great Gatsby 'the novel of the American dream'. Let us consider what this claim involves.
It is perhaps best to begin with the closing passages of the book, where its narrator, Nick Carraway, most overtly expresses Gatsby's significance for him. It is only Nick's evaluation, after all, that pronounces Gatsby 'great'. His account of "Gatsby's story is told in such a way as to explain this evaluation, to erase the 'obscene word' scrawled on that 'huge incoherent failure of a house1 which, while it is the material monument to Gatsby's career, is finally 'inessential ' along with all the other houses, and 'melt(s)' before a visionary view of the world:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
We may compare