Fitzgerald I: Symbol and Narrator in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby (1925) is narrated by Nick Carraway, a firsthand participant in its events who is nonetheless never its central character -- a first-person peripheral narrator, positioned close enough to report events directly while remaining just distant enough from Gatsby's own obsession to offer some critical perspective on it, however incompletely. Nick calls himself uniquely honest in the novel's opening pages, even as his growing fascination with Gatsby visibly colors how sympathetically he tells the rest of the story -- a useful reminder that a narrator's stated reliability and actual reliability are not automatically the same thing.

The novel builds its meaning through a small set of unforgettable symbols. A single green light at the end of Daisy's dock, visible across the water from Gatsby's lawn, represents his longing for a past he cannot recover and a future that keeps receding no matter how close he seems to get. The Valley of Ashes, a bleak industrial wasteland between the wealthy Eggs and New York City, represents the moral and social decay underlying the era's glittering wealth, and is home to the working-class Wilsons, left behind by the prosperity that surrounds but never reaches them. Above the Valley looms a faded, oversized billboard advertisement for an optometrist, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg -- some characters and readers interpret them as a watching, almost God-like moral presence in a spiritually empty modern world, while others read them as simply a decaying advertisement, indifferent and meaningless. Both readings are worth holding at once.