Famous First Sentences: The Great Gatsby

Some novels are itching to be made into movies.  Tightly written and deceptively straightforward, The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one such masterpiece.  I don't often use that last word -- masterpiece -- but Fitzgerald crafted a cinematic tale with a great eye for visual detail; that he did so in beautiful prose (some of which is just plain delicious) is the icing on the cake (this cliché is appropriate, as I'll show later).

I've used some of the passages from this novel to teach structure in composition courses, but this first sentence is a simple declarative statement uttered by the narrator, Nick Carraway:

• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

The Bildungsroman might show the shaping of a man; Gatsby does something at once both rather more subtle and rather more simple: it illustrates how an observer of life (Carraway) might shape his own ethical maturation, stemming from the clear advice his father gave him, and resulting in a choice to turn his back on a wasteland of moral turpitude (hate that word, but it's the right one: turpitude).

But oh! is the transition to this realization -- i.e. the arc of the novel shaping events around Nick Carraway -- gorgeous in the telling, and rotten to the core.

Several scenes stand out, for example Gatsby throwing his shirts on the bed to dazzle Daisy with them, one after another, in wanton display of his beauty -- this scene works just as well in the movie as it does on the page. But for me, the image that somehow encapsulates the mastery of Fitzgerald's writing is almost a surreal vision:

• We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
  
  The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. (Chapter One)

Read these two paragraphs aloud -- you'll be glad you did. This takes place in the house belonging to Tom Buchanan, and is described as being a Georgian Colonial mansion, which would mean it was built in the 18th century, before the American Revolution. It's an old, established house. It has a very solid pedigree (Buchanan is a racist extremist, remember)--indeed, it is a house that used to demonstrate that the owners were true American colonial gentlemen, but that now indicates nothing other than obscene wealth. Buchannan mutters that the most recent owner before him was Demaine "the oil man," as if that information offers a pedigree that somehow rubs off on him (and notice that even the name Demaine indicates a solid New England respectability).

The house disagrees.

Look again at the two paragraphs quoted above--the rose-tinted vision of this encapsulated space and its encapsulated, insulated inhabitants is delicately positioned, not quite a part of the house, not quite a part of the gardens--although the grass appears to extend right into the room. These people may be cushioned by wealth, but the house is disowning them: they are not landed gentry, no matter how extravagant Buchanan's dreams may be.

There is a wonderful, bright breezy atmosphere in the room, though: a lovely sense of cheerful, fluttery femininity . Tom Buchanan deadens that by shutting the windows and bringing everyone back down to earth. He is a harsh, abrasive man, killing the air, even, with a bang. He's the kind of man who ruins conviviality merely by being present.

♣ ♣ ♣

Gatsby is a better actor than Buchanan -- he manages to look the part of wealthy gentleman, even while all rumor and conjecture about him, his history, and the source of his wealth are anything but indicative of a "proper" pedigree. Carraway observes the behavior of the people he sees during this one golden summer, and then he walks away, and we are left with the inherent emptiness of Gatsby's longing for an impossible American dream.