The Great Gatsby: Anti-War Symbolism

Post-War symbolism and a collective sense of trauma seed the motivations and conscious behavior of nearly all of the characters that waft through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s breezy and eloquent meditation on the vices and virtues of the rich Long Islanders of the 1920s. Fitzgerald himself seems to invest The Great Gatsby with the accumulated promise and tragic misalignment of the times, fraught with a sense of spiritual uncertainty and a commitment to the fog of hedonism and empty luxury that would ultimately segue into the Great Depression. The speculated extent to which Gatsby reflects the forlorn time-capsule in which the dramatic events of the novel unfold is uncertain, however, the precise majesty of Gatsby’s presence seems to detach him from the other characters’, all of whom seem suspended in the twilight of wealth and an indistinct sense of irrelevance. Although Gatsby is driven by unrequited love for Daisy, and an inadequacy which explains his motivation for wealth and the status that accompanies it, he is never quite comparable with the more indentured exemplars of wealth and privilege that surround him.

Daisy is both a fretful wish through which Gatsby seeks to redeem his darker associations and a glimpse of himself through the lens of romantic disillusionment and ultimately tragedy ( Fitzgerald, 93-94 ). Daisy is the refuge Gatsby yearns for, just as the lavish parties that Gatsby throws are a means of distancing from the reality and visceral force of a war that imposed its presence in both supple and menacing ways. The palliatives available to

Daisy are roughly proportional to the emptiness and loss that pervades the Valley of Ashes that the partygoers pass through on their way into Manhattan, and the glitzy restaurants and hotels that harbor them ( Fitzgerald, 23 ). Gatsby wields his wealth like a suit of armor against the assemblage of intolerant snobs that suckle and fawn at his feet. Everything feels rushed and stalled at the same time, each character is an agonist at once isolated from the others’ and painfully aware of their own inconsequence to the backdraft of the war, the seemingly unshakable permanence of an event that haunts them in different ways. The only characters that seem entirely immune to the war are Daisy and Tom, possessed only with the compatible impulse to lose themselves in possessions and the guarded formalities of wealth.

Gatsby’s utopian cosmos of unending merriment and consumption is no more real or desired than his calculations to surround himself with the flighty patrons who mob his parties and disappear back into the early hours of the morning, banished on the last shrill voices of expiration and intoxication. The world he has invented and presides over tolerates only his wish to consummate his love for Daisy, but his love is unexplored to the extent that it is every bit as false as the steps he undertakes to secure it. “But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding, he literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room” (89, 90). Gatsby’s own injuries and disillusionment are hidden behind the formal walls of his great mansion. He watches the lively activities from a window above the parties, keeping a sharp eye out for Daisy. Fitzgerald mutes a direct reference to the presence of the war, instead, he weaves its impact through the absolutions of the central characters who carry on in a limbo of champagne and revelry. American culture is caught in a period of self-inebriation and panic; however, the alcohol and frenetic jazz distractions only serve to magnify the peril of the war and everything it has bequeathed to the living. Gatsby wants only the shelter of love, he wants to formalize and elevate it to a point where it is expressed through his ambition and conscious loss of personal integrity.

Gatsby is deftly aware of the moral compromise that permits him access to Daisy, as well as an opportunity to steal her away from the superficial and dishonest clutches of Tom. Fitzgerald withholds any details of Gatsby’s past, beyond the references to a lost individual, a damaged soul whose salvation, he believes, lies in the arms of Daisy. Gatsby is never ambivalent about Daisy, although somehow Fitzgerald suggests that he should be. She is not what Gatsby believes her to be, but he is loathed to abandon the illusions that he has carefully invested in her. Gatsby himself is a social product of the war, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who parlayed his cleverness and ambition through the black-market channels of the war only to emerge as a wealthy man. He is inseparable from the war from both a social and ethical point of view, although there are indications that he is aware of this every step of the way. His belief that Daisy will redeem him is not only naïve but disastrously ill-conceived from a man who possessed the acumen to rise to such financial height in such a relatively short period of time. “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: I never loved you.‘ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken” (109, 111). Fitzgerald uses all of the characters as props to express his own ambiguity and even contradictions about wealth, class, and the nature of war as an event that shaped the 1920’s in a number of ominous ways. Fitzgerald was both an exemplar and critic of the excess and privilege of the elite circles he describes. The men and women who attend Gatsby’s lavish evening parties are so far removed from the war that in a very real sense they compose a diversion that offers other forms of obsession. His superficial utopianism is directly t odds with the event of WW1 and the unexpressed secrecy it circulates among the characters, whose American nativity is described as a kind of pardon or pass. The degree to which this constitutes corruption or common refuge is uncertain, however the feeling that nothing matters beyond the next party, the next stormy affair, or the next round of champagne is artfully communicated.

Nick Carroway appears deliberately detached from Gatsby, expressing a confusing mix of admiration and contempt. The reader often has the feeling that Nick longs for the position that Gatsby holds, a formal landlord and self-made millionaire held aloft by virtue of ambitions whose darker associations are less relevant than the position they place him in. Because there are competing interpretations of Gatsby’s utopia it feels not entirely comfortable, but it does distance the participants from the forces of society that struggle with the aftermath of the war, and the implication that another war is not far off. Gatsby is a tragic figure because he struggles with forces that are both common and sympathetic, he is grounded by the love that he pursues in Daisy, and the long string of compromises he has made to reach a point where she appears accessible to him. Without wealth Daisy is remote, a far off wish that another nameless soldier might have conjured in the sorrow of his confusion and fear. In this respect, the anti-war sentiments in the novel come to the reader not in direct statements, but rather in a series of actions and their consequences.

Gatsby appears to want only the solace of Daisy, to him love is the distance he seeks, the compensation for all of the insecurities and apprehensions that continue to haunt him even in the exclusive heights of the incomparable wealth he has acquired. “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy’ (110, 111). Without the war Gatsby is unable to escape his lower-class status, therefore at least to some extent, the war becomes a facilitator as much as a backdrop both psychologically and emotionally. Money insulates the characters’ and where this insulation reveals brief glimpses beyond the hermetically sealed realm of wealth the last of Gatsby’s ill-conceived calculations come to the fore. Because Gatsby is a rich man the reader assumes things that may not be true. He may be every bit as conflicted and tormented without the money because its only purpose seems to be an instrument with which to secure his love for Daisy.

Daisy and the other celebrant's party the nights away in a lost world that is deliberately juxtaposed with the environment of the war in Europe, and the array of social residues it leaves. The isolation is nearly dream-like because in this world there are no outer manifestations of suffering or sacrifice, although the precise quality of suffering differs greatly. In spite of their callousness and haughty privilege the people who party compulsively cannot really be blamed for their excess, especially in the wake of the Great War. The evenings offer a host of palliatives that all seem to offer a dislocation whose ultimate purpose is an escape. Gatsby is perhaps driven the most by escape, it never occurs to him that Daisy’s marriage to Tom might well expose her character and that his love for her might be an invitation to tragedy. The conclusion is that on some ineffable level Gatsby is every bit as corrupt and superficial as Daisy and that his obsession with her is entirely unexplored ( Fitzgerald, 60 ).

There is also the suggestion that Gatsby’s wealth is more obvious because it lacks the respectability of a sequence of generations. Gatsby was made by the associations that involve the war, and yet the nagging reminders of his shadowy criminality shouldn’t necessarily prove an issue for the Buchanans’ or any of the others who are hypnotically enticed into Gatsby’s all-night parties. ‘He‘s a bootlegger…One time he killed a man who had found out that he…’ (61, ?) Jay Gatsby is elevated above the other rich people by the mysterious qualities that Fitzgerald imbues him with, the otherwise romantic attachment to an illusion around which he has built an empire. Here the author is making a comment about the motivations that dominate American culture in the early period of the twentieth century, and the punctuations of the war that have managed to destroy the common fabric of the hallowed American dream. If the culture is in decline and the soundness of the post-war re-birth is the consumption of distractions, the author expresses his own distaste for these people in the sacrifice of Gatsby at the indirect designs of those he surrounds himself with and to at least some extent—Daisy herself.

Fitzgerald posits a doomed romance within a considerably larger and more compelling canvas of the fragmenting social mores of the early twentieth century. Perhaps without the burden of his obsession, Gatsby might have been a truly inspiring individual, capable of reaching the heavens? Asking what the war meant to Fitzgerald might well entail an answer from Gatsby, who seems to be distinctly out of place among the pampered runabouts who frolic and carouse amid the festive confines of his mansion. Fitzgerald might be telling his readers that the grand romance between Gatsby and Daisy is a symptom of the post-Victorian culture and those newly discovered material obsessions. Where Fitzgerald communicates no uncertain ambiguity and even reverence for the privileged culture he knows so well, there is also a palpable note of disgust and condemnation. Fitzgerald’s American dream is neither resolved nor directly presented, it turns upon the better nature of Gatsby, the poetic and memorable features that distinguish him from Carroway and inform the tragedy of his demise. ‘Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor’ (150, 150). Gatsby is ultimately done in by his associations and seductions, his misguided ambition and the myopic nature of his love for Daisy…for had Gatsby briefly glimpsed the arc of the confused love it might well have been sobering for him.

The war seems to have invested so much of the deterioration that swirls around Gatsby, and the suggestion of honor or heroism is only a value to the extent that it has meaning in this new world of vapid carousal and ineffable loss. Gatsby steps into this decay not to participate for the same reasons as Daisy and the others, but rather as a means to an end. He fakes it as so many of the partygoers also fake it. Not to diminish the complexities and essential uniqueness of Gatsby the author permits the reader to meditate on Gatsby’s innumerable alternatives, his unique authority as an enabler of others’ dreams and casual decadence. When Gatsby dies the open well of Fitzgerald’s conflicted emotions rises to the surface.

Beyond the doomed character of Gatsby, the author’s profound anti-war sentiments are never directly communicated or even expressed through any of the characters, instead, Fitzgerald explores the often cynical hedonism and its impact on each character as an unconscious summary of the war and its social impact on American culture in the roaring twenties. The reader is sentenced to experience Gatsby as mysteriously out of place in this superficial milieu of social predators and the feast of souls who party madly as the world recovers. The surface depictions are heavily weighted in the author’s conviction that by association everyone is a victim of the war in one way or another. Each character, from the most unquestioning to the enchanting and forlorn narration of Carroway, is possessed by the entropic lifelessness and desperate longing of the period. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ (180, 182). Carroway expresses what the reader is feeling, starstruck in the presence of Gatsby, intimately chronicling his artful composure and lust for an impossible romance. Carroway seems to live vicariously through Gatsby as if even after Gatsby’s death the accumulated weight of the man’s presence will resonate like the far off gaze of a lover. More than any other character Nick remains composed in the most awkward of social situations, he is a cool observer, neither passing judgment nor remaining aloof. Nick is Gatsby’s hidden angel, the force that follows politely, never interfering in what he may already see coming. More than anyone Nick appreciates the glamorous exteriors and surfaces communicated by Jay Gatsby, the mad assurance that his plan must succeed in spite of what may be understood as a terrible oversight with regard to Daisy. Gatsby’s child-like belief that his heart will secure its desire is what will perish with him.

Gatsby’s essential aim differs greatly from the cast of affluent partygoers in that money is not the end in itself, the ultimate prize that purchases social acceptance. To his credit, Gatsby is a rationalist, and also the most delirious of dreamers. Nick is quite correct when he muses that Gatsby was the embodiment of promise, a man perhaps far greater than the times in which he found himself. Amid the rampant disillusionment of the post-war period, only Gatsby possessed something that distinguished him from the others, maybe his motives were purer, or his serene belief that his love for Daisy would force events into a conspired harmony in which everything would settle before him. He may have experienced the same disillusionment that drove the excesses of the times, however, he responded to it in another way. Gatsby was the curious conflation of both author and his field of study, corrupted yet mysteriously immune to corruption in the sense that he experienced it around him. ‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that‘s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning –‘ (180, 182). Fitzgerald details the social trends of the twenties through his characters, lost, vaguely predatory, self-infatuated and searching only for the next comforting rush, the intoxication that sustains them in the aftermath of the Great War. Carroway and Gatsby experienced the war however each man comes to terms with it in different ways amid the frenetic scramble for new wealth and the bitter victuals of attending party after party in an effort to chase away the lingering dread of the period. The social conflict between new money and old money appears to define respectable wealth. Even the guarded status of old money has not loosened in the wake of the War, and the old rules still apply, to Gatsby’s dismay. The grotesque greed and materialism that Fitzgerald comments on is every bit a consequence of the war as the more direct signatures and injuries. Fitzgerald wants the reader to come to share his vision of the tragedy that war entailed for Americans in the twenties however he is not going to make it easy to do this. His characters speak for him.

The clash between the old aristocracy and the emergence of new money is part of the dilemma that Gatsby encounters in his plan to win Daisy. Generations removed from its criminal roots the wealth of the old aristocracy has shed its sinister associations and designs and lies poised against the mansions of East Egg. Gatsby is reminded throughout the novel that in spite of his generous Saturday night parties, and the lavish lifestyle he has won for himself, he is still defined by the offense of new money. In this particular respect, Fitzgerald touches upon the unconscious hypocrisy that accompanies wealth in America, the arbitrary distinctions that circulate among the wealthy as to suggest that only certain wealth is respectable. Among the notable ironies is that Gatsby’s impressive rise to financial prominence is not enough to win Daisy, suggesting that even the rich maintain ridiculous double-standards. His dream is more immediate than that of any other character in the novel, most of who appear to be vaguely unsatisfied, even in the lap of material luxury and privilege.

Fitzgerald implies that Gatsby’s dream is pure and respectable because it is somehow unselfish and even noble. But there are contradictions that announce themselves throughout the narrative. Even as Gatsby begins to touch that intangible dream of happiness the forces that will undermine it are already assembling without his awareness. He is so thoroughly convinced that Daisy is his redemption that he closes out everything else to his own peril. Even after his efforts to establish himself in the same social circles that Daisy runs in he discovers that he cannot quite manage this. In nearly every aspect of Gatsby’s quixotic plan, the war overshadows his efforts on some identifiable level, and the author is remarkably skillful at describing the impact of the war both socially and economically through undisclosed anxieties and behaviors. Just beneath the dizzying swirl of merriment and absent celebration are the demons of war.

Fitzgerald, perhaps more than any writer of his period, captures the intimacy and angst of America’s lost generation in the visage of Jay Gatsby, and the varied characters that are both drawn to him and seeking to destroy him. Gatsby’s corruption is entirely self-ordained, and yet in spite of the eloquence and grandeur of his journey he might also be considered a victim of the war that the author assures us hovers over the events and characters in no uncertain terms. Gatsby’s singular dream to win Daisy, irrespective of its tragic myopia, is comparable to the accompanying deterioration of the American dream that Fitzgerald laments through Gatsby. He is everything that the dream contained, individualistic, adventurous and painfully glamorous, and yet his disgrace is that he is at odds with the decadence and empty hedonism which he exploits to secure Daisy. It wasn’t necessarily that his dream was wrong, but that he was not willing to confront a reality that might have undermined his desire.

Gatsby was meant as a martyr of the age, a flash of inspiration and uniqueness destroyed by the common conspirators who prey upon such appearances. Fitzgerald tells the reader that the war destroyed Gatsby as much as the particular events that followed. In his absence, the world was as it had been, and only Carroway was aware of the loss and its implications for the living, those very few who understood Gatsby and his mad dream of happiness. ‘After Gatsby‘s death, the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes‘ power of correction’ (176, 178).

Work Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, reissue edition. pp. 23-178, New York. Scribner 1996