Temporal Stagnation in the Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a classic novel of 20th century America. Despite the fact that in some ways, its plot is very small and focused on the lives of a few individual people, the narrative arc encompasses grand themes about the American dream in the first half of the 1900s. The sense of history progressing forward is missing, however. Time progresses cyclically in the novel, continually getting stuck and returning to formative moments for the characters. In some ways, the great failing of The Great Gatsby is his inability to move, to move past a critical moment in his past. Time, for him, is stuck. When Gatsby declares that one can, of course, repeat the past, it is exemplifying that repetition and regression. The use of time in the novel reinforces the lack of character growth and the pointlessness of West Egg society, never creating progression as much as stagnation and regression. There are frequent uses of time metaphors throughout the book, with reoccurring clocks and hours.

Time, in the novel, is most commonly understood in hours on the clock, not really years, or weekdays, or any other absolute measure. The hours of the day continually repeat and cycle, with one nine-o-clock not being demonstrably different than another. The text continually points out the time in this way, focusing on the particularities of schedules and bedtimes and invitations. Gatsby’s early resolve, which spiraled into degeneracy, is exemplified by the schedule his father, Mr. Gatz, shows Nick at the end of the book. This event occurs after Gatsby is already dead and his father is talking about what a good and promising young man he had been. There’s a tragedy to this discussion, as Mr. Gatz is continually talking about his future and the way he had all the potential in the world. In this context, the schedule that he offers is not one of dreary repetition, what an individual would do each and every day. Instead, it is an example of limitless potential and striving for the future. In Mr. Gatz’s words, “He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here”(Fitzgerald 131) Gatsby had been going through time normally, in a progression to the future, but his interaction with Daisy before the First World War arrested his development. Instead of moving toward a future and toward progress, he continually cycles back to the failed romance and Daisy’s broken promise. His temporal progression is stymied and the bright promise that his father still saw in him is illusory. Even his increase in station and his wealth is not indicative of personal growth; he earned his money through illegal activity and only so that he could better regain Daisy.

Gatsby’s inability to deal with the progression of time is exemplified in his reuniting with Daisy. She does not seem to initially recognize him and he is forced to tell her that they’ve met before. When he does this, he is leaning back against the mantelpiece and upsets a clock that is sitting there. He catches it, preventing any damage, but nonetheless apologizes to Nick. Nick replies, “’It's an old clock," I told them idiotically. I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor”(Fitzgerald 68). Even though the clock is unharmed, this meeting is such a vivid rejection of the normal order of things that the characters feel like the clock has been destroyed. A symbol of the progression of time has no place in the meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. After all, as Nick points out, “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken”(Fitzgerald 85) The only thing that would truly satisfy Gatsby would be the destruction of the clock and of time more generally, such that all the missed opportunities could be erased. When Daisy is finally in his house, she wanders around the grand mansion and exclaims over several elements of it. Finally, in his disarmingly plain bedroom, she picks up a gold hairbrush and smoothes her hair. In response, Gatsby has to sit down, overwhelmed and overcome. Nick describes him:

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. (Fitzgerald 72)

This moment of being totally drained, all of his happiness at her presence and the easy intimacy of her using his hairbrush in his bedroom, leaves him shaking and seated. Clocks of the period of the novel, much like in our period, were impossible to overwind, so there is an added layer of being displaced from time in the metaphor. But in theory, to overwind a clock is to increase the tension of the springs inside so much that it can no longer tick normally. Metaphorically speaking, it is being too focused on progression, on making it the right time, such that one destroys the ability to progress at all. In the same way, Gatsby is at the moment he has been focusing on for years unceasing and his mechanisms are unable to cope.

The seasons are also a reoccurring way of understanding time in the novel and they are similarly cyclical. Early in the book, Daisy speaks of the winter solstice and how it always passes her by:

"In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." (Fitzgerald 13)

The event that is looked to, in this case, the longest day of the year, is missed. This statement happens early, when the narrator Nick is first getting to know Daisy and yet has no knowledge of her relationship with Gatsby. However, the comment about the solstice is the very next piece of dialogue after Daisy responds aggressively to the suggestion that she must know Gatsby. Of course, she did know Gatsby, back in Louisville and on Gatsby’s way to the war, but WWI forestalled their romance. Daisy had promised to wait, but this was a lie. In the novel, their romance rekindles, but much like the solstice, she has missed the chance to actually establish a romance with Gatsby that is continual. The years pass, but she’s forever missing the longest day of the year because she fails to understand the relationship between the present and future. Gatsby’s fundamental temporal problem is being stuck, but Daisy does not understand the temporal quality of a promise. When one makes a promise, it creates a relationship between the present-day moment of promising and the unpredictable future where one is going to live up to the words that one says now. Daisy, however, failed at promising; she told Gatsby she’d wait for him, and instead, she married Tom. Much like her inability to remember the solstice, she cannot properly understand the relationship between the present and the future.

In conclusion, time does not progress in The Great Gatsby. It continually cycles back and returns to touchstones of the characters, whether that be on a daily basis, seasonally, or to one great memory that one continually yearns to repeat. This paper has focused on the way time is used in the story of the individual characters—Gatsby’s personal lack of growth and obsession—but this sense of degeneracy persists even in the broader themes of the state of the nation and its slide into decadence. In general, there is an overweening sense of promise that has been wasted and abandoned for the sake of obsession, focusing on a few key iterations of moments without regard for the full understanding of history. Gatsby is entirely stuck in the past and is chasing that mythical moment with pleasures and excess. In this, he is truly an American exemplar, demonstrating the impossibility of progress when one is unable to know the proper progression of time.

Work Cited

Fitzgerald, F Scott. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. Vol. 1: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.