FRAGMENTATION IN TGG

ARTICLE BY DR ANDREW GREEN

  • defines modernism as “[what] changed the idea that authors could any longer seek to represent the world with a confident and unifying ‘voice’.

  • the poet and critic T.S Elliot , a major influence on F Scott Fiztgerald wrote of the author voice not as a unified but rather as a unifying construct

  • violence of Elliots language is in itself suggestive of the brokenness of the world he and the modernists were exploring and seeking to represent

  • Elliots seminal modernist poem The Waste Land should be such a shaping influence of TGG.

  • TGG makes a number of direct allusions to the The Waste Land- employing just the methods Elliot suggests in appropriating and ‘forcing’ the language of the literary tradition into a new construct.

  • when the Buchanan ill-fated New York party ends with a round of ‘Good Night. Good Night. Good Night.’ F. is superficially echoing the final lines of Eliot’s ‘The Burial of the Dead’

  • The Valley of Ashes recalls the ‘grey’ and destroyed world of Eliot’s imagination- a world peopled by hollow men such as Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, a generation left emptied by their experiences during WW1

  • ‘The Hollow Men’ is the title of another of E’s works- in one scene Tom B further ‘hollowed out’ by his failed marriage to Daisy and his ‘empty relationship with Myrtle Wilson

  • the fragmented event of Fitzgerald’s narrative are artfully combined to create an aesthetic unification and in so doing reach a disrupted aesthetic unity

  • ‘his narrative is a false and uneasy reconstruction’- about nick as an unreliable narrator


FRAGMENTATION OF PERSONALITY AND SETTING

  • within this fragmented world, it is not surprising that settings and personalities should also be sites of brokenness and incompleteness

  • [Nick’s] migration east is part of his personal search for meaning (my interpretation- queer?) - an attempt, perhaps, to reconstruct himself in the wake of what he with dark humour calls : “that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War.”

  • Buchanan house is observed by nick that “its facade is ‘broken by its windows’ and this becomes a metaphor for Tom’s ‘fractiousness’ and indeed the broader ‘fractiousness’ of the novel”

  • VoA- “it inevitably recollects Elliot’s The Waste Land- it is a place deprived of life: ‘a certain desolate area of land’ a place of ‘ridges and hills are grotesque hardens’; a place where ‘ash grey men […] move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.’

  • VoA- ‘people and objects are reduced to a sludgy grey where definition ceases’

  • Gatsby- ‘dealer in dodgy shares and a member of the criminal fraternity’

  • Gatsby is ‘a composite of fragments’ (Tanner: “he looms and fades”), regardless of whether or not these fragments reflect any sort of truth.

  • Gatsby- ‘there is nothing we can be certain of in Gatbsy’s life’

  • Gatsby’s library- ‘the nature of his personality is reflected in Nick’s description of his library- an elegant facade, full of books with uncut pages- a place which ‘if one brick was removed[…] was liable to collapse’

  • ‘gatbsy’s image of himself is falling apart . For all this, however, like Daisy we cannot but be impressed by ‘the colossal vitality of his [Gatsby’s] illusion.’

  • Gatsby is ‘a man of parts’ … he is also an actor, a construct, a deceiver


FRAGMENTATION OF BODY

  • VoA: ‘watched over by the disembodied eyes of Doctor Eckleburg- a kind of reverse Tiresias whose eyes are always open and who sees exactly what goes on’

  • Gatbsys’ ‘raiment is incomplete and fragmentary’ , when introduce to James Gatz, wearing a ‘torn green jersey’