Great Gatsby Chapter 9 notes

Fitzgerald draws his novel to its conclusion. This chapter on the wholeows him to make his final com custodyt on the corrupt and destructive side of the American Dream. On one level it could be said that Gatsby represents the success story of the American Dream the epitome of the stereotypical ascent from rags to riches. He drives his own great deal and prosperity acquiring great wealth and material possessions but , ultimately, his dream fails anyway.Fitzgerald makes it abundantly clear just how distorted the collective vision of society had go away with regard to the accumulation of wealth and the influence of mass media represented by the eyes of T J Eckleburg. Such materialistic goals had overtaken the more altruistic and innoxious pursuits inherent in the original interpretation of the American Dream.In this chapter the reader senses snicks great sense of despair, disillusionment and disgust. He is appalled by the behaviour he encounters in his preparation for Gatsbys fun eral I found myself on Gatsbys side and alone. After all the parties he had thrown for a countless trail of guests who paraded through his folk Nobody came.The reader has now experienced Nicks journey, his voyage note the sea imagery to which he refers in the final lines of the novel. It is interesting to note just how much(prenominal) Nick has matured as a result of his experiences as he lay in his house and didnt move or breathe or speak, instant upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end. So, it is Nick who shoulders the final debt instrument for Gatsby.Nick begins the chapter commenting on the impact of these events remember he is writing from a retrospective stance cardinal old age later After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, provided as an endless drill of police and photographe rs and newspaper men in and out of Gatsbys trend door. These seem to be the only people interested the media. They are not interested in the man Gatsby, but rather the fabrication of the man, the lies and the gossip which go hand in hand with his own self-constructed image. Essentially the media contributes to the corruption of the American Dream.Nick wanted to get somebody for him. He feels loyal and protective towards Gatsby and so begins an avid search to do just this.But he tells us no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. Perhaps, one bespeak look no further than at the history of the original image fabricators, the dream creators of Hollywood to learn of the pitiful and lonely existences of their more fragile stars. houseclean away the veneer of glamour and wealth and all that really prevails is the very stark and harsh Valley of Ashes.All of this reinforces Nicks loyalty I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Ga tsby and me against them all.Nick begins to catalogue the callousness of the people who cannot hide their indifference to Gatsbys death.Wolfsheim declares I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now. A absurd euphemism for really saying he cannot be bothered its not that important.Next, there is Klipspringer who claims Well, I certainly try when asked to attend the funeral but may be futile to because of a sort of picnic. However, he does get to the heart of the matter, What I called about was a pair of shoes I left thereNick snarl a certain shame for Gatsby.Fitzgerald now chooses this moment to reveal another(prenominal) aspect of Gatsbys past his estranged father He came out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in now. Gatsby has been generous with his money.It is Gatsbys father who reveals the sense of purpose and indeed the dreamer in Gatsby from his diary hop on from bed 6.00 AMDumbbell exercise and wall-scalingHe even had a list of endearing General Resolves which do imbue him with an innocence and a serious-mindedness that enhances the readers opinion of him, sadly after his deathNo more smokeing or chewingRead one improving book or magazine per workweekSave $5.00 (crossed out) $3.00 per weekBe better to parentsThe misspelling of smoking is deliberate by the way.Three people attend the funeral Mr Gatz, Nick and Owl Eyes.Owl eyes is the only party guest who shows up. He is shocked to witness the absence of so many Why, my God They used to go there by the hundreds.It is interesting to note, electric charge in mind the references to blindness that we encounter throughout the novel, that Owl eyes removes his spectacles before declaring the reality and moral truth of Gatsbys situation The poor son- of -a-bitch.The blindness comes from within as can be seen from most of Fitzgeralds characters.Nick comments, I see now that this has been a story of the West, after a ll Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadapt suitable to Eastern purport.You will remember from Death of a Salesman that there is a similar East West divide. Biff favours the freedom and happiness in the West whereas Willy relentlessly pursues the capitalist Eastern way of life again exposing the corrupt nature of the American Dream.Nick has matured enough to see through the racy, adventurous ffeel of the East and its enchanted metropolitan twi idle he realises that downstairs all the glamorous, glittering veneer there are spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it just like the fowl dust which floated in the turn on of his (Gatsbys) dreams.The East represents capitalism and consumerism and indeed corruption of American society.The West was presumably still relatively innocent rating homespun values and the happiness of the individual.Nick is able to see this but he is the only character in the novel who does.The East has a quality of distortion.Again, Fitzgerald juxtaposes the recurring adjectives, grotesque and fantastic, once more alluding to the unsufferable dream with realityWest Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreamsa hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, over-hanging convulse and lustreless moon.There is no romantic presentation of this location for Nick the place is given an eerie, dismal atmosphere, where the houses are personified as shrinking away from this depressing, all-consuming locale.notably it is here Nick talks about the anonymous woman in discolor whom I have pointed out beforefour solemn men in dress suits are walking a presbyopic the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house the wrong house. But no one knows the womans name , and no one cares.This is a very sinister dream in which Nick envisions a woman in white this woman could represent Daisy or Jordan or even one of the fe mannish guests at Gatsbys party. It does not really matter, for Fitzgerald she represents the anonymity and lack of substance of the typical 1920s female. She is suppressed by the superiority of her male counterpart who uses her to satisfy and fulfil sexual desire. The fact that the woman is drunk and therefore lacks control reinforces the status of women is such a society which has itself lost visual sense and control of any kind of moral fibre. Her hand sparkles cold with jewels suggesting the empty, shallow pursuit of such material possessions. The fact that the men drop her off at the wrong house and no one cares really captures the essence of something Daisy says earlier in reference to her daughter I hope shell be a realize thats the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.On first reading this se ems like another very whimsical, even stupid and callous statement from Daisy but it is this very passage about Nicks nightmare that gives her comment weight and meaning and, perhaps, its the most perceptive thing she says in the entire novel.They were careless people, Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had madeThis really contains the essence of Nicks loathing of such people. This triggers the memory of something he says at the beginning of the novel when he is about to relate his story to the reader When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention for ever I wanted no more profuse excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.We remember him talking about the distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. A society whic h had such a callous ignore for human life this can be seen by their reactions to the deaths of Gatsby and Myrtle both of which are really perpetuated by Tom and Daisy respectively.They disappear drifting off leaving chaos behind undoubtedly to begin a life elsewhere.The drifting which permeates the novel points towards the loss of moral and spiritual stability which must come from the tenderness of the individual.Tom and Daisy can do this because they never really snuff it attached to anything or anyone they are indeed careless and their wealth allows them a certain freedom, an escape from reality. in the end Nick sums up the essence of the original American DreamAnd as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsbys house, had once pandered in whispers to the last a nd greatest of all human dreams for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an esthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.This is a brilliant piece of description from Fitzgerald and quite poignantly encapsulates the real essence of the American Dream. Yet, it could not be sustained. The land became manipulated and exploited for human profit. But for the 17th century Dutch sailors it was, in those first moments, the ultimate land of growth, beauty and enchantment fresh, green breast of the new world.It is clear that this is why Nick refers to Gatsby as great I feeling of Gatsbys wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisys dock.This was what Nick admired his capacity for wonderHe had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hard ly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.This is again referring to Gatsbys refusal to moderate that his past could not be relived, or recaptured, just like his tenacious belief in the dream.The image of darkness and the attendant image of blindness is practically used to foreshadow the inevitable failure of Gatsbys dream.Yet Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by yea recedes before us.The green light here symbolises the dreams and hopes of societyIt eluded us then, but thats no matter tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms fartherAnd one hunky-dory morning -Nick refers here to the dreamer in all of us. He conveys the human need to dream, to be inspired, to be challenged. Yet, he knows its important to be able to draw a line between the dream and reality something Gatsby could never do.So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.We are all inextricably cerebrate with our pasts the past shapes the future. We know this obviously from history. Gatsby insisted on living in the past his past with Daisy. Daisy could not isolate him from his past he remained socially unworthy of her. target any of us really escape the past. America itself struggled to shake off her more rigid European connections before the declaration of independence.Furthermore, the American Dream has become part of its past a part of American history which no longer exists in the same way as it did then.The dream is impossible and this is what makes Gatsbys engagement so tragic.