A Gatsbean Odyssey: Failed by Its Characters? (2/7)

The disjointed central character of The Great Gatsby is a good indication of the overall workmanship of the novel and has at times made me doubt its quality. My copy of the book is only 115 pages, which makes this Great American Novel a Mini Great American Novel. But is it actually great?

My copy of The Great Gatsby:

 

 

Sometimes, I think The Great Gatsby is failed by its characters. I have already discussed the opacity of the great Gatsby himself, but he is not the only character to present obstacles to understanding this stubborn book.

A prime example is Daisy Buchanan. As the love of Jay Gatsby’s life, the one he has spent five years striving to obtain, we might expect her to be an outstanding example of feminine virtue, but she invariably has something maddeningly superficial to say. One of the most baffling is while she is hanging with Gatsby at his house and reveling in the wonders of his wardrobe:

"’They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’"

Perhaps there is something beneath the vapid façade. Indeed, Carey Mulligan is such a fine actress that she invests the scene with real emotion in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation, but can she save the character from its source material? When Daisy says that every girl must learn to be a “beautiful little fool,” this may be an indication that she has adopted such a mask merely to satisfy society’s demands, but Daisy always seems to me to be nothing more than that, so that it isn’t a mask at all, but who she really is.

Daisy is not only hard to read, she is also unlikable--and The Great Gatsby has more where she came from. Perhaps the most unlikable is her husband Tom. He’s a big, strapping, gruff and dumb polo player, vain and short-tempered. As if that weren’t bad enough, he’s a philanderer, a woman–beater and a white supremacist. But he’s rich, which means he can get away with it. When all has come to pass, Nick Carraway has a perfect description of the Buchanans:

"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 made."

This description fits Daisy’s friend Jordan perfectly. She’s a well-known golfer who is prone to cheating. Nonetheless, I always find her to be the book’s most likable character. I sense that somewhere inside she is weary of the upper class and in her own clumsy way is begging Carraway to take her away. She is the book’s most sympathetic character, and Luhrmann’s film suffers for showing so little of her.

Ahh, the perfection of Lois Chiles as Jordan in the 1974 film . . .

 

But maybe I have this all wrong. After all, Jordan is not the only character with a good side. Perhaps the book works precisely because of its characters, even the same obtuse and unlikable ones.

Tom Buchanan is the perfect example. Despite his massive failings, his love for the mechanic’s wife Myrtle is touching. She is more to him than an easy lay. She is an escape from the quaint, sanitized, polite and restrained existence of his class. She is something visceral, and when he loses her, his grief is genuine.

Tom is a perfect example of how a number of the book’s characters at first appear flat but are actually multifaceted. This makes them hard to grasp but also intriguing. Perhaps that is what calls readers like myself back to the book again and again.

 

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