Symbols in the great gatsby smile
Hill “‘d of helped build up the country” (IX, 175) to Buchanan’s apparently well-informed remark “I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were” (VII, 140). His portrait, as in a cubist painting, is made up of juxtaposed, fragmented and distorted images from his father’s deep-seated conviction that Gatsby like the tycoon James J. Then Gatsby’s vagueness is also due to the fact that he is not presented from any fixed perspective, any definitive angle of vision. Gatsby is never introduced globally and objectively. Indeed, the character of Gatsby is not built through an addition of details, which would be the traditional way but through subtracting hypotheses. In a letter, Fitzgerald declared “ Strange to say, my notion of Gatsby’s vagueness was O.K.”. Our first impression of the man is therefore not borne out by the story’s denouement. For instance, Wilson the garage-owner is first seen as a passive, ghastly silhouette “a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome” (II, 31), but this lack of presence is contradicted by the end (chapter VII, VIII) when he turns out to be a destructive force bent on taking vengeance on his wife’s killer. Daisy’s melodious voice was not so much due to genuine passion as to the glamour of money (VIII, 126).įrom an opposition between two signs the reader is left to infer meaning. At that point in time Gatsby realized that the charm and youth of that voice was very much a matter of wealth. It so happened that Daisy had caught a cold so that her voice was huskier (VIII, 155). The latter, thinking back to his past, recalls his first date with the woman whom he was to love so much ever after. The meaning is finally made explicit by none other than Gatsby during the night of the accident.
Yet, Nick realizes on the first he visits the Carraways that Daisy’s voice lacks sincerity, and that it gives away Daisy’s duplicity: “the instant her voice broke off… I felt the basic insincerity of what she has said” (p.24).įrom these two contradictory signs, the magic power of the voice and and the insincerity of that same voice an interpretation is suggested. It is because of this voice that Gatsby falls madly in love with Daisy: “I think that the voice held him most – that voice was a deathless song” (end of chapter V, p. It is often a material or a physical detail that points to a moral dimension of the character, as with Hawthorne and Melville.ĭaisy’s voice is alluded to several times in the novel. Instead of the over-detailed description of 19th century novelists, we find in the case of each character a few signs that may be contradictory. A stylized technique of characterization Ambiguous signs This study will fall into parts: in the first one, we will see how characters are gradually characterized by the readers from a few signs and in the second one, we will demonstrate that characters must be understood through their relationships with objects.
This is a stylized method of presentation, a virtual iconography of character whereby the soul of a being is shown forth through one exterior element. Thus, Gatsby’s presence for example is signalled by his indescribable smile (54, III) or by his colourful suits, his hollow-eyed stare or Wolfshiem’s by his hairy nostrils. The author’s technique is close to the Joycean “signature” when the character is broken down into its separate parts, and one or two of the parts are made to stand for the whole. It is up to the reader to reconstruct the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent whole. Thanks to his “ideographic” method of character-portrayal, Fitzgerald suggests one idea through an attitude, a gesture but does not provide a final explanation. They are not described in any detail and cannot be studied separately.
In the Great Gatsby, characters are not introduced in a traditional way.