-Nick Harroway, The Great Gatsby
About a month ago I finally finished The Great Gatsby for the first time since High School, wherein I realized was that this isn't a book for High Schoolers at all.
Much like how "We Are Young" by Fun isn't actually about being young, but about how "Tonight we are young"--that is, we haven't been young in awhile and may never be again--The Great Gatsby is not about the recklessness of youth, but of the recklessness at the end of youth.
Gatsby is less about first pursuing the dream, then when the dream (like yourself) inevitably begins to fray. For example, the novel's not about Daisy breaking Jay's heart (that's old news when the story opens), but about her breaking her own, abandoning her youthful dreams of romantic love to settle for security and "respectability" with that philandering fool of a millionaire Tom Buchanan. Such has been her disillusionment that she says cynically of her daughter, "I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
Likewise for Jay Gatsby, the moment he has Daisy back in his grasp is the same moment when the green light across the harbor--that symbol of all his youthful desires--suddenly loses its luster; "His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one," with the dread promise of more to follow.
That is, The Great Gatsby is a book for 30-somethings, not adolescents--it's a novel about the end of the dream, not the beginning. The members of Fun had turned 30 when they sang "We Are Young," as had Nick Harroway at the novel's climax:
"I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing round of a new decade...Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."
That's about as brutal set of sentences as any 30-year-old can read. It's almost a little too on-the-nose for Nick's youth to end the same night as Gatsby's youthful dream of regaining Daisy. As though turning 30 isn't hard enough as it is.
For even the middle-aged and elderly, folks who normally just smile indulgently when a 20-something complains of their age, have all told me, without exception, in all soberness, that turning 30 was hard. Maybe the hardest. You are perhaps reconciled to the inevitable march of time by 40, 50, 60, etc., but 30 is the Big Epistemological Break, the Dividing Line. Turning 30 is like a car leaking transmission fluid trying to make a gear shift in cold weather--lurching, jolting, heart-attack inducing, and slow to settle into the next stage.
But wait, there's hope! For with Nick the night of his 30th birthday is Jordan, the tomboyish pro-golfer (and careless driver) he's been crushing on all along the margins of the main plot:
"But there was Jordan beside me who, like Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand."
Nick hopes her carelessness will help him to care less as he embarks on this new decade. But of course, as every High School reader in America knows, his assurance barely lasts; before the last chimes of his 20s have echoed away, the carelessness of Jordan has, along with Tom's and Daisy's, Myrtle's manslaughter and Gatsby's murder, come to represent for Nick everything wrong with this world. So Nick, who had tricked us all into thinking he was but the narrator, only a passive mediator and recorder of events, surprises us by turning out to be the true protagonist all along: For his is the only character that grows, who at last acts and is not just acted upon.
He breaks up with Jordan.
This impulsive girl is caught off guard by someone else's impulsiveness. She doesn't know how to be treated the way she treats others. She lashes out:
"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were a rather honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."
But Nick is unbowed. "I'm thirty," he says, "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
For you can spend up through the first half of your 20s telling yourself that yours are but youthful indiscretions, indulgences and not character flaws, that you still have your entire life to define who you are, and not face up to the fact that you are becoming that person right now. But by 30, you know that you fool no one but yourself--and you can no longer let others fool themselves, either--or at least you can't and still count yourself honorable.
And so Nick faces the portentous third decade alone, a little more wary, a little less indulgent; as did America itself as we moved on from our own Roaring 20s into the Depressed 30s, and, like Tom and Daisy, refusing to learn a thing from either. Or, as Fitzgerald most eloquently puts it:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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