Analysis: Chapter 5
Fitzgerald's Preoccupation With Turning Back Time
Robert J Comito
January 26, 2004
The
Problems of Time and Remembered Experience in The Great Gatsby
The concept of an inescapable past manifests
a major theme in F Scott Fitzgerald’s works. The 1920s left Fitzgerald him
with memories and experiences that he tries in vain to refute.
Venting through his writing, Fitzgerald points out a sympathy and disgust
for his past, as well as its hopelessly unavoidable nature.
In the Great Gatsby, this theme is intensely important not only to Jay
Gatsby’s futile intentions but to the themes of excess and wasted youth.
Clocks and watches, especially in Chapter 5, serve symbolically for
Gatsby’s and Fitzgerald’s vain attempts to relive or recreate the past, to
“wind back the clock” so to speak. In
The Great Gatsby and his other works, Fitzgerald captures his and Jay
Gatsby’s fool’s errand to redo or rewrite an inescapably remembered past, a
motif to which clocks and watches are significant.
Memories of excess and tragedy in the Roaring Twenties especially anguish
Fitzgerald because he understands that he cannot escape or relive them.
Certainly Fitzgerald desired to forget much of the 1920s. To him, it was a time when he and others wasted their
valuable youth in the pursuit of vanities. He states in his essay Echoes of
the Jazz Age that the entire youth had become “hedonistic, deciding on
pleasure” and declaring the whole period “an era of excess” (Fitzgerald1
41, 42). Many critics agree that it
was precisely this disgust with his and the nation’s past that so alienated
Fitzgerald; critics commonly interpret him as the prophet of youthful vanity and
excess during the Jazz Age (Commager 245).
But the twenties were also a decade of personal tragedy for Fitzgerald.
Of this, he wrote
By
this time, contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of
violence. A classmate killed his
wife and himself on Long island, another tumbled “accidentally” from a
skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speakeasy in New York and crawled home to
Princeton to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac’s axe in an
insane asylum where he was confined. (Fitzgerald1 45).
Although writing Echoes of
the Jazz Age in 1931, by 1922 undesired experiences filled Fitzgerald’s
memory. Critic Maxwell Geismar referred
to the two years between 1920 and 1922 (or between This Side of
Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned) as “two decades of
bitter experience: an experience that has no sufficient counterpart in the
external facts of the writer’s life over the period” (244).
But however much he may strive to relive his youth more meaningfully or
to write over the painful truth, the inescapability of these events bind him.
Furthermore, he recognized the futility of forgetting or ignoring the past. In Echoes
of the Jazz Age, he ridicules the elderly who in 1931 pretended to believe
that Americans faithfully followed Prohibition during the Roaring Twenties, even
though they knew Americans did not. He even started the essay admitting that
however repulsive or attractive parts of the decade may have appeared, they
cannot be forgotten nor relived (Fitzgerald1 40).
These mixed emotions for the past find their way inevitably into
Fitzgerald’s writing. Much of his
success has been accredited to his ability to see good and evil in human
experience. First, he treats the
past as definite, permanently behind people.
In his works remains an “acute consciousness of the irrevocable passage
of everything into the past”; something done cannot be changed (Myener 241).
But Fitzgerald expresses how the passage of time robs people of
opportunities through youthful characters frittering away their youth to pursue
transient pleasure and passing beauty. He looks sympathetically to his days of
lost youth in his novels. There he
displays “the pathos of the irretrievableness of a part of oneself” (Myener
241). Fitzgerald also tried to relive his youth through these vain young
characters, giving them the same opportunities and qualities he once had. But
the tragedies that befall these extravagant and vainglorious characters remind
the readers that bad memories cannot be escaped. In his books before The
Great Gatsby, tragedies seem more like terrifying nightmares (Myener 241).
In this sense, Fitzgerald points out that the felt experience will stick
with readers forever, and despite denial will not go away.
Attempts to forget or rewrite them are fruitless and frustrating.
In The Great Gatsby, the idea of a
lost yet inescapable past underlies many themes in the book.
First, the rich and extravagant meaninglessly waste away their youth and
money. The conspicuous consumption and endless pleasure seeking at Gatsby’s
parties evidence this. Rather than a meaningful and memorable experience, these
partygoers waste their time on drunkenness and immediate gratification. Similarly, Nick makes it seem like other characters waste his
time—he seems to have more meaningful things to do when others drag him around
in vain pursuit of pleasure. When Tom brings Nick unwillingly to meet his
“girl” and have a party in the city, Nick continually tries to escape what
seems to be a frivolous waste of his time.
In chapter five at the Gatsby mansion, Nick does not want to just stand
around and watch Daisy and Jay watch each other, and tries repeatedly to escape
the situation. But more important is the concept that the past cannot be
rewritten. Nick himself repeatedly
insists on historical objectivity because he realizes the past is past and
unchangeable (Myener 241). Likewise,
in order to appear genuinely rich, Gatsby tries to erase and forget his past as
a poor midwestern farmer and menial worker.
Not even his developmental experience with Dan Cody fit into his new
image. Instead, he tried to make himself a legitimate pharmacy-chain owner who
inherited his fortune and a rich Oxford and high-class heritage.
But Fitzgerald reminds the reader of this endeavor’s futility.
He cannot escape the true sinister origins of his fortune, a fact that
catches up to him when he and Tom have fight over Daisy. Pieces of his past
remain to hamper his plan. Miss Baker and other social partygoers gossip about
his past. Pictures, such as one of he and Dan Cody, books, and other things
remain to evidence his real history. Even
in conversation he cannot keep the proper cover. Waiting for Daisy in chapter
five, he slipped up, revealing weakness in the story of where his wealth came
from. However, despite these inconsistencies, Jay continues with his lie,
thinking that so long as he has changed his history in name (as long as he is
Jay Gatsby not James Gatz) his story is true. In the end, Fitzgerald proves that
Gatsby can never truly erase his own past.
Clocks serve as an essential symbol for this
ongoing theme. First, clocks symbolize futile attempts to return to the past,
and they frequently appear when Gatsby sentimentalizes about his long-ago
romance with Daisy. In chapter
five, Gatsby’s encounter with the clock happens at this significant moment:
“[Daisy
and I have] met before,” muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at
me…Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of
his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it
back in place. Then he sat down,
rigidly…
“I’m
sorry about the clock,” he said. (Fitzgerald2 87).
As he remembers about his past
experiences with Daisy, he accidentally nocks over the clock.
The way Fitzgerald phrases this, with “took this moment to tilt,” the
clock does not passively get the center of attention. Rather, the symbol is
thrust into the situation to remind the reader and Gatsby that he cannot return
to his former romance with Daisy, before she married, had a baby, and became
otherwise occupied. Additionally,
the clocks in chapter five serve to point out Gatsby’s attempt to recreate the
past. Clocks are tools that can help keep track of time, but they don’t always
tell the correct time. Metaphorically,
Gatsby deliberately set the clock wrong to deceive himself and the world; by
making telling or thinking a different image of the past he thinks it can be
true. Accordingly, after the
success of Gatsby’s scheme to meet Daisy again, Nick sees him as “running
down like an over-wound clock” (Fitzgerald2 93). Thus the image of Gatsby
manipulating a clock complements his motives to recreate the past as he wanted
it. To Nick, this attempt it just
as absurd as it is visible. Similarly, in the first clock encounter Nick says
that the three of them momentarily thought the clock had fallen and smashed.
This allegorizes Daisy and Gatsby’s fantasy about rejecting the past five
years, returning to when they were madly in love, and pretending that they had
always been in love. For this
reason, Fitzgerald juxtaposed the fantasy about the broken clock to Daisy’s
admission that they had been apart, followed by Gatsby’s recital of exactly
how long it had been. Juxtaposition
serves not only to link the two ideas (and thus show that this is the past they
try to forget) but to give their fantasy a reality check, reminding that they
cannot change what Daisy and Gatsby have done in the past five years nor can
they return to life before it. So not only does the clock itself remind them
that they cannot change the past, but their futile attempts to change the clock
also prove the inability to change the passage of time.
Fitzgerald symbolically uses a clock to
express the futility of Gatsby and Daisy’s attempts to relive and rewrite
their pasts. Throughout The
Great Gatsby, the theme of wasted time and changing characters’ pasts
relies on the concept of a fixed yet irretrievable past.
In most of his novels, Fitzgerald tried not only to vainly recreate his
lost and wasted youth, but he also conveys the how characters cannot return to
or change a time that they have wasted away. The reason he did this is because
Fitzgerald himself experienced firsthand the excess and vanity of Americans
during the Roaring Twenties and other violent experiences that he longed to
erase. But because he found any attempt to retrieve lost
opportunities or to forget, change, or erase past events futile, Fitzgerald how
events passed were fixed, inescapable, and irretrievable.
Works
Cited
Commager, Henry Steele. The
American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Rpt in Twentieth
Century
Literary Criticism.
Vol 1. Ed Bryfonski, Dedria and Mendelson, Phyllis. Detroit: Gale Research
Company, 1978. 245.
Fitzgerald, F Scott (1).
“Echoes of the Jazz Age”. Visions of America. Ed Brown, Wesley and
Ling, Amy.
New
York: Persea Books, 1993. 40-47.
Fitzgerald, F Scott (2). The
Great Gatsby. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, 1980.
Geisman, Maxwell. “F Scott
Fitzgerald: Orestes at the Ritz”. The Land of the Provincials: The American
Novel.
Houghtin Mifflin, 1947. pp 287-352. Rpt in Twentieth Century Literary
Criticism. Vol 1. Ed Bryfonski, Dedria and Mendelson, Phyllis. Detroit: Gale
Research Company, 1978. 224.
Myener, Arthur. “F Scott
Fitzgerald: The poet of Borrowed Time”. The Lives of Eighteen from
Princeton.
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