Boats Against the Current

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we tell our stories lately. My last essay looked at Herman Hesse’s prologue to Demian and reflects on the humanity in telling and listening to our stories. Stories are so much more than the trajectory of our lives. They involve the big things, of course, but even accounts such as how we get to work each morning or how we spend a rainy day or busy afternoon count as our stories. One of the factors in story that Hesse touches upon is the inherent incompleteness in every story. There’s a lot of discussion in academia about what is known as the “unreliable narrator”, a term I’ve always hated a bit. I dislike it because every narrator is, by nature of his role as storyteller, just as reliable as we are in telling our own stories. The words themselves are as true a reflection of the person telling the story as any provable facts can be. Story reflects the narrator in both the account told and the manner in which it is told. We shouldn’t be questioning whether we can rely on the narrator for a by-the-book account of the world; rather, we can ask what this story reveals about humanity - about that of the narrator and about ours.

One of the most often cited examples of an unreliable narrator is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Nick Carraway, whose voice gives us the story in the author’s magnum opus: The Great Gatsby. First published in 1925, Gatsby will be turning 100 next year; and even today the novel holds meaning that has yet to grow stale as it nears a century in age. Despite its initial reception by critics as anything but great, the book rocketed to popularity during World War II - when pocket-sized copies were issued to American soldiers fighting overseas. It has since become a bookshelf staple in many a home library. Perhaps the tragedy of Gatsby didn’t initially resonate with a society determined to live fast and large; the Roaring Twenties may not have been ready to be vulnerable in the way that the novel demands its reader to be in order to truly connect with the protagonist and narrator. Whatever the initial reason for its failed success, the soldiers who found themselves far from the safety and familiarity of their known lives found something in this story that connected to their personal experiences. They knew what it was to lose home and live in a state of disconnect and pain despite the need to appear strong and in control.

Fitzgerald has a special place on my personal bookshelf - literally and figuratively. I made it a point to read every one of his works I could get my hands on, but Gatsby remained my favorite. At one point I had five different copies of The Great Gatsby in my apartment. All five survived multiple moves and attempts to downsize. Something about Gatsby has always spoken to me. It captures so much of the human experience: feeling out of place, being in love, having lofty dreams that seem out of reach, discontent with material success, jealousy, grief, betrayal, friendship and truly knowing a person behind the mask he or she presents to the world. A couple years ago, I taught an American Literature course and had the opportunity to revisit this longtime favorite. I was finally at a point in my life when I knew I needed to get my drinking under control, and I was using running in an attempt to balance my lifestyle out. The more I ran, the less I drank. It seemed to be working, and I felt in control of things most days. My heightened awareness of my own problem during this time influenced the lens with which I read Gatsby, and I recognized the prominence of alcohol in the story. The novel is soaked in it.

Gatsby doesn’t drink, at least not to the extent that his guests do. And considering that the majority of the novel is the muddled chaos of a summer fueled mainly by bootlegged booze, that’s a striking practice that deserves not to be glossed over as a side note on his character. Gatsby’s reasons for abstinence from booze seem rooted in his relationship with Captain Cody, the man with whom he made the leap from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. Our narrator, Nick Carraway, comments on Gatbsy’s practice: “It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.” Though Gatsby surrounds himself with the society of alcohol, he refrains from drinking himself.

Gatsby may not consume alcohol; however, he presents with behaviors that are hallmark of an addict in the way he orients his life around illusions of connection, specifically around the material wealth he pursues and around Daisy, the woman he’s convinced is the great love of his life. Gatsby idolizes Daisy in the way an addict views his substance of choice. For Gatsby, Daisy becomes the incarnate answer to the chronic sense of discontent and restlessness he seems to have been born with.

Born into poverty as James Gatz, Gatsby not only changes his name but abandons the family roots that formed his original conception of self and connection with others. He separates himself from the life given to him in pursuit of the one he felt he was meant for. This action displays a refusal to accept life on life’s terms and the chronic need to be in control of his life trajectory despite his circumstances. Changing his name is a small thing, but it is his first act of dishonesty in presenting himself as someone he wanted to be rather than someone he was born to be. He continues with this dishonesty as a grown man, telling whatever small lies he deems necessary to uphold the image he has created of himself. In active addiction, lies stem from the need to keep alcohol or drugs in our lives. The self who needs the substance is the one formulating and dispatches those lies because of a serious need to survive. When Gatsby tells his story to his new friend and neighbor, Nick, he spins the lies into it because he can’t fathom Nick accepting him for who he truly is. These lies become an important part of his story and identity because they reflect the discontent and self-consciousness that fuel his pursuit of material prowess and social acceptance.

By the time Nick meets him, Gatsby has built a life bent on achieving the wealth and success that Daisy will find attractive. Gatsby met and fell in love with everything Daisy represented years earlier, before his time abroad in the army, and in their time apart she has become the missing puzzle piece of the life he feels is his birthright. He holds wildly extravagant parties financed by his shady business dealings, hoping that some night Daisy will wander in along with the throng of uninvited guests who show up to consume his booze and enjoy the entertainment. He surrounds himself with a menagerie of freeloading guests at these parties, but as Nick soon finds out, not one of these people who show up to his house really knows him. Gatsby lives out the oft-cited feeling of being in a room filled with people while feeling completely alone. You hear this in AA halls a lot because that’s what alcoholism does to you. Gatsby is alone because no one knows him, because he has chosen to fill his home with strangers, to pass himself as someone other than who he is at his core, and to let everyone around him operate under the haze of illusory connection.

These parties are big and fun, but there isn’t any real substance to them. Jordan Baker, Daisy’s friend and Nick’s sort of love interest for the summer, comments, “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” She’s spot on there. Jordan is another character who doesn’t drink, but she’s chronically dishonest, as Nick finds out later. Her feeling about these parties reflects the illusion of connection created by alcohol perfectly. The substance alters our perception of ourselves and our surroundings to convince us that we’re all operating on the same wavelength and therefore intimately connected; whereas a more private, actually intimate setting would unearth the truth more easily and destroy the illusion that everything is happy and fine. The big parties allow the blending, the feeling that we’re all the same because they eliminate the space for honest, sober communication. That has to happen off stage. On stage, the guests are merely figures in the theatrical dance of Gatsby’s life as a successful, happy man who has achieved everything except the girl.

Gatsby goes about getting the girl like a true addict pursuing his next fix, except maybe with a bit more patience. He has moved into a house across the sound from Daisy - now married to Tom Buchanan, and he goes to Nick, who happens to be Daisy’s cousin, to arrange an invitation for Daisy to come over and stage a meeting between the two former lovers. He then proceeds to manicure Nick’s lawn and send an excessive amount of flowers to adorn the space in a not so subtle attempt to control the visual details of their first meeting in years. He can’t leave it to chance or any higher power. The appearance of perfection masks the inner turmoil he has suffered and continues to suffer as he prepares to finally insert Daisy into his equation for happiness.

Even when Daisy and he are reunited, Gatsby continues to implement factors of control in their relationship. They remain in his house to maintain the privacy of the affair, but the enclosed nature of their relationship reflects the isolation of his active addiction to the person he needs Daisy to be. He wants her to be someone she just isn’t and can’t be, and because he is so familiar with living in this kind of dishonesty, he can’t comprehend the illusory, false nature of his expectations.

We’re going to take a little side path here and examine the motif of water in Gatsby. The presence of water in various forms as a surrounding force in Gatsby’s life reflects the drowning nature of his pursuit of the life he wants as one just as destructive as the pursuit of and consumption of alcohol. When James Gatz makes the transition to Jay Gatsby, he does so by boarding the boat of Captain Cody and assuming his new name and identity in a storm on the ocean. Though he saves Cody’s boat and earns the favor of the man who sets him successfully on his new path, Gatsby enters the unpredictable realm of water in doing so, immersing himself in a literal and figurative storm that he will feverishly attempt to sail through in the years to come. Gatsby’s home in West Egg overlooks the bay that separates him from East Egg. Significantly, the house he has chosen to signify his new life faces the water, reflecting the central focus of his life-consuming addiction in his life. The bay also serves as a barrier between Gatsby and the life he wants. The bay separates West Egg - the residence populated by new money - from East Egg - old money, and in that separation is also present the disconnect between these two societies of people. The bay holds the prejudice and disdain of old money toward new money as well as the resentment and discontent of new money in their efforts to be just as legitimately successful and intrinsically worthy as their old money neighbors. Humans defining themselves by the manners in which they accumulate material wealth innately live in states of disconnection from each other. Though Gatsby lives within sight of the green light on Daisy’s dock that shines as a beacon of hope, he does not realize that the light is an illusion illuminating the very thing that both divides him from happiness and pretends to offer him a means to attain that happiness. Water drowns his arranged meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house when it unexpectedly rains just at the time of his arrival to meet her. The rain here represents how his attempts to manipulate the terms of his reunion with Daisy do not stand a chance when up against the natural order of the world. Gatsby can make every effort to insert Daisy into his new life, but he cannot control the destructive nature of his addictive practices nor can he dictate the factors outside his capacity to change. The water here - present in the sea and the rain - serves as a reminder that so much of life is beyond his capacity to control. And Gatsby’s attempts to bring the disconnect in his life through lies, manipulation and wealth only submerge him deeper into the depths of an addictive modus vivendi that ultimately ruins him. Alcoholism works like this; we think we’ve finally found a means of achieving connection, but it only drowns us and makes the disconnect more severe in doing so. It’s a cycle that quickly spirals into a force beyond our control to rein in on our own. Gatsby’s lifestyle very much mirrors this cycle. Though he orchestrates grand parties and intimate rendezvous with Daisy, the outcomes of these gatherings have a force like the ocean tides or rain storms. They are out of his hands that so desperately reach for control in the way Nick sees him reaching toward the green light on the very first night that he sees his new neighbor after moving in.

The trajectory of their summer reveals the truth that this thing that Gatsby has with Daisy isn’t love. This is the kind of relationship, the addiction that kills. When a chaotic series of events leads to Daisy fatally striking a woman (who happens to be her husband’s mistress) while driving Gatsby’s car, Gatsby lies about the details of the accident because he can’t let Daisy be a destructive, careless person in his world. That lie leads to his death at the hands of George Wilson, the woman’s desperate husband. He dies in his pool, literally and figuratively submerged in the water and chaotic force of life, surrounded by the lavish grounds he curated to be Jay Gatsby: the man always running from his past and constantly haunted by it.

Gatsby’s birth father arrives after the death of his son. His emergence into Gatsby’s world may seem out of place given his absence for the entirety of the novel and most of Gatsby’s life, but it fits well with Gatsby’s story. Of course his true father and past life come forth when death strips him of the life he has created. Despite his illusions, Gatsby cannot control who he is, he cannot control the love or choices of the woman he desires, and he cannot control his fate. But even in death, he bears some connection to the man whose life he was born into. Despite his every attempt to cut ties with his true family and design a new life for himself, his father retains this tie to his son and shows up as reminder of who Gatsby is at his core: a young man driven by fear of not belonging, of not being good enough, whose life circles back to the very spaces he strove to escape.

Artists tend to leave a piece of themselves in their work, and whether he intended to or not, F. Scott Fitzgerald must have developed the character and experience of Gatsby as a reflection of much of himself. Fitzgerald struggled to control his alcohol consumption from a young age and even tried unsuccessfully to quit several times. Perhaps his choice to create a protagonist who was able to abstain stemmed from his own deep desire to rid himself of the vicious cycle his own life was caught in. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald gave life to a man who had achieved the material success and wealth that eluded his own attempts; furthermore, he’d made a man who had reached adulthood unfettered by the grasp of alcoholism that held so tightly to the author’s throat. However, though free from alcohol, Gatsby inherits the disconnection and discontent that his creator wrestled with in life. Fitzgerald presents the inner turmoil and darkness of his characters so honestly because it’s a space he knows intimately. Gatsby is a masterpiece not because it offers a solution or a happy ending, but because it walks around in the chaos of this struggle, revealing the illusion of happiness that lives in consumerist society and the destructive trajectory of material pursuits. Addiction is reflected in the constant need for more, the heaviness of not being enough and the harshness of feeling completely unknown and unseen in a room filled with seemingly happy people. Gatsby, Daisy, his guests, and even we the readers, continue to grasp at the material substances that offer the seductive promise of happiness and belonging when they really only deepen the emptiness and need for more in us.

The novel’s closing line is one of the most quoted in literature: “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It’s beautifully tragic in its truth. When we fight against the current as Gatsby has done, we’re forced to revisit the space we try to escape. Beating on against the current strikes this courageous image in our minds and seems to resonate with the virtues of individualism and self-advocacy. But the current is not the status quo or society; the current is nature. When we fight nature, our true selves, and life, we’re fighting a losing battle. We can’t not be ourselves without misery and hardship of our own making. Recovery only comes when we can accept ourselves as we are and accept life on its terms and begin living in a way that embraces and marries these circumstances with each other.