IOC Essay Demo, Bowen, 2010
CAVEAT: Neither perfect nor finished. Consider this an example, not a model. Different passages and different readers and different interpretations call for very different analytical strategies!!
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This passage, from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, concludes the novel with Nick's final actions, which are relatively trivial, and his final reflections, which are profound. On the eve of Nick's departure from the East, he makes a final visit to Gatsby's house and beach. After "erasing" a bit of graffiti defacing Gatsby's abandoned house, Nick proceeds to contemplate the events of the summer; the majority of the passage is devoted to his reflection on American history and character, considered in light of the events of the plot.
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This selection appears at the very end of the work. It is the "last word" on the story, and it immediately follows Nick's summary of how he spent the time between Gatsby's death and Nick's own return to the Midwest. The text returns to the motif of sea-related imagery significant elsewhere in the novel, here echoed with fluidity and movement of many kinds. This final reflection forms a capstone for the running commentary that has accompanied Nick's narration of the story's events.
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Above all, this text is dominated by movement: physical movement, historical movement, and the movement of human imagination. Not everything is in motion; for most of the passage, Nick the character is stationary on the beach, and although his commentary focuses on tremendous forward movement—primarily of the human spirit, as manifest in "dreams" and "wonder"—in the end, he finds that movement countered and ultimately nullified by the inertia of the past. The effect of this paradox, both in this passage and in the book as a whole, is that it celebrates and reinforces the human capacity for yearning, which persists beautifully and somehow admirably in the face of repeated disappointment, tragedy, and failure.
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The first and most concrete movement in this excerpt is the action of Nick erasing the obscenity from Gatsby's steps. The very presence of this graffiti contributes to the mood of disillusionment, a sense of something beautiful being sullied, appearing as it does where so much grandeur once floated during Gatsby's parties. The word appears on the "white" steps—which rise up, like Gatsby's aspirations—and in the light of the same moon under which he once kissed Daisy.
Nick erasing the graffiti, and reporting the act so casually, reinforces his characterization of himself as non-judgmental—though he has repeatedly, somewhat hypocritically, passed judgment throughout the work. The cumulative effect of this moral neutrality is, in the end, somewhat chilling. There is only so much murder, betrayal, infidelity and deception the ordinary heart can take without a great wail of grief, if not indignation. The only suggestion of that wail lies in the abrasive "rasp" of Nick's shoe against the stone; it does not satisfy. The reader's yearning for goodness is yet another desire that, in this book, will go unmet.
Another significant movement in this passage is that of the narrator's focus. As Nick himself is in the process of leaving the East, it seems natural for his attention to review both details of place and the meaning of his experiences there. The first paragraph begins at the steps of Gatsby's house; the second moves to observe its surroundings, deepening into a reflection on history and human nature; the third returns to comment on Gatsby's dreams and why they were not realized; the fourth explicitly connects Gatsby's tragedy with our own. It is a fitting end to a novel whose narrative focus, all along, has been only loosely trained on the title character. Gatsby's very presence, like the "orgastic future that recedes before us," was enigmatic, contradictory, and immensely appealing; we yearned to know more, even when what we learned was disappointing.
The mood of disillusionment and the sense of movement are carried through the description of setting in lines 7-9. In the darkness—Daisy's green light noteworthy in its absence—Nick observes the summer homes, now closed, and the ferryboat just a "shadowy, moving glow." The disenchantment driving Nick back to the Midwest is even reflected in his register; what had been "white palaces" and "colossal affairs" in Chapter 1 are now merely "big shore places." In a surreal movement, these now "inessential houses…melt away," making way for Nick's commentary about the origins of America.
In this segment of narration, on lines 10-18, the visual imagery of setting turns into metaphorical imagery of theme. The simplicity of "a fresh, green breast of the new world" quickly vanishes in the paragraph (much as its trees fall to mansions), giving way to language that is formal, abstract, and exalted in its superlatives. This style echoes Nick's narration of Gatsby's most thrilling moments with Daisy.
The longest sentence of the passage, lines 12-18, makes perhaps the most explicit statement of theme in the novel. After a final reference to Gatsby's house, the language detaches from specifics of the story; the voice seems to belong less to the character of Nick and more to the author himself. Using clauses of increasing length, the sentence builds to a climax that, like the so-called "orgastic" future, carries sexual overtones: enticed by "pander[ing] whispers" in an "enchanted moment," man holds his breath, "compelled…face to face" – not with a romantic partner, but with that most romantic of emotions: imaginative wonder. Unfortunately for those of us who arrived late to this continent—after the party was over, in this novel's view—we missed that last chance to experience "something commensurate with [our] capacity for wonder." The narrative voice then reinhabits Nick's character and returns to the plot, pronouncing Gatsby's dreams doomed before he began.
Had the work ended there, on line 25, with Gatsby's dream—which by now is our dream also, and already behind" us—the message of this novel would be very different. But Fitzgerald does not leave us with our dreams lost, "where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." Now the narration explicitly moves beyond Nick's first and third person singular to first person plural, a transformation completed in a single sentence (26-27) that begins with Gatsby and ends with us: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us." The joy and the hope and the yearning and the longing implied by the incomplete sentences of 27-29 perfectly embody the experience of our most beautiful, most impossible, most compelling dreams. They are our outstretched arms, and Fitzgerald leaves them up and reaching in the final statement of the book, where we "beat on, boats against the current," despite being "borne back ceaselessly into the past." The movement of this passage becomes the movement of human history, and the resilience—sometimes noble, sometimes tragic—of our dreams.
In the end, the message of The Great Gatsby is this: the fact that our dreams are rarely realized is no reason not to dream them. That our visions withstand tragedy and disillusionment, through millennia of human frailty, is perhaps the greatest wonder of all.
Colormarking example for peer edit process