Two eggs hatch the plot of The Great Gatsby, one East and one West. The eggs are fictionalized protrusions, a pair of peninsulas that jut out into Long Island Sound, creating a small bay between them. While West Egg and East Egg are fictional, they are based on the real geography of Long Island, referring to Great Neck and Manhasset Neck (sometimes called Cow Neck) respectively. The impassable gulf between the shores of these two eggs, East and West, becomes the novel’s narrative center, both physically and symbolically, and through the arc of the story the center does not hold.
Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, moves to West Egg from the comfortable but intrusive world of the upper Middle West to the anonymity of a fresh beginning in New York City, hoping to make it rich on Wall Street in the bond business. After a few lonely days living in his suburban bungalow, he becomes, in his words, “a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler,” when an even more recent transplant asks him directions. The language Nick uses to describe himself draws on the mythology of the West with its stories of grizzled mountain men blazing trails into endless virgin wilderness.
With this language, Fitzgerald turns Long Island into a sort of synecdoche of the nation, the hundred mile jut of land becomes a microcosm of the United States from East to West. And, as Nick will later admit, although the action of the novel happens in New York City, the book is really about the West and all the symbolic weight this ever-expanding region has been made to carry in our national story.
From in the beginning, when those original European settlers first staked claims on this continent, both for the sake of their heavenly souls and earthly profit, looking West toward what they believed to be a land without form and void, this frontier seemed a New Eden just waiting to be inhabited. Of course, since the Western myth is a myth of a paradise on earth, it must ultimately become a myth of paradise lost.
Firstly, the loss came because the West was already someone else’s home. There were, of course, the members of numerous Native American nations who had lived in this land for millennia. From the perspective of these nations, the westward expansion of the settlers was, as historian Helen Hunt Jackson said, a century of dishonor marked by displacement and atrocity as their ancient civilizations were crushed by a collision with newcomers carrying guns, germs, and steel. And there were also Spanish, British, and French colonists and traders in the area long before Lewis and Clark forged their path to the Pacific, all with their own nation’s military backing and sense of entitlement. The American claiming of this land, then, would never be some guiltless nesting, but always homesteads nestled in the shadow of blockhouses and howitzers.
"The Blockhouse in the Wilderness" from Hendrik Van Loon's The Story of Mankind 1921
Secondly, the loss came because that wilderness, with its staggering resources and beauty, was not endless. Within a century of American exploration and settlement, conservationists were rushing to head off the devastating depletion of resources like fresh water and old-growth timber, and the near-extinction of iconic species like the beaver and bison. While those living along the Atlantic could imagine west of the Mississippi as a well-stocked and rugged supply closet for predatory East Coast industrialists to pilfer and profit by, acres of clear-cut forests and pyramids of bison skulls were vivid proof of the quickly accumulating loss to those living in the West.
This sense of accumulating loss, settling like a “foul dust” on what remains, pervades the novel from Nick’s opening admission of the loss of his youth and vulnerability. And Nick, while he would maintain his admiration of his wealthy West Egg neighbor Jay Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope,” declaring that, despite everything that unfolds in the novel, he turns out all right in the end, he loses his own ability to withhold cynical judgment of other people, a marker, Nick says, of a loss of hope.
But the novel begins with the fresh promises of spring and budding trees and a new job. So what if Nick’s new roommate abandons him and his dog runs away as soon as he moves into his little rented home on the shore? Life, he claims, was starting over again with the hopeful possibilities of a new beginning. Fitzgerald, though, in a series of nesting narrative arcs that move from expectant possibility to disillusioned anticlimax, will begin to chip away at Nick’s hopefulness, first with a disappointingly awkward dinner party with his wealthy cousin, Daisy, and her even wealthier husband, Tom, in their mansion across the bay.
Tom and Daisy live in East Egg, which is to say, among the fashionably rich. While both East and West have plenty of money, East Egg money is unearned, and therefore of higher status. When I mention this to my students, they are often baffled that working for your money somehow diminishes its worth. But, inherited wealth, like an aristocratic title, feels handed down as if by divine right demanding fealty from those who weren’t so blessed. An inheritance can pretend at the purity of immaculate reception from one generation to the next; money earned still smells of the sweat and swindle it took to make in the first place.
While this old money is cool, detached from the hustle and haggle of earning, and therefore should be comfortably established, Nick’s evening with Daisy and Tom radiates anxiety and restless discontent. Tom, with his captive audience at dinner, subjects the party to a vaguely outlined book report on The Rise of the Colored Empires by “this man Goddard”. Tom is a convert to the book’s racist theories about a supposed threat posed to “Nordic” white supremacy by non-white nations. “It’s all scientific stuff,” he insists, “It’s been proved.” While the rest of the party dismisses Tom’s ideas (Daisy gently mocks them and Nick thinks they are “stale”), the anxious notion that a so-called white civilization could soon be overwhelmed made Harvard educated Lothrop Stoddard, the fictional Goddard’s real-life counterpart, a best-seller for his 1920 The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy.
This white fear of being “submerged” as Tom describes it, never left the American discourse and has arguably become only more potent today. From the nation’s inception, the white population of the United States had always been on the move, like a river overflowing its banks in a rush toward the Pacific, claiming its own course. But, when the nation’s frontier was declared officially closed in 1890, the power of the West as the mythic space of endless American renewal began to diminish, to the point that our own political conversation is dominated, not by talk of opening the floodgates to new frontiers, but protectively damming ourselves within walls.
Greg Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth claims that our nation’s unique frontier permitted a “constant fleeing forward allow[ing] the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems” as communities in conflict simply “pushed outward” from East to West, recreating themselves in new environments without resolving the issues of “economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence” that spurred the divisions. The men and women who birthed these social divisions, lacking the interest or will required to create lasting solutions, relied on what Grandin calls the “safety valve” of the frontier dangling the tantalizing promise of new beginnings somewhere beyond the Mississippi. While there’s something inherently childish about it, this desire to just run away from problems still captures the imagination. Then, as those unsolved problems accrued and cluttered the West, others could clean up what they hath smashed.
So, as servants clear dishes from the Buchanan table on a summer evening in 1922, Daisy, with a voice Nick compares to a promise, looks West and whispers thoughtlessly, carelessly, of all those non-Nordics her husband fears, “We’ve got to beat them down,” while winking, Nick says, “ferociously toward the fervent sun” sinking in the West. We know that Daisy has neither Tom’s true-believer stridency reflected by the comment, nor any real conviction against it. She is a self-proclaimed cynic who takes the cruelty of the world as it is and passively inherits the money and corruption she profits from.
Daisy sometimes appears childlike in her passivity and silliness, but she is something more sinister. The mask of innocence is predatory, and she preys on the earnest idealism of others, as shown when, after seeming to reveal her troubles to Nick, he realizes the “instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, [...] the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.” Daisy’s voice is a siren song for idealistic men who wreck themselves on her cynical shores. Or maybe it’s something less mythic and more tawdry than that: simply the street magician’s old trick of misdirection, not from the sleight of hand card stunt, but from the accomplice in the crowd picking your pocket as you look on in awe. Either way, it’s a fake.
"The Fortune Teller" by George de La Tour
"American Progress" or "Spirit of the Frontier", a popular painting by John Gast, 1872
Like the frontier myth, she is a false promise offering up uncomplicated and innocent dreams that will, in the end, never be fulfilled. As the arc of this gilded, yet ugly evening descends to a close, Nick becomes disenchanted. “For a moment,” Nick says of Daisy as their little East Egg party ends, “the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened — then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.” These are images of aching, lovely loss – a fading glow, a regretful desertion, a retreating childhood.
As the chapter ends, Nick sees Gatsby, that personification of hope, for the first time. It’s night, and the only lights now are artificial. Gatsby stretches his arms out toward one of these false stars, a green light across the bay, and then disappears, leaving Nick alone in “unquiet darkness.” This small scene - a lonely, grasping, fervent wish on an artificial star followed by unquiet dark - is a good synopsis of the novel, which is to say, a good synopsis of the American dream.
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