Powers of Adjustment — The Great Gatsby

By Eve Matheson

Becoming aware of the 100 year publication anniversary of The Great Gatsby, I thought it might be time to read it again. I am no longer in possession of my high school copy. I do recall being forced back then to spend an awful lot of time thinking about and talking about the green light.

For the sake of this review, I am going to do what your high school teachers tell you to do when you’re learning to write an essay: write as though your audience has already read the book. I always thought that was a bit presumptuous and it very well may be—except for Gatsby.

On my second reading, which I completed over the course of one evening and the next morning, the green light was there, shining alluringly, and then meaninglessly, but there was also so much there that I had completely forgotten about. For one thing, Fitzgerald’s brilliant pacing.

I was shocked to discover that the valley of ashes and T.J. Eckleburg and poor Mrs. Wilson are introduced in chapter two! That awful apartment party scene where Tom breaks her nose and where we get the first taste of Nick Caraway’s…shall we say imperfect narration… happens in chapter two! After the second bottle of whiskey is produced out of the confusion, Nick tells us that he wanted to leave, “but each time [he] tried to go, [he] became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled [him] back, as if with ropes, into [his] chair.”

It’s the type of excuse that a man needs when he’s somewhere he really shouldn’t be, witnessing things he really shouldn’t. It’s what comes next that’s most important though, when he says, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” By the end of the summer, the enchantment will have dissipated, with only one man escaping unscathed: Nick himself.

When I was a teenager, I wasn’t interested in all the unsavoriness. All the reality that the novel accuses its glittering characters of first producing and then ignoring–well, I wanted to ignore it too. I was drawn in by the romance of Gatsby. The smile, the mansion, the parties. Then the embarrassment and unreasoning and all-consuming joy at being reunited with his Daisy. His Daisy, who of course, doesn’t exist, but who, as a teenage girl, I also wanted so badly to exist. I think vividly of tea at Nick Carraway’s in the pouring rain.

Though I was told to pay attention to the unsavoriness—the carelessness—I preferred the romance, the nostalgia, the past. I’m prone to it. I didn’t like Tom, didn’t really like Daisy, either, but the romance of Gatsby was enough distraction. I was only interested in them insofar as they tortured Gatsby. I was probably willfully missing the point.

On this second reading, what stood out most when considering the carelessness I could no longer ignore, was Nick’s own carelessness. This is not revolutionary. Who could forget Jordan’s ruthless put down: “I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” And she’s right. She’s right that it’s his secret pride—in his own words, it’s the “cardinal virtue” he suspects himself of. She’s also right that he’s not a straightforward person, not at all.

That lack of straightforwardness captivated me, really dominated the novel for me. A little more than halfway through, when Daisy and Tom show up to one of Gatsby’s parties for the first time, Nick feels an unpleasantness and oppressiveness in the air that he’s never felt before. Having grown accustomed to the West Egg scene, it’s unsettling to observe it through Daisy’s East Egg eyes. He observes that “it is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment,” and when I read that, something clicked into place.

The whole novel is an exercise in Nick’s powers of adjustment. The whole scene and every character are adjusted by him. As the reader, you end up doing cartwheels trying to figure out which way is up. Nick is telling the story, but even as he includes Jordan’s incisive diagnosis of his dishonesty, he can’t fully own it. On the first page, he announces himself as a man who reserves all judgements, but throughout the novel he judges. Tom is arrogant, Daisy is insincere, Jordan is dishonest (pot, kettle). His account is artful, so it almost slips by you, but he doesn’t know himself. Either that, or he does know himself, but he doesn’t want you to know him.

He wants to escape, and he does. After Gatsby becomes a non-problem by dying, Nick can love him unabashedly, bury him and escape back west to “the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.” He claims he had to leave because the East was “distorted beyond his eyes’ power of correction,” but even that’s not true at all. His powers of correction may be shaken, but they are strong enough. The book we hold is proof enough of that.