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.Lionel Trilling is undoubtedly right in calling this method ofcharacterization ideographic and in applying the term as well to themethod of the novel as a whole.Nothing and no one in the course of thenarrative is really developed; everything is seen in tableau, in a state ofpermanent pictorial rest.The characters are little more than a collection ofstruck attitudes, frieze figures carved on the entablature of a moralabstraction, a greatly generalized intuitive view of the nature of Americanexperience.Their individual identities are subordinated to the central ideathey are meant to signify, perfectly embodying the platonic conception behind the remark made by Gatsby when he admits the possibility that Daisymay perhaps have once loved her husband: In any case it was just personal. The secret of the entire technique of the novel may in a sense be said to liehidden in this remark, for its effect is to divert attention from the personaland particular to the abstract conception, the allegorized whole.In achieving this effect Fitzgerald carried the pictorial methodconsiderably beyond James; in fact, the closest parallel to its use in Gatsby isthe Joycean signature or epiphany technique where character is brokendown into its separate parts, and one or two of the parts are made to standfor the whole.The result for Joyce, in both A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses,was the establishment of a virtual iconography of character, a system ofextravagantly distilled symbolic essences, usually suggested by a gesture or anarticle of clothing, through which the soul of being was shown forth.Theresult for Fitzgerald is not nearly so elaborate, but it is very similar in kind.Nick Carraway is revealed to us through his signature of honesty; Gatsby isidentified by his pink suits, Tom Buchanan by his rippling pack of muscle,Daisy by her voice, Jordan by her balancing act, Myrtle by her fleshy vitality,Wilson by his hollow-eyed stare, Wolfsheim by his hairy nostrils, the butlerby his nose.In the case of each of the major characters these attributes takeon metaphorical significance in the thematic design of the novel.Nick shonesty is called into ironic question by Jordan in an effort to shift the blamefor her own dishonesty; Gatsby s pink suits suggest the meretriciousness ofhis role, Tom s muscle the brutal strength of his; Jordan s balancing act is 49The Life of Gatsbyindicative of her precarious control over herself and her need for stabilizingmoral convention, while Daisy s voice serves as the gauge of her basicinsincerity, which it is the principal business of the novel to penetrate.Initially full of warm excitement and promise, it is finally shown to be fullof money, and in the long interval between the two observations thepathetic futility of Gatsby s dream is gradually made clear.To create an effect of involvement and movement while retaining theadvantage of the pictorial method, Fitzgerald made constant use of ironicparallelisms of both character and event, still very much in the manner ofJoyce.Both Gatsby and Daisy are insincere, Gatsby about his past, Daisyabout her present feelings; Tom s unfaithfulness to Daisy is balanced byGatsby s faithfulness to her; yet Tom and Daisy belong to a secret society of ultimately deeper faithfulness.Nick keeps faith with Gatsby to the end,but not with Jordan.Jordan s dishonesty is revealed in time with theBuchanans and Gatsby s; Jordan like Daisy is a careless driver, and theepisode in which this fact is first made clear to Nick prefigures the momentwhen Daisy s carelessness results in Myrtle s death; both, furthermore, areanticipated by the comic accident scene in Gatsby s driveway and are finallycommented upon during Nick s last meeting with Jordan when, to concealher own dishonesty, she insists that she met in Nick another bad driver.Justbefore the showdown scene with Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel Tom feels that hehas lost in one afternoon both his wife and his mistress; during the scene hewins back his wife, and Gatsby loses his mistress and is symbolicallymurdered by Tom all to the accompaniment of Mendelssohn s WeddingMarch being played in the ballroom below.As Gatsby the dreamer dies, Nickremembers that it is his own thirtieth birthday, the time of life when, in hisand Fitzgerald s romantically limited chronology, all dreams must end.Onthe way back to East Egg Daisy kills Tom s mistress, Wilson loses a wife, anda while later Tom arranges through Wilson to murder Gatsby in fact, Wilsonbelieving that Gatsby has been Myrtle s lover as well as her murderer.All theprincipal male characters lose the women they love, and in each case throughsome act of faithlessness on the part of one or more of the women.This system of carefully plotted interior parallels and cross-referencesserves greatly to enhance the thematic size of the novel and to give back toit some of the quality of dramatic specification that the method of staticcharacter portrayal takes away.The same can be said for the reflexiverelationship of the parts in the narrative design as a whole.Each of the ninechapters is composed of one, or very occasionally more than one, dramaticscene presented pictorially and surrounded by skillfully foreshortenedpanoramic material, and each achieves significance not through the standard 50John W.Aldridgedepth-wise plumbing of character, but through its contribution of fresh factsto the linearly developing sequence of facts that gradually illuminate Gatsby scentral dilemma and mystery.Each functions, furthermore, in reciprocalrelation to every other, at times ironically, at times by simple contrast, so thatan effect of counterpointed motifs comes ultimately to stand, very much as itdoes in The Waste Land, in place of the more conventional and predictableeffect of events arranged chronologically and naturalistically.The opening and closing pages of the novel frame Gatsby s story withinthe parentheses of an elegiacally retrospective vision of time, history, andmoral conduct.The first two pages state the terms of the ambivalent attitudethat Nick is to take toward the subsequent action and which it is to be thetask of that action to resolve.Presented initially as a young man taught by hisfather to reserve all judgments in the knowledge that all the people in thisworld haven t had the advantages that you ve had, Nick describes himselfimmediately afterward as one who has since been taught better by first-handcontact with some of the people who have had even more of the advantagesthan he, and who have left him with the feeling of wanting the world to bein uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever
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