The Language of Time in "The Great Gatsby"

Author(s): Tony Magistrale and Mary Jane Dickerson

Source: College Literature, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), pp. 117-128
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111811
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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN
THE GREAT GATSBY
by Tony Magistrale and Mary Jane Dickerson

"You may say . . . history is written by writers?I think

it is more than that."1

Doth national and personal histories figure largely in F. Scott Fitzger

ald's The Great Gatsby, a novel in which the American, through the
Dutch sailors' eyes of long ago, sees himself "face to face for the last
time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder."2 In such a highly charged and consciously historical context in
which voices from one society are engaged in dialogue with imagined
characters (and readers) from other times, it seems inevitable that
concepts of time and even the literal imagery of the clock itself dominate
many scenes. Through this metaphorical web, Nick Carraway draws us
into a dialogue of participation in Jay Gatsby's attempt to "repeat the
past" (73).3 In Gatsby, Fitzgerald fleshes out fragmented individual
memory in a remarkable synthesis of time and place so that it
momentarily becomes part of a collective social memory.
As readers in the 1980s, we recognize that Fitzgerald's handling of the
passing of time and his characters' reactions to it reflect our own
personal and national anxieties about the complex ambiguities of history.
So it is appropriate that within the context of this novel, the difficulty of
maintaining easy distinctions between time relationships?especially past
and present?becomes more acute, thereby effectively linking Fitzgerald
to novelists such as Faulkner and Joyce whose texts extend the linguistic
parameters of narrative fiction. Although Fitzgerald's reputation as a
story-teller usually puts him in the company of those who usually employ

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 118 COLLEGE LITERATURE

a linear narrative technique, similar to Dreiser's and Crane's, the

narrative structureof Gatsby reveals time as a malleable and fluid
concept, juxtaposing past and present in ways that show how they
momentarily merge in human memory through the social act of telling
stories. In his recent observations on the "complex double vision" of
Fitzgerald's first-person narrator, George Garrett even asserts, "Gatsby
is, in many ways, a wildly experimental novel, a trying out of what
would become familiar, if more varied, strategies of our serious literature
and especially, of the range of our literary language."4
The impact the past has on the theme of this fiction and its
relationship to Fitzgerald's narrative structure shows time to be anything
but an inexorable tick-tock; indeed, for the two major voices in this
novel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, the passage of time will be
momentarily suspended in the symbol of "a defunct mantelpiece clock"
(57). The novel's evolution, its textual history, reveals the genesis of an
intertextual dimension?a dialogue between a monologistic and unified
mythic past and a materially debased and chaotic present?that allows
Fitzgerald to suggest the complexity of the American experience. In
doing so, he observes and questions American conceptions of history and
self within shifting social contexts.
Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian contemporary of Fitzgerald, supplies a
critical framework that appears especially relevant to the way the
temporal and the spatial intersect to create the discourse of history in
novels. Bakhtin's theories shed light on the relationship between the
novel as utterance and its historical and social contexts?what he calls
"the dialogic principle."5 Bakhtin's conception of a time-space interde
pendency in fiction, the chronotope, is useful as an analytic tool for
comprehending some of the major scenes that take place in Gatsby.
A briefdescription of Bakhtin's evolving conception of the literary
chronotope might here be worthwhile. Its meaning stems from Bakhtin's
reflections on the way in which novelists assimilate certain instances of
"real historical time and space" into the created worlds of their fictions
(84). Bakhtin studied a series of chronotopes?instances of remarkable
novelistic intersections between time and space?among which are the
road, the encounter, the drawing room or salon, the town, and the
threshold to any number of interiors. Such instances provide opportunity
for dialogue, narrative climaxes, building of narrative tension and
suspense, as well as occasional resolutions of conflict that enable the
story to advance.

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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN THE GREAT GATSBY 119

For Bakhtin, the most important dialogue is that between the

unfolding scene and its audience located outside the pages of a novel. In
its cross-section of life in the 1920s, Gatsby is made up of social scenes
in a variety of settings, both indoors and out-of-doors, road scenes in
cars and trains, and encounters that are marked by the breaks and
changes of crossing thresholds. The major scenes that take place in the
novel?journeys by car to the city and away from the city, the accident
that kills Myrtle Wilson, Gatsby's conversations with Nick inside the
yellow roadster, the confrontation that occurs in the New York City
hotel room, and Gatsby's reunion with Daisy at Nick's house?are
emblematic of Baktinian chronotopes. According to Bakhtin, we gain
access to the deepest meanings of a novel only through these occasions of
temporal-spatial expression.
The mutual interaction of time and space provides the sense of being
alongside Nick Carra way as he chronicles the novel's events. As a result,
what supposedly transpired in 1922 produces an immediacy for the
contemporary reader. Through the use of Nick as narrator, Fitzgerald
creates a certain dialogic tension that also controls the temporal and
spatial properties of the novel's central scenes. One of the best examples
of a Bakhtinian chronotope in Gatsby occurs while a drunken Nick is
still inside the New York apartment where Tom Buchanan has just
broken Myrtle's nose. In this scene, Nick occupies a role similar to the
one which Bakhtin assigns the reader: he is at once enmeshed in the
dialogue and physical actions that take place among the characters, and
yet at the same time he occupies a space apart from them:
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft

twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild,

strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair.
Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed
their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets,
and I was him too, looking up and wondering. / was within and without,
simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
(23-24, emphasis added)
The sense of suspension Nick describes in this passage?both in terms of
his own emotional conflict and in the context of a time-space relation
ship?provides an excellent illustration of one of Bahktin's central
distinctions:

If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as
the teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in

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 120 COLLEGE LITERATURE

which the event occurred . . .The however realistic and

represented world,
truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it
represents, where the author and creator of the literary work is to be
found. (256)
As Nick brings his personal and worldly experiences to bear on his
interpretation of Gatsby, so we bring our individual and historical
experiences to bear on the chronotope of the novel's represented world?
a process of exchange. As Bakhtin continues, "The work and the world
represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world
enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as
well as part of its subsequent life, in a continually renewing of the work
through the creative perception of listeners and readers" (254). The
represented world of Gatsby conforms nicely to this paradigm. The novel
faces inward toward parlor scenes and social encounters in the recent
past, but also goes on to include the Dutch explorer's encounter with the
continent in a more remote past. The text likewise expands outward
toward the making of on-going histories, both personal and national,
that the reader brings to each encounter with the book. What Fitzgerald
has been asking from his readers may be more than we have yet been
willing to acknowledge.
I
Americans are fervent believers in starting over?shedding the past and
inventing the future. Unlike Europeans, who for better or for worse,
maintain close ties with ancestral traditions, Americans have always been
able to define themselves differently from their parents. Cast in a culture
that dreams in the future tense, "the green light, the orgiastic future"
(121), Gatsby curiously focuses on one man's obsession with his own
personal history and his attempt to recast his life in such a way as to
influence the passing present. Because Jay Gatsby's entire "life produc
tion"?from his "colossal affair" of a house, to the Rolls Royces and
magnificent shirts?is aimed at the winning of an ideal, to satisfy his
desire he must transcend his own origins and destroy time. The irony of
Gatsby's quest to "undo history" is that his particularly American
pursuit of a gleaming future defined by material success has been
motivated by an adolescent vision of what Nick tellingly labels a "vast,
vulgar, meretricious beauty" (65). The dream of the seventeen-year-old
James Gatz remains the dream of the adult Jay Gatsby. The result is the
creation of a world in which the fairy tale of adolescence becomes the
sole motivation of manhood. It is a conceit that views the reality of time

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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN THE GREAT GATSBY 121

as enemy, a force of corruption that must somehow be surmounted in

order to nourish and realize the ideal "for a transitory enchanted
moment" (121).
R. Michael Sheffield argues in his essay "The Temporal Location of
The Great Gatsby" that "the story must not be followed sequentially
... it must be disassembled and then reassembled according to some sort
of comprehensible pattern in the life of Jay Gatsby."6 The same process
dominates Carraway's own self-construction and ours, as we read.

Throughout the novel, then, the concept of time is distended?a

reflection of Gatsby's personal obsession with Daisy as well as an
indication of his ability to remain at the center of the narrative?until the
entire Long Island summer seems somehow part of an adolescent's
fantasy of "gleaming, dazzling parties" filled with "music and laughter"
(120).
Indeed, in Chapter 5, a pivotal point in the novel as Gatsby is
re-introduced to Daisy at Nick's home, Fitzgerald's literal emphasis on
clocks, watches, and time enlarges to become a metaphor for the novel's
major theme?Gatsby's need to destroy the present so that he might
"repeat the past . . .fix everything the way it was before" (73). It is,
after all, significant that Fitzgerald himself singled out this chapter as
one of the most important in the novel. In a 1924 letter to Max Perkins,
his editor at Scribner's, Fitzgerald says: "Your criticisms were excellent
and most helpful, and you picked out all my favorite spots in the book
to praise as high spots. Except you didn't mention my favorite of all?
the chapter where Gatsby and Daisy meet."7 In a recent article, The
Great Gatsby and the Great American Novel," Kenneth Eble calls this
chapter "the center of the novel" and declares, "This chapter was very
clearly reworked, chiefly in order to give it a static quality, to
approximate in the telling Gatsby's attempt to make time stand still."8
The chapter is another illustration of a Bakhtinian chronotope, insofar as
it is set in a living room and contains, in Bakhtin's words, "the place
where the major spatial and temporal sequences of the novel intersect
. . .the where encounters occur . . .where some
place dialogues happen,
thing that acquires extraordinary importance in the novel, revealing the
character, 'ideas' and 'passions' of the heroes" (246).
Throughout this central chapter, the language Fitzgerald employs
contains constant references to time, from the opening scene indicating
Nick's fear at two o'clock in the morning that his house might be on fire
to the closing moments when Gatsby succeeds in re-creating his dream

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 122 COLLEGE LITERATURE

with Daisy?standing outside time, "possessed by intense life" (64).

After helping Nick prepare his humble home so that it may be worthy
enough to entertain Daisy, Gatsby reveals his intense nervousness:
"
'Nobody's coming to tea. It's too late!' He looked at his watch as if
there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. 'I can't wait all
"
day' (56). When Gatsby finally faces Daisy, he moves like a man
sleep-walking through a dream that has suddenly become flesh, forget
ting his own words about its being "too late." His glittering possessions,
indeed his very existence, suddenly appear suspended in time, "unreal"
in Daisy's presence. Gatsby's condition receives added emphasis with the
introduction of a clock on Nick's mantel: "[Gatsby's] head leaned back
so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and
from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy" (57).
That Gatsby has been reunited with Daisy gives momentary substance
to his belief that the advance of history can be altered or even halted.
And this thesis is symbolically portrayed as Gatsby's head, the place
where his memories of the past originate, is juxtaposed with the broken
clock. Actual contact between head and defunct clock, then, suggests a
conscious suspension of time in which Gatsby has conquered the passage
of time itself. Moreover, this scene is an illustration of Bakhtin's
time-space relationship: Gatsby exists physically in one temporal arena,
but mentally inhabits quite another. The clock occupies the center of the
chronotope here, as it is materially representative of time in the present,
but actually is not, like Gatsby himself, an accurate or valid manifesta
tion of what it appears to be.
Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of
his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set
it back in place ....

"I'm sorry about the clock," he said ....

"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the
floor.
"We haven't met for many said Daisy ....
years,"
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another
minute. (57)
In this scene, particularly in the evocation of time as a malleable
presence that is capable of lying "smashed in pieces," Fitzgerald indeed
produces an example of the literary chronotope that Bakhtin first
described in the summer of 1925: "Time, as it were, thickens, takes on

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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN THE GREAT GATSBY 123

flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and

responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (84).
Like Quentin Compson in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Gatsby
strains the power of the imagination and the limits of language to
re-create the past and his own version of the world through the language
he selects. Figures in fictions, both Quentin and Gatsby attempt to make
fictions; their attempt to control time also reflects what each author tries
to exert through the act of narration and through imposing a narrative
structure. Nick's description of Gatsby's self-creation which, in turn,
reflects and becomes his own self-making thus merges with Fitzgerald's
authorial act.
However, just as Gatsby appears to have this past within his grasp,
reunited with Daisy, Fitzgerald reminds us of just how ephemeral and
tenuous Gatsby's control over time really is. The very realization of his
dream, like the "trembling fingers" that catch the clock, is not secure
and cannot be sustained. At this moment, which he had idealized for so
long, when his emotion is at "an inconceivable pitch of intensity,"
Gatsby somehow is beginning to feel a loss?a loss of something he
cannot name or identify. Once again, Fitzgerald describes this sensation
through a Bakhtinian chronotope; time is a metaphor rendered "artisti
cally visible," employed to illustrate the gap between objective reality
and Gatsby's subjectivity: "he was running down like an overwound
clock" (61). The image, with its sense of dramatic deflation, describes
Gatsby's ultimate fate and re-establishes him within the human structure
of time, defined and restricted by its perimeters. Gatsby's dream, the
"dangerous . . .pressure of his head," is by the conditions of its own
existence doomed to failure.
Gatsby does not want Daisy as she exists (Daisy Buchanan, wife and
mother); he desires the Golden Girl of his memory, dressed in white, the
Daisy Fay of five years ago. Gatsby wants a controllable past for himself
as well as for Daisy; indeed, he will not acknowledge the passage of
time, or the possibility that Daisy loves Tom also, because to do so
would be a recognition that time and history exist in an objective realm
beyond his regulation.

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

"Daisy, that's all over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter any
more. Just tell him the truth?that you never loved him?and it's all wiped
out forever."
She looked at him blindly. "Why?how could I love him?possibly?"

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 124 COLLEGE LITERATURE

"You never loved him ..."

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now?isn't
that enough? I can't help what's past." (88)

To acknowledge Daisy's past relationship with Tom would also mean

recognition of Daisy's own memory, her own history. Hers would
become a voice that Gatsby would have to listen to and take into account
beyond the initial "rush of emotion" that "its fluctuating, feverish
warmth" creates (64).
Since Jay Gatsby cannot regain Daisy because she does not exist as he
imagines her, he pursues her not as a real woman, but as an ideal, like
Quentin's version of Caddy, who remains forever the virgin, despite her
promiscuity. Their five-year separation becomes permanent at the novel's
conclusion when Gatsby's body, circling slowly among the dead summer
leaves on the swimming pool's surface, suggests one final image of the
clock's rotation: "The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly,
tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water" (108).
Gatsby and Quentin cannot convert the present into the past because
time always frustrates the quest for the ideal; its function is an ultimate
reminder of man's human perimeters, his mortal destiny. Gatsby's
imagination and inventiveness allow him to create a world of his own
making, but it is a world that ultimately defies the reality of time itself:
"A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the
clock ticked on the washstand" (65). Gatsby's world is one in which
there can be no voice but Gatsby's?no version of history other than his
own. In other words, Gatsby's version of history is solipsistic; it is
monologistic and does not truly engage in dialogue with other voices or
versions of history. And it is precisely for this reason that Gatsby rarely
engages in conversation with other characters within the novel. Nick
Carraway is the one person in the novel with whom Gatsby converses to
any extent and even then the level of conversation is monological: Gatsby
talks at Nick rather than with him.9
In his 1929 critical analysis of Dostoevsky originally entitled Problems
of Dostoevsky's Art, Michail Bakhtin argues that the Russian novelist's
major literary contribution is the origination of the "polyphonic
novel,"10 and among the various aspects Bakhtin associates with this
narrative form is the conscious attempt to transcend time, linking past to
present in a process of simultaneity:
The ability to exist simultaneously and the ability to stand side by side or
face to face opposite one another is for Dostoevsky the criterion for

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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN THE GREAT GATSBY 125

differentiating the essential from the non-essential. Only those things which
can conceivably be presented simultaneously, which can conceivably be
interconnected in a single point in time, are of the essence and enter in

world; . . .[Dostoevsky's characters] remember from their

Dostoevsky's
past only those things which have not ceased to be current for them and
which continue to be experienced in the present: an unexpiated sin or

crime, an unforgiven insult. (24)

Through the interplay of time and place as they evoke and expand
memory from the individual toward the collective, Fitzgerald engenders a
fictional narrative from a variety of historical consciousnesses. In a
manner resembling Bakhtin's description of the polyphonic novel,
Fitzgerald superimposes one time upon another in order to invent a
present through a vision of the past, and to effect what Matthew
Bruccoli describes as "the passing present."11 In this sense, Gatsby not
only connects with Dostoevsky's narrative forms but also anticipates
William Faulkner's use of structural and thematic experiments that
reflect time's complexity.
In many of Faulkner's best novels, the actions of the present are held
in suspension by an interrupted narrative that allows the events of the
past to become reanimated, what Bakhtin defines as "materialized
history" (The Dialogic Imagination, 247), a status where "Time be
comes, in effect, palpable and visible" (250). While Fitzgerald is not so
obviously or consciously experimental as Faulkner, in Gatsby he still
manages to suspend time by juxtaposing the past in a direct relationship
with the present. Consequently, just as Faulkner chooses to dispense with
the typical characteristics found in conventional narratives in order to
provide the reader with a deeper and multifaceted understanding of
subjective histories, Fitzgerald employs time images and references in
order to illustrate Gatsby's "unreality of reality" (65), his subjective
interpretation of the past.
II
In 1964, Kenneth Eble examined the significant changes Fitzgerald
incorporated between the early pencil draft of Gatsby and later typescript
copy, especially the crucial alteration of the Dutch sailors' passage that
Fitzgerald would expand and place at the end of the novel. This last page
of the novel grew out of one sentence that initially appeared at the end
of Chapter I: "And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world I
too held my breath and waited, until I could feel the motion of America
as it turned through the hours?my own blue lawn and the tall
incandescent city on the water and beyond that, the dark fields of the

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 126 COLLEGE LITERATURE

republic rolling on under the night."12 This sentence, later expanded into
the final three paragraphs of the novel, is more evidence, even at this
early stage of Gatsby's formulation, of the degree to which temporal
images and references were already shaping Fitzgerald's imagination. The
notable absence of the word "hours" in the final draft is replaced by a
remarkably encompassing historical discourse. The subjective "I" of
Nick Carraway evolves into the intersubjective "we" within the dialogue
taking place throughout the fiction, acknowledging the heterogeneous
voices participating in the making of that diverse history, both personal
and national.

Fitzgerald thus appears to have anticipated Bakhtin's analysis of the

literary chronotope. Illustrating the full significance of Bakhtin's dialogi
cal principle, Gatsby suggests that it is not only the writer who "makes"
history but also the characters who create history through their interac
tions and ongoing dialogues with each other and with each reader. As
stated earlier, the novelist handles the concept of time in Chapter 5 by
compressing it into a motion so tangible that past and present become
nearly indistinguishable as they are brought together through Gatsby's
encounter with Daisy. In such a context, Fitzgerald's early sentence
would seem to reflect this same preoccupation?the juxtaposition of past
with present; indeed, a sense of the vast sweep of American history
suddenly reduced to its component "hours." A hint of the novel's larger
design is thus suggested within this single sentence, anticipating the
elaboration in Chapter 5 as well as the book's concluding three
paragraphs.

By thus emphasizing the close relationship between present and past,

Fitzgerald enlarges the scope of the novel. Gatsby creates a dramatic and
narrative tension that is at the center of the ongoing process of making
ourselves as individuals and as Americans. Nick is the receptacle, the
tabula rasa in the narrative; we serve in an analogous capacity as we read
of the struggle to create a self and a context for that self?the tension
that represents the crux of Bakhtin's argument linking the personal to the
historical.
In America, to transform oneself from a barefooted James Gatz into
an elegant white-suited Jay Gatsby gives truth to historical and mythic
tales of making oneself over?the ragged Ben Franklin chewing on a
pennyloaf turns into the venerable American, a philosopher statesman
who dines with European kings. The implied dialogue that takes place

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THE LANGUAGE OF TIME IN THE GREAT GATSBY 127

between Gatsby and the American models he emulates in his grandiose

self-conception becomes one that we enter through the implied dialogue
we carry on with Nick in the making of the text. In other words,
historical consciousness in Gatsby is rendered through Carraway's act of
making a text, in itself the result of dialogic understanding centering on a
tension between language and time especially dramatized in Chapter 5.
Fitzgerald thus creates an historical discourse in potential?one we
continue to engage in as we communicate through our own dialogic
relationship with Gatsby. The narrative frame?the Dutch sailors'
passage originally in Chapter 1 and later expanded into the novel's final
passage?creates a dialogical situation among the original Dutch settlers,
Nick Carraway, and us as readers: a reduplication of the "within and
without" (24).

NOTES
1F. Scott Fitzgerald, "To Mrs. Bayard Turnbull," circa spring, 1933, The
Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1963): 435.
2_, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1925): 121.
3Matthew Bruccoli goes to some length to describe Gatsby's "time
haunted" quality by referring to the "450 time words" that appear in the novel,
information he cites from Andrew T. Crosland, Concordance to The Great

Gatsby (Detroit: Gale Research, 1975): 8.

4George Garrett, "Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great
"
Gatsby, New Essays on The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, The New
American Novel Series (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1985): 115.
5M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.

Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981). In the

chapter "Forms Of Time And Of The Chrontope In The Novel: Notes Toward a
Historical Poetics," Bakhtin describes the origins of the name chronotope in
mathematics "as part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity" (84), and says we are

borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely).
What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and
time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a

formally constituitive of literature .... In a footnote to the above

category (84)
passage, Bakhtin tells us that, in the summer of 1925, he attended a lecture on
the chronotope in biology in which the lecturer also "touched upon" aesthetic
questions. It interests us to note that Bakhtin indicates a progression from the

physical sciences to the life sciences and toward a historical poetics.

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 128 COLLEGE LITERATURE

We wish here to acknowledge our University of Vermont colleague Mary

Hall who introduced us to Bakhtin's theories on narrative and inspired us in

applying them to The Great Gatsby.

6R. Michael Sheffield, "The Temporal Location of Fitzgerald's Jay
Gatsby," Texas Quarterly 18 (1975): 123.
7F. Scott Fitzgerald, "To Max Perkins," circa December 1, 1924, The
Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1963): 170.
8Kenneth Eble, "The Great Gatsby and the Great American Novel," New

Essays on The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, The American Novel
Series (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1985): 94.
9Bakhtin's formulation of the polyphonic novel permits the inclusion of a

monologistic voice as one of several voices contained within the polyphonic

novel. Julia Kristeva, in her analysis of Bakhtin's dialogic principles [Desire in
Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia U
P, 1980)], posits that "For Bakhtin, dialogue can be monological, and what is
called monologue can be dialogical" (67). The character of Ivan Karamazov, for

example, is a monologistic presence in the novel The Brothers Karamazov,

Bakhtin's paragon of the polyphonic narrative; until the end of the novel, Ivan
remains unaffected by the other characters, even as he
profoundly influences
other consciousnesses within the novel. Thus Ivan Karazmov and Jay Gatsby
would appear to share something in common.
10M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rostel

(New York: Ardis, 1973). According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky anticipated a

modernist aesthetic in his attempt to dramatize a plurality of consciousnesses
which are not subsumed under a single authorial perspective. Dostoevsky's
polyphonic novel embraces "several worlds and several full-fledged conscious

nesses; they are presented not within one field of vision, but within several

complete fields of vision of equal value" (12). Bakhtin ascribes the polyphonic
novel exclusively to Dostoevsky, arguing that the Russian represented a signifi
cant break with the nineteenth-century narrative tradition. By limiting his frame
of reference to the continental novel, however, Bakhtin excludes all reference to

nineteenth-century experimental American novelists such as Hawthorne and

Melville. It seems to us that within representative texts such as Moby Dick, The

Confidence Man, and The House of the Seven Gables, Bakhtin's concept of the
polyphonic novel is also evident. The Great Gatsby comes out of a tradition that
includes Melville and Hawthorne and thus owes its degree of experimental
orientation more to their influence than to that of the continental novel.
1
Matthew J. Bruccoli, "Introduction," New Essays on The Great Gatsby,
ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, The American Novel Series (Cambridge: Cambridge U

P, 1985): 9.
12Kenneth Eble, "The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby" American
Literature 36 (1964): 316.

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