The Explicator

ISSN: 0014-4940 (Print) 1939-926X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

The Passion of Gatsby: Evocation of Jesus in

Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY

Thomas Dilworth

To cite this article: Thomas Dilworth (2010) The Passion of Gatsby: Evocation of
Jesus in Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, The Explicator, 68:2, 119-121, DOI:
10.1080/00144941003723873

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00144941003723873

Published online: 08 Aug 2010.

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The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 2, 119–121, 2010
Copyright

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144941003723873

THOMAS DILWORTH
University of Windsor

The Passion of Gatsby: Evocation of Jesus

in Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY

Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Passion

Douglas Taylor was the first to explore at length Gatsby’s symbolic identifica-
tion with Jesus, and other interpreters have noted it, including Robert Emmitt, who
sees Gatsby as being informed by the archetype of the dying god. These and other
interpreters have noticed evocations of the Passion of Christ near the conclusion of
the novel. There, Gatsby evokes Jesus carrying his cross. On the last day of his life,
Gatsby went from his house to its garage, picked up an inflated air mattress, and
“shouldered” it (128)—not the usual way to carry an air mattress. This alone might
not recall conventional depictions of Jesus carrying his cross over one shoulder,
but Gatsby is about to die on this air mattress.1 The association is strengthened by
what happens next. On his way to his swimming pool, “he stopped and shifted it a
little, and the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head” (128).
The chauffeur is a would-be Simon of Cyrene, who, for a while, carries Jesus’s
cross for him (Matt. 27.32). After his death, moreover, as the air mattress revolves
slowly, Gatsby’s blood flows into the water of the swimming pool, making “a thin
red circle in the water” (129). This mixture of blood and water may evoke, as
Taylor suggests (37), the “blood and water” flowing from the side of Jesus after
he was pierced in the side by a spear (John 19.34).
The ironically cushy, “pneumatic mattress” symbolizes the inflated, airy, or
spiritual romanticism which gets Gatsby killed (128). It is what motivates him
to keep Daisy’s secret about her accidentally killing Myrtle Wilson. The same
romantic love keeps him awake the night before his death, during his vigil at the
Buchanan house—which recalls the vigil Jesus keeps in the Garden of Gethsemane
on the night before his crucifixion. Whether or not Gatsby suffers agony akin to

119
120 The Explicator

Jesus’s, like Jesus he keeps his vigil in a garden, the back garden of the Buchanan’s
house. Moreover, just as Jesus suffers alone while his disciples sleep, Gatsby is left
alone by Nick Carraway, who goes home to sleep. (Carraway is, in a sense, Gatsby’s
disciple and his evangelist, given that he writes his story.) Carraway “le[aves] him
standing there . . . watching over nothing” (116). The word “watching” recalls
Jesus in the Gethsemane enjoining his disciples, “watch with me” and observing,
“you could not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26.38–39). With all this in
mind, it seems more than mere coincidence that Jay Gatsby shares with Jesus the
first initial of his first name. It is a name Gatsby gives himself “at the specific
moment that witnessed the beginning of his career” as a savior (78): he is rowing
out to warn Dan Cody that he has anchored “over the most insidious flat on Lake
Superior” and “that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour”
(78).
As a redeemer, Gatsby is a Jesus figure in various senses. As an idealizing
romantic, he attempts to redeem his own experience of the world. For Carraway,
Gatsby’s romantic dedication is, to a large extent, imaginatively redemptive of
the crass materialism typifying most other characters in the novel. And Gatsby
is ultimately a Jesus figure in that he dies for Daisy’s sin. Her killing Myrtle is
accidental and therefore cannot be a sin, but she flees the scene of the accident,
and that is a sin as well as a crime. Gatsby has intentionally taken her crime upon
himself. When Carraway asks him if Daisy was driving, Gatsby replies, “Yes, . . .
but of course I’ll say I was” (114).
Echoes of the New Testament late in the novel extend earlier imagery of
Gatsby’s self-invention. In chapter 6, Gatsby imaginatively goes one better than
Jesus as product of a virgin birth: according to Carraway, “his imagination had
never really accepted” his biological parents “as his parents at all” (78). Instead,
Carraway says, Jay Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He
was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he
must be about His Father’s business” (78–79). Carraway alludes here to Luke’s
gospel, where, establishing himself as the son of God, Jesus declares indepen-
dence from his earthly parents by telling his mother, “I must be about my Father’s
business” (2.49). (Many commentators have noted this, including Taylor 35, Em-
mitt 284, and Christensen 15.) Jesus is referring, of course, to his heavenly Father.
As Carraway uses the words, Gatsby is his own father in an imaginative recast-
ing of theological consubstantiality, the doctrine by which the father and son are
one in substance. In combination with these evocations of Jesus in chapter 6,
the final allusions to the suffering and death of Jesus imply that Fitzgerald and
Carraway have been narrating, with deeply ironic double meaning, the Passion of
Gatsby.
Evocation of Jesus in Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY 121

Note
1With anatomical licence, Robert Emmit notes, “He is Christ, who carries the emblem of death
upon his back” (285). William Earle notes that the resemblance of the air mattress to Christ’s cross is
established “by the placement of the mattress upon Gatsby’s shoulder” (3).

Works Cited
The Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
Christensen, Bryce J. “The Mystery of Ungodliness: Renan’s Life of Jesus as a Subtext for F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Christianity and Literature 36:1 (1986), 15–23. Print.
Earle, William “The Character of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.” Helium.com. Helium, Inc., n.d. Web.
25 Jan. 2010.
Emmitt, Robert J. “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby.” Aeolian Harps: Essays in
Literature in Honor of Maurice Browning Cramer. Ed. Donna G. Fricke and Douglas C. Fricke.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green UP, 1976. 273–89. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Taylor, Douglas. “The Great Gatsby: Style and Myth.” University of Kansas City Review 20 (1953),
30–40. Print.