Babb - 1963 - The Great Gatsby and The Grotesque

"The Great Gatsby" and the Grotesque
Author(s): HOWARD S. BABB

Source: Criticism, Vol. 5, No. 4 (fall 1963), pp. 336-348
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41938363
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HOWARD S. B ABB *
ffThe Great Gatsby 99

and the Grotesque
Most critics of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work hold The

to be his major achievement, discovering the reasons f
in such interrelated factors as its concentration, the au
concern with novelistic form, and his use of a narrato
story. Without disputing these findings, I want to
what follows to another formal element in The Gre
mode of grotesque representation that Fitzgerald brin
after time. For this mode seems to me the chief sourc
power, Fitzgerald conveying through it his most pe
ment of the society shown in the novel.
Grotesque is a dangerous term for my purposes, par
meaning is notoriously vague. Moreover, when the wo
reasonably technical sense- as by Wolfgang Kay ser
grotesque art1- it has come to denote some features
partially in The Great Gatsby or not at all: the actual
different realms of being, for instance, usually the h
animal; or the suspension of what we ordinarily take t
its laws; or a pervasive air of the fantastic. And we
feel- to follow Kayser's analysis of the grotesque a bit
the metaphysical principle animating the world of thi
Absurd, or that at bottom " the formations of the
game with the Absurd " and thus ultimately suggest "
exorcise the Demonic " from man's universe. But if th
cations of grotesque art have little relevance to The Gr
I think the word does remain applicable. For one impo
the grotesque is that it represents a world fundamental
in a markedly distorted manner, with the result that t
# Howard S. Babb teaches English at The Ohio State Universi

1 Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Ol
cited as "Kayser" hereafter. For most of the formulations co
tesque in my second paragraph, I am drawing pretty directly on
book, translating Kayser's words literally in the quoted passa
some local references to his mention of characteristics listed in m
realms of being (p. 25); the suspension of everyday reality an
fantastic (pp. 22-23); the relevance of the Absurd (pp. 199-20
world" (pp. 198-199).
336
"The Great Gatsby" and the Grotesque 337
alien- fancifully exaggerated, yet uncannily ominous. More than

the central characteristic of the grotesque is its intermingling o
laughable and the frightening, which precludes the more convent
more unequivocal sort of response that we associate with comedy
tragedy. It is Fitzgerald's union of the oddly humorous with the
fying in his portrait of society in The Great Gatsby that compe
to use grotesque in discussing the book. Also, he makes us a
periodically that the world in this novel is distorted, though no
the degree that it would be in a thoroughly grotesque work.
What tempers the distortion is the continuing presence of a sy
pathetic narrator in the story, Nick Carraway, and in gener
" normality " mutes the grotesque effect of the whole. Insofar
take the book to be about him, his growing entanglement in the
of Gatsby and the Buchanans via Jordan Baker and his subse
retreat from the East to the West, our attention is deflected fro
Eastern life itself to his conventional moral decision. And in his
capacity simply as our point of view, Nick always regards the Eastern
world and its inhabitants with a compassion alien to the " cold glance "
that marks the perspective of quintessentially grotesque works (Kayser,
p. 200). Yet for all of his influence on the story, the world he presents
to us reveals its grotesqueness again and again. Incidentally, the book
never encourages us to imagine that this quality inheres in Nick's own
way of seeing, with Fitzgerald thus obliquely dramatizing him as a
person; rather, Fitzgerald's attitudes pretty much square with Nick's-
though one feels that the author sees the grotesqueness of the world
more readily than the narrator does- and for both of them the quality
belongs strictly to the world that they observe. As The Great Gatsby
proceeds, the grotesqueness of this world impresses itself little by little
on the reader: first through some descriptive passages, later through
the representation of certain characters, finally through thf very
plotting of the climactic incidents. Indeed, Nick himself comes at last
to recognize that the reality surrounding him is grotesque, that the
convention of reckless behavior which he can accept as appropriate
enough to the East's gay parties informs as well the whole range of
this society's deeds. Under the shock of this discovery, he explicitly
calls the world "grotesque," as we shall see later on, and turns his
back on it. Whether Fitzgerald also retreats, ultimately, from this
vision of reality as in fact grotesque is a question better postponed
until we have noticed the variety of grotesque elements within the
story.
338 Howard S. Babb
The first movement of The Great

at the Buchanans', at Myrtle Wilso
In doing so, it essentially equates the
their pursuit of pleasure and their
surface of these scenes is much gayer
Fitzgerald exposing us first- along w
Eastern life. And through this open
the grotesque passages have a dom
approach each of the parties, Fitzgera
in which, chiefly by his use of figur
or more details to the point of comi
the home of the Buchanans, for exam
started at the beach and ran toward
mile, jumping over sun-dials and br
finally when it reached the house dri
as though from the momentum of
similar effect of over-magnification
Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker w
the wind:
The only completely stationary object . . . was an enormous

couch on which two young women were buoyed up as
though upon an anchored balloon . They were both in white,
and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had
just been blown back in after a short flight around the house .
I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip
and snap of the curtains .... Then there was a boom as Tom
Buchanan shut the rear windows . . . and the curtains and
the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the
floor . (p. 10; my italics)
In both passages, the figure is continued to the point where what it

literally says intrudes upon our attention; Fitzgerald thus leads us to
imagine the account momentarily as a factual one rather than merely
a way of speaking, and so imparts to his picture a whimsical extrav-
agance 3- the quality which he captures again by repeatedly describing
aI quote from the first edition of The Great Gatsby (New York, 1925)- and
later follow its spelling of the name " Wolfshiem." For allowing me to use his
copy of this edition, as well as for general advice about Fitzgerald's texts, I am
grateful to my colleague Matthew Bruccoli. And I am indebted to Roy Harvey
Pearce for many suggestions which helped to clarify the argument of this essay.
8 The typical figurative language of Fitzgerald's style affects us very differently,
" The Great Gatsby " and the Grotesque 339
Jordan Baker as seeming to balance some object on her chin

10-11).
The language introducing the apartment of Mrs. Wilson, the mis-
tress of Tom Buchanan, reveals the same kind of distortion:
The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of

tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move
about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging
in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-
enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred
rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved
itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady
beamed down into the room. Several old copies of Town
Tattle lay on the table together with a copy of " Simon Called
Peter," and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway,
(p. 34)
The " to stumble . . . over " is so pointedly physical that, applied to

" scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles," it actualizes
the "scenes" as the things tripped over, making them solidly three-
dimensional for a moment. The net result is to inflate the already comic
contrast between the refinements of Versailles and the coarseness of
the apartment. The ludicrous in the remaining sentences also arises
from the juxtaposition of extremes- the " picture " that is not any
painting but " an over-enlarged photograph," the " hen " and " blurred
rock " which become " a bonnet " and the face of a woman, the
gossip columns which lie side by side with a book concerning religion-
all of the contrasts hooting at the vulgarity of Mrs. Wilson.
As Nick begins settling in to his own first party at Gatsby's, another
passage crops up in which our usual perspective on the world is
intermittently wrenched askew:
"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan [to

"the two girls in yellow"], and I started, but the girls had
and it can also be illustrated from The Great Gatsby : . . it is what preyed on
Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed
out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men " (p. 3);
"At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this
low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by
the sad horns around the floor" (p. 181). These expressions are highly intensive,
yet they operate quite conventionally, the vehicle subserving the interests of the
tenor; whereas in the figures quoted in my text, the vehicle temporarily takes on a
life of its own, the total effect verging on the absurd.
340 Howard S. Babb
moved casually on and her remark

mature moon , produced like the s
caterer's basket. With Jordan's s
in mine, we descended the steps
garden. A tray of cocktails floated
and we sat down at a table with th
three men , each one introduced t
my italics)
The first italicized phrase we may respond to as a figure hit on at

random, one which happens to transform a natural phenomenon into
something artificial. But the second expression that I have marked
transforms the artificial into something natural, the " tray of cocktails "
appearing vaguely possessed with a life of its own. And the third
phrase reduces natural, animate " men " to the level of the devitalized,
the mechanical, through neutralizing each of them as a featureless
" Mr. Mumble." These interchanges in the normal categories of being
occur in such quick succession as to develop a feeling of fantasy. Yet
the fantastic is domesticated, as it were, by the number of purely
factual comments in the paragraph (about the movements of the girls,
Jordan, and Nick) because Fitzgerald employs precisely the same tone
for these statements as for his bizarre observations.
While the scenes I have been discussing do strike the reader as

chiefly comic, in each of them Fitzgerald adds another dimension to
his world by illuminating it briefly from a different angle. For all
three contain some more or less muted indication of violence (though
how firmly this fact registers with Nick is hard to say) and so echo
with the emotional dissonance of the grotesque. At the Buchanans'
party, the relevant details are Daisy's black and blue mark, and the sup-
pressed quarrel about Tom's liaison; at Mrs. Wilson's apartment, Tom's
sudden breaking of her nose; at Gatsby's, the automobile accident
which ends the evening. This accident itself, which virtually concludes
the first section of the novel, closes out Nick's introduction to the
Eastern world with a grotesque flourish (pp. 65-68). The incident is
wonderfully funny in its unfolding, what with the muddled surprise
of the first drunken man, who gets out of the car claiming that he
"wasn't even trying" to drive, and the unexpected emergence of
second, who is equally perplexed at the stopping of the car. Yet
Fitzgerald sustains an undertone of terror through noting the more
sober reactions of the spectators, developing suspense for a few
moments about the possibility of injury to the second man, and
reminding us frequently of the " amputated wheel." And of co

in spite of the laughs that the men provide, they have clearly act
with no regard for consequences in undertaking to drive at all. M
over, Fitzgerald induces us to see them as confirmed in irresponsib
even after the accident, for he makes us suppose the first fellow to
been the driver all the while that the man is protesting his ignor
of automobiles, and Fitzgerald allows the second man to persist in
irrational attempts to drive the wrecked car away. The habit
irresponsibility implied here obviously parallels this event with th
car accident fatal to Mrs. Wilson at the climax of The Great Gatsb
but the prevailing ludicrousness of the incident at Gatsby's gives
to a prevailing seriousness in the later incident, the complementa
tones defining the grotesque effect of this controlling element in
novel's structure.
In the course of the story's second movement (Chapters IV-VI),
Nick becomes more and more involved in the Eastern world through
attaching himself to Jordan Baker and through helping to advance
Gatsby's relationship with Daisy Buchanan. But the new section is
prefaced by that famous list of people who visit Gatsby's home during
the summer. The preface represents the last distanced look at the East
that Nick achieves until the close of the novel, and Fitzgerald's list
lights up this world brilliantly, the passage coming nearer than any-
thing else in The Great Gatsby to pure grotesque art (pp. 73-76).
For one thing, he manages something like the intermixing of different
realms of being in the names which he concocts for these people:
names often linking them with the animal world (the Leeches, Black-
buck, Edgar Beaver, the Catlips, Ferret, Francis Bull)- though some-
times with fishes (S. B. Whitebait, the Hammerheads, Beluga), or with
the vegetable world (Clarence Endive, Newton Orchid, Ernest Lilly,
George Duckweed, Henry L. Palmetto). Also, a number of the names
juxtapose elements that seem for one reason or another incongruous:
the Willie Voltaires, Rüssel Betty, Claudia Hip. Yet this splendidly
amusing catalogue- and Fitzgerald uses a host of other devices to make
his names sound comic- is punctuated again and again with some nota-
tion of violence. A single excerpt will illustrate the effect, as well as
the types of name-coining just described:
From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the
O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of
Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was
there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk
342 Howard S. Babb
out on the gravel drive that Mrs.

ran over his right hand.
The violence, here as everywhere in

circumstantially reported that it be
the bizarrely-named inhabitants. Ind
prelude lies in Fitzgerald's perfect c
together, the details build up the
drawn to be ours, an alien and ab
alone seems quite plausible, a true en
The second movement proper of
renewal and past history of the rela
In their actual meetings, the gro
absence. Of course Nick's growin
Gatsby through this phase of the n
ceedings sympathetically. And Fitzg
treating the meetings grotesquely,
passion for Gatsby and thus on mak
to the affair with Daisy than we do
affair with Mrs. Wilson. But if the
gloves (as I shall bring out after a m
enough when dealing with one of
Meyer Wolf shiem- Fitzgerald ther
life appear grotesque, as well as ext
the representation of character (pp
itself echoes the animal realm. An
with a less pleasant effect than in h
on a physical detail, his repeated des
nose into a fantastic being: Wolfshi
growths of hair which luxuriated in
at me indignantly " His nostrils tur
Furthermore, Wolfshiem's conversat
incongruities. For he proceeds with
with sentiment for " The old Met
and gone. Filled with friends gon
of a murder ("I can't forget so long
Rosenthal there. ..."), to a profes
("I understand you're looking for
encounters between Gatsby and D
over-exaggerated lines nor the blend
terize this portrait of Wolfshiem, ev
have developed several details grotesquely. For instance, Gats

display, " one by one," of a mountainous " pile of shirts " (and th
of his status) to Daisy- on the first visit to his home of the wom
he has worshipped so long- is certainly a heightened gesture,
potentially ridiculous. Yet Fitzgerald endows the whole scene so su
cessfully with an air of romantic sentiment that we are force
regard the gesture simply as Gatsby's rather extravagant way
offering himself and his life to the person he loves- an effect confirme
by the response of Daisy, who is overwhelmed at her sense of all
feels she has lost in not having waited for Gatsby five years earli
" ť They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in
thick folds. 4 It makes me sad because I've never seen such- such
beautiful shirts before'" (p. 112).
But in spite of Gatsby's blissful reunion with Daisy, the atmosphere
of the second movement becomes more and more menacing. We have
already noticed the undercurrents of violence in the pages naming
Gatsby's guests and presenting Wolfshiem; and the reunion itself is
followed immediately by a vicious snub to Gatsby at the hands of
Tom and the Sloanes, and by the party at Gatsby's- painted now in
dominantly harsh colors- which Daisy at last attends and finds offensive.
Thus Fitzgerald prepares the way for the lurid closing movement of
The Great Gatsby , in which the eruptions of violence drive Nick
finally to reject the East.
The very plotting of the climactic incidents seems calculated by
Fitzgerald to make the operation of the world appear grotesque. For
in the case of Mrs. Wilson being run down by Gatsby's car, we feel
a great disparity between the shocking result and those trivial im-
pulses-Daisy's, to go to town; Tom's, to drive Gatsby's automobile;
Jordan's, to have Tom stop for gas- which unite so casually to make
up the necessary conditions for the death. This incongruity magnifies
hugely the irresponsibility of the Buchanans' world as well as the
dominance of the merely accidental in the universe of the story. As
for Wilson's determination to avenge the killing of his wife (pp. 188-
191): Fitzgerald permits him to mull over the details of Mrs. Wilson's
infidelity with an unknown man (details which cry out the name
"Tom" to us), to link the infidelity quite rightly with the death,
to identify- with fundamental moral truth- the lover of his wife as
the guilty party (". . . he killed her . . .")-and then to settle on the
wrong man. (Clearly Tom is made responsible at bottom for the
killing by the fact that Mrs. Wilson is rushing out to seek him in the
344 Howard S. Babb
car which his own words have giv

though Daisy happens to be the ac
Fitzgerald makes both the Buchanan
now bearing the chief responsibility
at the wheel, and Tom directing Wi
grotesque muddling of moral trut
counterpart on the next page, wher
burg into God:
. . . Michaelis saw with a shock t

eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, w
and enormous, from the dissolving
" God sees everything," repeated
" That's an advertisement," Mich
(p. 192)
The equation is ludicrous- and of course quite true. For Fitzgerald has
prepared us, through the earlier introduction of the billboard and the
scattered references to the Doctor in the text, to conceive of him as the
Spirit presiding over this world: an informing principle mindless,
conscienceless, vaguely associated with money; a God abstracted to
the immense pair of eyes which peer out of a vacuum at the human
wasteland.4
4 The passage introducing Doctor Eckleburg is the only grotesque one, through
the first movement of the story, in which the effect is more ominous than comic.
Fitzgerald is again playing tricks with his language, now transforming ashes into
the animate force in this fully circumstanced world presided over by the Doctor:
This is a valley of ashes- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat
into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of
houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally , with a transcendent
effort , of ash-gray men who move dimly and already crumbling through
the* powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and imme-
diately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an
impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your
sight.
But above the gray land . . . you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes ... are blue and gigantic- their retinas
are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair
of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evi-
dently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice
in the borough of Queens .... But his eyes, dimmed a little by many
paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping
ground, (pp. 27-28; my italics)
The single touch of humor in this distorted picture, where the desolation looms
so large, is Fitzgerald's reference to the " wild wag of an oculist."
"The Great Gatsby " and the Grotesque 345
How fully Nick comprehends the incongruities just discussed is ha

to decide. But certainly he is shocked by the violence of events and
responds by repeatedly describing the world of the East as "gr
tesque " during the final stage of the novel. As he uses it, the term
means " distorted " and connotes the threatening (but not the laug
able)» Thus, when he goes to bed after the accident fatal to M
Wilson, " I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savag
frightening dreams" (p. 176). And grotesque recurs in the vignette
almost at the end of The Great Gatsby , where Nick views the E
from a distance once more and expresses his sense of all that h
happened:
Even when the East excited me most ... it had always for
me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures
in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El
Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque,
crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless
moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are
walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a
drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which
dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the
men turn in at a house- the wrong house. But no one knows
the woman's name, and no one cares, (pp. 212-213)
The passage is itself grotesque in the heavily accented lines with

which the picture is drawn and in its series of emotional dissonances:
the uniting of " conventional " with " grotesque," of " solemn men "
with " drunken woman," of party with accident (or at least collapse),
of the men's apparent concern for the woman with the mistake they
make and with their actual lack of interest in her. In catching together
so many of the story's motifs- parties, violence, money, blunders in
identification, a fundamental indifference in personal relations- and
coloring them grotesquely, the vignette images most effectively the
world which has come to repel Nick and which Fitzgerald has exposed
trenchantly through much of The Great Gatsby.
In thus reviewing only the most important ways in which Fitzgerald
represents the universe of the novel as grotesque, I have slighted several
elements which strengthen this effect. In the matter of characterization,
for instance, such minor figures as Wolfshiem, Owl Eyes, and old Mr.
Gatz may be the most obvious grotesques. Yet surely something of
the same quality attaches to Gatsby himself, even though we have seen
Fitzgerald protecting his hero in the scenes with Daisy, and even
346 Howard S. Babb
though the grotesqueness of Gatsb

admiration of Nick, and I think of F
intensity of the hero's romantic dre
on only a few traits and gestures in s
the figure to several extravagantly
gerald handles Gatsby so as to bring
between the public's version of him a
possessed of a sinister German backg
host we see, who in fact has a com
magnificent visions of Daisy, and the
object on which he lavishes them; be
human limitations, and his conceptio
between his utterly corrupt activities
corruptible dream" (p. 185). Prob
grotesque in the characterization of t
in the portrait of Nick. But the inter
how larger than life with those repr
itself a phenomenon of grotesque a
The Great Gatsby from comedy t
irresponsible behavior treated humoro
becomes fraught with more and more
the reader an indelible impression of
An indelible impression, but in the l
one. For we can never escape the n
is constantly made out to be an essen
his judgments may often strike us as
example, his rejection of the East see
his own involvement with Jordan Ba
that he should remain as silent about t
5 The idea of Gatsby as some sort of God

account of him as self-begotten: one who ha
tion of himself " (p. 118). Gatsby 's own con
show that he imagines himself in control of
ship with Daisy in absolute terms, first insist
loved Tom (p. 158), and later allowing tha
for Tom was " just personal " (p. 182). The
reinforced through the language sometime
that "we scattered light through half Astor
in which Fitzgerald arranges Nick's introd
suddenly revealed in his true person, comes
6 See the description of a painting by Vel
Mrs. Wilson's death, as Jordan Baker and Tom Buchanan do, yet
against them almost immediately as somehow guilty). Similarly,
final return to the West seems adolescent, an attempt to preser
innocence of youth rather than to come to terms with the realiti
experience. Yet, despite the inadequacy of these judgments, the
ciation of Nick everywhere with morality acts to put a conventi
frame around the world he tells us of, to distance it from us, an
to soften the impact of its grotesqueness. This may be only t
that Fitzgerald is to some extent trapped by his chosen form: tha
very narrator who serves to unify the events so powerfully has
effect as well, because of the morality with which he is endowe
weakening the most compelling vision of reality communicated by
story. But I think we are entitled to wonder whether Fitzg
himself does not back away, as it were, from this grotesque v
which he has created through the novel's structures and style. S
as one can discover, his feelings about Gatsby are as ambivale
Nick's, both of them finding Gatsby's vulgarity offensive, y
maining deeply attracted by Gatsby's capacity to dream. It is
typical that, in the well-known concluding paragraphs of the bo
the irony at Gatsby's pursuit of an illusion should be overbalanc
the grandeur he gains through the linking of his dream and his w
with "the last and greatest of all human dreams," about "the
world," and with the "wonder" of the early explorers at their fi
sight of America (pp. 217-218). But Gatsby's capacity to dre
particularly when exercised on so trivial a person as Daisy, ap
less of a redeeming feature to the reader than to Nick and Fitzg
To differentiate Gatsby from his world on this account, as Fitzg
does, leaves the reader with an impression that the author glosses
the actual corruption which allies Gatsby so firmly with the wo
of the novel. By thus imbuing its central figure with an aur
sentiment, Fitzgerald inevitably tones down the grotesqueness of
world and to this extent betrays the vision of experience that see
me to underlie the story.
Although I have been complaining that The Great Gatsby
short of being pervasively grotesque, the mode is more integ
and consistent here than in Fitzgerald's other works. A story
" The Diamond as Big as the Ritz " may seem potentially grotesqu
that it shows Fitzgerald manipulating the most fantastic materials
a straight face; but the tale strikes me as verging on allegory
whole thing becoming a commentary on our world instead of rend
348 Howard S. Babb
a world slightly alien to ours. If on

of the grotesque in the conversation
of "Absolution," yet the story focus
is too prevailingly serious to produc
with The Great Gatsby' s . The same
completed novels. In The Beautiful an
straining so* hard to make the book
(such as our first, distorted view of
indeed, and potentially grotesque sc
Marietta home or the drunken Anth
feel intended to be simply depressin
scenes of violence in Tender Is the N
McKisco, or Dick Diver's beatin
accordance with the realistic met
The Great Gatsby does Fitzgerald m
tion of events and his portrayal of
of crucial passages, a predominantly
are the moments of truth in the
Fitzgerald's powers and to his ins
they are so fine that we wish at last
sustained his vision and succeeded
Great Gatsby in a grotesque mode

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"The Great Gatsby" and the Grotesque

Author(s): HOWARD S. BABB

ffThe Great Gatsby 99

Most critics of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work hold The

# Howard S. Babb teaches English at The Ohio State Universi

alien- fancifully exaggerated, yet uncannily ominous. More than

The first movement of The Great

The only completely stationary object . . . was an enormous

In both passages, the figure is continued to the point where what it

Jordan Baker as seeming to balance some object on her chin

The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of

The " to stumble . . . over " is so pointedly physical that, applied to

"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan [to

moved casually on and her remark

The first italicized phrase we may respond to as a figure hit on at

While the scenes I have been discussing do strike the reader as

reminding us frequently of the " amputated wheel." And of co

out on the gravel drive that Mrs.

The violence, here as everywhere in

have developed several details grotesquely. For instance, Gats

car which his own words have giv

. . . Michaelis saw with a shock t

How fully Nick comprehends the incongruities just discussed is ha

The passage is itself grotesque in the heavily accented lines with

though the grotesqueness of Gatsb

5 The idea of Gatsby as some sort of God

a world slightly alien to ours. If on

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