El Greco's "View of Toledo" and the Division of Self

“Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old – even then 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 over a sullen, overhanging sky and lusterless 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.”

The Great Gatsby, 176

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the end, Nick attempts to restore Gatsby’s dignity by castigating Daisy. This suggests Fitzgerald’s disapproval of the American obsession with wealth and commodification. Even for Nick, the events of the novel are hazy and almost dreamlike.

Instead of being the women that Gatsby desires to build his life around, Daisy devolves into a nameless, faceless “thing.” Gatsby can never separate the symbol of Daisy with what she actually is, merely a voice “full of money.” The woman is described as “drunken,” rather than dead. Ironically, this serves as a much more fitting adjective for her. Dead would connote an inability to recognize the present, while “drunken” suggests an unwillingness. Her hand “sparkles cold with jewels,” not suggesting visible physical decay, but rather an intangible moral corruption. Like Daisy, the outer façade can be beautiful even if the inner character is distorted and disturbed. Unlike Gatsby, Nick bears witness to Daisy’s corruption.

At the end of the novel, readers are struck by the realization that Gatsby will never be happy. He does not marry Daisy and thus would continue to be obsessed by what he believes she represents. More importantly however, even if Gatsby married Daisy there is the suspicion that she would fail to live up to his expectations of her. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is thus ultimately the story of the human reality that expectations are often not reality.