Candles, Music and the Dark Side of Excess

[Monty J]

The candles in the first chapter encapsulate the entire novel, as do the words of a song in Chapter V, where "Ain't We Got Fun" echos through the halls of Gatsby's gilded mansion the ironic truth of the Roaring Twenties-the rich get richer and the poor get--children.

(p.16):

...the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers.

Note the sudden and violent method Daisy chose to extinguish the candles. She could more easily have blown them out or used a snuffer.

(p. 20)

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes.

The delicate wavering glow of candles represents the dreams of four tragically entangled main characters--Gatsby, Daisy, Myrtle and Wilson, each with an energizing conception of what they want in life. Gatsby's dream of wealth--even if tainted by criminal conduct--is personified in the allure of Daisy's voice "full of money." Myrtle's dream is wealth through illicit access to Tom, her passions ignited by his successful bearing and aggressiveness. "Gatsby? What Gatsby?" is Daisy's illusion of happiness. Hard working and gullible, George Wilson's reason for being is Myrtle.

Fitzgerald's early emphasis on the dead candles places them prominently among the novel's recurring motifs of ashes and dust to convey that the flame of the American Dream was burning low during the Roaring Twenties.


In Chapter V while Gatsby, Daisy and Nick stroll through Gatsby's West Egg mansion, Klipspringer hammers on the piano and warbles (p. 101):

“One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer
The rich get richer and the poor get— children.
In the meantime,
In between time——”

Here Fitzgerald adds satirical song lyrics, giving the feel of a Greek chorus commenting on American society's downward slide.

In her last words of dialog in the novel, Daisy's illusion of happiness with Gatsby evaporated when Tom exposed him as a criminal,[Ch. VII]

The voice begged again to go.
“Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.”
Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage, she had had, were definitely gone.
“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”
She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.
“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”
They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ...ghosts, even from our pity.

And when the violently extinguished remains of Gatsby, Myrtle and Wilson join the ash heaps, the tally of dead dreams caused by decadent behavior climbs to four. History will later confirm with The Great Depression the consequences of the collective moral erosion so artfully presented in The Great Gatsby.

Relegating this masterpiece of social critique to the status of a romantic tragedy does injustice to Fitzgerald's social insight. He couldn't have predicted the Depression, but he clearly sensed something sinister in the prevailing excesses of his "Jazz Age" milieu.

Epitomized in the Sub-prime Mortgage Collapse of 2007, moral decay is a trend played out repeatedly in successive decades of capitalistic boom and bust. "Ain't we got fun?"

Seldom since it was published has the social criticism in Fitzgerald's apex novel been more relevant than today in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its skyrocketing rents, mass evictions and exploding homeless population. Then a gaudy greedy reality show star gets elected President.


What reason could there be for so many in the literary establishment to divert attention from the novel's social satire but a concerted unwillingness to confront the portentous grim reality The Great Gatsby attaches to the vaporous American Dream? In the corrupt behavior of the novel's social elite, Fitzgerald exposed The Dream's vulnerability to the vagaries of character. The message: our lives and destinies are in the hands of people with serious flaws of character.

Casting The Great Gatsby as a latter day Romeo and Juliet is not only critically dishonest; it is a high tech form of censorship. When university endowments are at stake, one wonders whether the Harold Blooms of American have the courage to confront their donor class with aspects of literature that do not conform to a political agenda. It is only a step away from book burning.