A Buddhist's Analysis of "The Great Gatsby" : While the Still Eyes of the Witness Watch

by Tom Armstrong, editor of Zen Unbound
©2002-2004 Tom Armstrong

“My book is wonderful, so is the air + the sea.” – FSF, letter to Edmund Wilson, summer 1924

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" may seem to be an odd book to analyze in a Buddhist online magazine. There is no meditation, nor even a climactic martial arts battle. And the character Jay Gatsby isn't great because he awakens to the meaning of life. Too, unlike a contemporaneous novel, James Hilton's "Lost Horizon," no one crashlands in ersatz Tibet.

Instead, on a surface level, "Gatsby" is about the opulently rich and their wild, boozy parties. It's about adultery and a chain of events that lead to three deaths. Not the usual fodder to wax polemic on Buddhism, it's more like a plotline to a weekday afternoon soap opera. But here's the thing: "Gatsby" is textured and chock-full of tasty nuggets, written by 28-year-old Fitzgerald at the time when he was brimming with special wisdom and was able to organize complex structure. Strewn through his elaborate concoction, written in lyric prose that came to be known as Fitzgerald's "high style," are touchstones for any Buddhist wayfarer.

Fitzgerald thought "Gatsby" was wonderful, "something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." When critics generally panned his effort upon its release in 1925, he thought none of them understood. An unread failure in its own day, the short book was resurrected when Fitzgerald's career was revisited by critics after his death at age 44 in 1940. At the end of the Twentieth Century, four prestigious literary groups independently polled scholars, writers and critics to amass rankings of the top novel written in the century. "The Great Gatsby" was the consensus Number One American novel – which calibrates with the wild claim Fitzgerald made for it days before sending the final draft to this editor. "I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written," said the letter, dated August 27, 1924, to Max Perkins.

THE WITNESS

A central symbol in the novel is a huge billboard advertising the services of an oculist, Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. It is in the borough of Queens "…above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it." The billboard is high overhead, near intersecting roads, visible from the train that connects Long Island to New York City and near the service station/garage where George Wilson toils and lives upstairs with his wife, Myrtle – who near the end of the book is killed in the street, run over by Daisy driving Gatsby's car. Writes Fitzgerald, "The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – his irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. … [H]is eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground."

Analysts of the book offer two main explanations for what the symbol represents. One begins by declaring that Eckleburg's first and middle initials stand for Thomas Jefferson. The basis for this is derived from an understanding of the novel as a sweeping exploration of America. After it was too late to make the change, Fitzgerald wanted to give his book the terrible title "Under the Red, White and Blue" – which would in part be in homage to Fitzgerald's ancestor after whom he was named, Francis Scott Key, the lyricist of the National Anthem. Indeed, there is a gallantly streaming sweep to the novel with its many characters having occupations and lifestyles representative of Jazz Age America.

The most-common explanation for the billboard is that it represents the Christian God. Before George Wilson sets off to avenge the death of his wife, he indicates to a friend that the billboard eyes represent God to him. "God sees everything," says distraught Wilson. "That's an advertisement," his friend says, correcting him. If we are to accept the friend as being more levelheaded than Wilson – and I certainly think that we are – then a proper understanding is that at this point in the novel Fitzgerald is directly telling us not to take up an understanding of the billboard as symbolizing an ever-watching God.

Assuredly, the eyes represent God to George Wilson, but, spurred on by the eyes, his vengeance for the death of his wife results in him killing an innocent man. A pretty lousy God, this billboard! Surely, the advertisement means something else in the context of the book as a whole.

Years before Fitzgerald wrote "Gatsby," he wrote his longest, best and most-unusual short story, a wonderful fantasy called "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." He had difficulty selling it, however, because the major magazines thought it bordered on blasphemy. Fitzgerald, the borderline blasphemer, was not given to injecting theistic material into his writing. Fitzgerald had a clear interest in themes where human conduct/misconduct were observed, and where ethical persons were faced with dealing with charming unethical persons. But while there were religious elements to many of his short stories, Fitzgerald was not personally an observant Christian -- nor were there pious themes to the hundreds of short stories he wrote, or his handful of novels.

The big clue to the meaning of the billboard can be found in the novel's second chapter when Nick, the narrator of the story and its protagonist, is at the party in Myrtle's apartment, looking out the window:

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park though 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, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

The yellow windows, like Dr. Eckleburg's yellow spectacles, are seen from a street below. Nick, the reader's cogent guide, a little tipsy, ensnarled in the petty dramas at Myrtle's party (as if with ropes) identifies himself with others – swaps himself with others – in the infinitely diverse dance of life. Here, Nick/Fitzgerald approaches reaching a condition of "seeing the vista," to use the phrase of Seiju Bob Mammoser – except that Nick/Fitzgerald acts as a witness, not in fully non-selfconscious detachment from the activity.

Insightful are these words from a biography posted at the website of Brandeis University: “… Fitzgerald had the gift of double vision. Like Walt Whitman or his own Nick Carraway, he was simultaneously within and without, at once immersed in his times and able to view them and himself with striking objectivity. This rare ability, along with this rhetorical brilliance, has established Fitzgerald as one of the major novelists and story writers of the twentieth century.” Of course, what this website's short biography calls “double vision” is a sibling of transcendent insight, an ability to see oneself in everybody else and everybody else within oneself. It is [to use a familiar Buddhist metaphor] to see the moon reflected in a hundred dewdrops. It is interesting that critics/interpreters of the novel do something slavishly that is wrong: They follow Fitzgerald's seeming lead and identify the billboard eyes as belonging to Dr. Eckleburg, when, in fact, we know it is the doctor's billboard, with a surreal (noseless) depiction of a patient of his (not the doctor, himself) in glasses. Confusion of identity is a part of the novel that underscores its true theme: The within and without; the ability of be both the watcher and the watched – the rapture (and shock, sometimes) of being both yourself and any other person. Indeed, it is the answer to the Firesign Theatre ditty, “How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?”

With an understanding of the billboard as a symbol of the high spiritual state of Being the Witness, it explains the character of Owl Eyes, so identified because of his large glasses. An owl in a watchful nocturnal bird that sits high and still in a tree and is identified with intelligence. This character is, I think, clearly meant to be a double for the billboard – or, perhaps, the billboard incarnate.

At first meeting, when Nick finds Owl Eyes in the library – drunk, but sobering up from an encounter with wonderment – his continence is not unlike Nick's at Myrtle's party. From being at the Gatsby party for just an hour, Owl Eyes has gained great insight into Gatsby, despite not having met him. He proclaims Gatsby “a regular Belasco” [Belasco was a producer of lavish Broadway shows in the 20s.] when he finds the books in the library to be real, but uncut. [Uncut means that pages haven't been separated. That is, the books are new but have never been opened.] The library – and, by extrapolation, the party and estate – are an elaborate prop. And yet, the discovery isn't derided as fakery; it is observed as being fakery and it is admired. Owl Eyes mutters “if one [book] was removed, the whole library was liable to collapse.” Owl Eyes is experiencing the epiphanous insight that Nick had had: the simultaneous experience of enchantment and repugnance toward human secrecy and life's endless variety.

By “human secrecy” I think Fitzgerald means the cocktail of shame and deception. It is from this libation that the elaborate concoctions of 'self' stir to life separating each of us from others.

Owl Eyes reappears when Gatsby is showing his mansion to Daisy. Nick, who tags along, reports that he believes he hears the owl-eyed man “break into ghostly laughter.” We may suppose that Owl Eyes appreciates Gatsby's success with his prop home in delighting his beloved Daisy. Owl Eyes is a ghostly apparition, like the noseless face on the billboard.

Owl Eyes is last heard from as the unexpected, only attendee other than Nick at Gatsby's funeral. “The poor son-of-a-bitch,” is his comment.

It may be that Owl Eyes is meant to BE Nick, in Witness mode. For it is only Nick with whom Owl Eyes interacts.

Fitzgerald had profound sympathy for all his characters and it is his compassion, something you find as well in the works of Dickens, Irving and Forster, that raises him to greatness and separates him from the pack of authors who write with moral urgency about that old bugaboo, the battle between good and evil and from within the restricted confines of a self-interested protagonist's one pair of eyes.

In an early biography, Fitzgerald is quoted as having said to his secretary, “I take people to me and change my conception of them and then write them out again. My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even my feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds.”

While Fitzgerald cannot have been “empty of self” in the full-throttle Buddhist sense, a careful reading of “Gatsby” indicates that, with his fiction, he moved beyond a simple projection of his identity. Jy Din Shakya explains the difference in his online article “Empty Cloud: the Teaching of Xu Yun”:

We have all heard about a parent, or friend, or lover who claims to be completely unselfish in his love for another. A husband will say, “I kept nothing for myself. I gave everything to her, my wife.” This man is not empty. He has merely projected a part of his identity upon another person.

A person who is truly empty possesses nothing, not even a consciousness of self. His interests lie not with his own needs and desires, for indeed, he is unaware of any such considerations, but only with the welfare of others. He does not evaluate people as being likable or unlikable, worthy or unworthy, or as useful or useless. He neither appreciates nor depreciates anyone. He simply understands that the Great Buddha Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light and Goodness, dwells within every human being, and it is in the interest of this Buddha Self that he invests himself.

A bizarre sequence at the end of Chapter 2, that puzzles many a reader, can perhaps be explained only from an understanding of Fitzgerald's ability to get into the character of others. Chester McKee is the bad photographer at Myrtle's party who is described as “a pale feminine man” who has a spot of shaving cream on his face. In all ways the man is set up as someone to avoid, particularly for a reader in the homophobic 1920s. But after Nick has his “within and without” experience looking out Myrtle's window, he walks over and wipes the lather from the sleeping man's cheek and soon afterward leaves the party with McKee.

I think we may only surmise from the last paragraphs in the chapter that Nick then had a sexual encounter with Chester McKee in his apartment, immediately below Myrtle's. It can only be a gay-sex reference when, in quick sentences, Nick takes his hat from the chandelier and Chester distractedly touches the elevator boy's lever. Next, Nick is standing next to the bed with Chester “clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” In the last paragraph, Nick is still in New York, awaiting a Long Island train, half asleep in Pennsylvania Station at four in the morning.

I don't think that we are to conclude that Nick is gay (as Truman Capote did when he wrote his rejected screenplay for the 1975 film of “The Great Gatsby”); rather, we are to understand that Nick can fully understand and be sympathetic with anyone no matter how different that person is from himself. This is an echo of what Nick says of himself in the novel's opening pages: “… I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. … Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still afraid of missing something if a forget that …”

FITZGERALD'S LOVE FOR THE CHARACTERS

It is easy to approach the novel with a misapprehension of the characters as all being flawed or pitiful. The shorthand is that Gatsby's a gangster; Daisy's flighty; Tom's a brute; and Jordan's a manly cheater. The Hollywood movies made from the book compound the problem, erring in presenting the characters foremost as gruff, spoiled, shallow and small – as if Nick was our guide Virgil leading us through a Dantean purgatory.

But the characters, as seen with wavering reliability through Nick's eyes, are far from despicable.

When we learn of Tom, he has a “supercilious manner,” “arrogant eyes” and “a cruel body,” but immediately after Tom concludes a sentence with words to Nick “… just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are,” Nick's narration reads “… I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.” [I think it is important to recognize here, and throughout the book, that Nick is keenly aware of others' need to be liked and that Nick's approval is important to all the characters in how they feel about themselves.]

Daisy first meets Nick with “an absurd, charming little laugh” and the words that suit her habit, which we will come to know, of gushing overstatement: “I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.” While Nick hints that Daisy's manner may be a crafty act, it seems more likely that he is just resistant to her mannered but genuinely felt love for others, the surface of a coping strategy to which she is unaware, to help her with the frequent inappropriate things she does and the non-sequitors in her conversations which suggest she is not very intelligent, but may just mean her thoughts and interests wander.

In his earlier novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and the Damned,” the works were character driven. The high octane of Fitzgerald's way with words fueled the reader through the stories. Accepting advise of other novelists was instrumental in a change in how Fitzgerald approached his craft, which is demonstrated in novel number three, “The Great Gatsby.”

It is important first to understand what F. Scott Fitzgerald was like as a man and how different he was dealing with his art than the narrow portrayal of him as a careless alcoholic, that comes mostly from autobiographical articles he wrote for Esquire, later collectively called “The Crack-Up.” I think that anyone who carefully reads letters of his that have been published will instantly find Fitzgerald lovable, as I did. It is almost charming to find that this man who is the supreme magician at crafting insightful phrases is also an incompetent speller. Invariably, he spells “receive” in the manner of an average fourth grader – recieve – and the last name of his pal and sometimes-rival Ernest Hemingway with two m's. Yet, Fitzgerald's brilliance is ever evident and his words glow with genuineness of character and courtesy. In communications with his editor and in letters with the institute where his wife received psychiatric care, Fitzgerald is a patient problem solver, thoughtful and forthcoming. I think that Fitzgerald's artistic insight is born of forgivingness and understanding of human flaws and frailty – lessons learned from his own many problems – while also having a high appreciation of others' skills or insightfulness. Lovingkindness and deep compassion were present in the man and it is very evident in his work if you blot from your mind much of Fitzgerald's reputation.

SUFFERING EXAMINED: DAISY AND TOM

In “The Great Gatsby,” there is certainly suffering. All the characters suffer rather mightily. But is not the usual trail of crocodile tears that you see in typical novels – a ready devise to drive the plot onward. Here, the suffering of the characters is explored, nobly.

When we first meet Daisy Buchanan, her little finger has been hurt. It's a minor injury, but it presents her in contrast to her “big, hulking physical specimen” of a husband, Tom. [It is ingenious how Tom is described by both Nick and Daisy in ways that are superficially highly critical, but leave the impression of him being strong and handsome, partially forgiving his quick-tempered brutishness.]

Daisy complaint “Look! … I hurt it,” which quickly becomes “You did it, Tom. … I know you didn't mean to, but you did do it.” Tells us a lot about Daisy's delicacy and implicates Tom for carelessness, if not meanness. Daisy wants always to be nice. [She tells Nick that he reminds her “of a rose – an absolute rose”; a comparison he rejects brusquely with these narrative words: “This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.”] Always in the book, her expressions and thoughtfulness are delightful, passing sometimes into the territory of absurdity – something that the readers notice, but the other characters do as well. But like a flower that would instantly wilt out of the greenhouse, Daisy is in constant need of protection – from a man, and the security of an undiminishable supply of money. [Nick with his usually rosy disposition lives happily outside the Pleasure Dome of Big Bucks.]

Think of Daisy as being like Siddhartha was in his father's compound. Siddhartha was driven to know the truth and willingly took on burdens of discomfort; he left the compound as a young man. Daisy has no interest in truth, and no tolerance for the pain and experience of empathy that truth-seekers (like Nick) will necessarily quickly encounter. Delusion is her shield, her warm fur coat; but this should not be taken to mean that we must view her as a bad person. Delusion is Daisy's coping strategy. She doesn't follow the threads of conversations easily, but she tries (and succeeds!) at being delightful and interesting, something Jay Gatsby best appreciates.

It is important to know that Daisy is based on Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda. Daisy's maiden name, Fay, is the same as Zelda's mother's maiden name. An article in New York Times Magazine, by Peter D. Kramer, titled “How Crazy was Zelda?” offers an analysis of Zelda that is, too, a good description of Daisy:

Zelda's spending sprees, her “passionate love of life” and intense social relationships, her melancholic response to disappointment … point toward a mood disorder, as does the alternation between frank psychosis and a sparkling, provocative personality.

Tom Buchanan, like his wife Daisy, has the knack of knowing how to act in the cocoon of Old Money. Fitzgerald describes with surreal bravado the “elaborate” Buchanan home as Nick first sees it: “ … a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon …” [All this is in contrast to the much larger mansion of Jay Gatsby, whose wealth is not “Old.” His mansion, “a colossal affair,” is described a few paragraphs earlier in staid terms nearly suitable for a Realtor's ad.]

But Tom is unhappy; he is dissatisfied. Nick claims insight into his heart, and knows that he will “drift on forever seeking … the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” This perceived restlessness is made evident when Nick tags along with Tom to a makeshift party at the New York City apartment Tom provides for his mistress, Myrtle. There, Tom and Myrtle end up getting into a fight where in an act that is by turns abusive and careless, Tom breaks Myrtle's nose.

It is easy to dislike Tom and identify him as the villain of the book. And with his wealth, physical strength, good looks, and ease at attracting women, it is perhaps hard to sympathize with the unhappiness and dissatisfaction that Nick identifies in him. But Tom clearly is trapped and, despite all his means, cannot find his way to being satisfied.

Dissatisfaction with life is, however, something well known to Buddhists; it's the First Noble Truth. That “way out” Tom may need might be in identifying with others, but Tom is forever the victor in any confrontation with anyone: Winning out over Gatsby in marrying Daisy and with Daisy's decision to stay with him and not run off with Gatsby. And, ultimately, Tom is passively responsible for Gatsby's death -- with Daisy's acquiescence -- thus eliminating his rival.

To Tom, others are tools for his ends; he sees others as many children do. He is blocked in his spiritual development by the very success he has over others. And for that, despite everything, he should have our sympathy.

There is, too, an important additional reason why Daisy should have our sympathy that is revealed in a fleeting clue. In the pivotal middle chapter in the book, Nick, at Gatsby's behest, has Daisy come to his small house where she is to be surprised by the presence of Gatsby, her lover before her marriage to Tom. In words of greeting that Nick and Daisy share before entering the house, Daisy asks, playfully, “… why did I have to come alone?” Nick, in his supercilious manner, saying one of several things Daisy (and in this case, likely, any reader, too) is not meant to understand, responds “That's the secret of Castle Rackrent.”

Castle Rackrent may have been known to many of the well educated and more-readerly folks of 1925, when “The Great Gatsby” was first published, but it was an obscure reference then and is more alien to us today. You would have to have a scholastic interest in 18th Century English literature or be a particularly knowledgeable feminist to know about “Castle Rackrent,” – a novel written secretly by Maria Edgeworth, about the mistreatment of women in patriarchal society. In the Edgeworth novel, two women are separately imprisoned in castles – a circumstance that reverberates in “Gatsby” by Daisy being dominated by Tom, and Myrtle 'kept' in an apartment Tom pays for. Myrtle is also locked up by her husband, George, over their garage near the end of the book.

It is clear from the tortured reference to Castle Rackrent in “Gatsby” that Nick (i.e., Fitzgerald) is especially aware of and sympathetic with the subjugated status of women, even while he maintains his fidelity with the men, in opposition to Daisy's and Myrtle's best interests. But, too, what has been unnoted, is that Edgeworth had a purpose in her novel that I think Fitzgerald shared in his – which is a keen interest in revealing the reality of other people. In the preface to her book, Edgeworth uses the word “secret” in reference to people's inner lives. She wrote, “We cannot judge … from their actions …; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover [people's] real characters.” Is this line Nick/Fitzgerald's “secret of Castle Rackrent?”

What is most odd about “The Great Gatsby” are its many careless conversations and half-finished sentences. Editors and critics over the years have wrestled with what Fitzgerald wrote, changing sentences and criticizing details. “Gatsby” has generated a bonanza of speculation about many sentences, and there are debates about what corrections in the text should be made [to correct direct errors by Fitzgerald, who could be clumsy with details] or not made [since the 'errors' may be intentional to reveal characters' flaws, insights and personalities]. Indeed, the text of “The Great Gatsby” has been re-edited many times to suit the interpretations of different editors.

I think that the critics fail to appreciate the full extent to which “Gatsby” was sloppy intentionally – to meet the Edgeworth edict of discovering character with careless conversations and half-finished sentences. Fitzgerald knew himself to be a unique and fascinating conglomerate of wonderful and weird qualities and I think each of his characters were meant to be revealed as unique and fascinating conglomerates, as well – and not to be thought of as being placed on a simple spectrum of Good vs. Bad.