This I Believe About Literature

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The Four Words You Missed

Inside our authorized text of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the dedication read, “Once again to Zelda”. The narrative begins here. Forget the first chapter or first sentence of the first chapter, the takeoff has already happened. By the time you get to the first word of The Great Gatsby the story is already in full swing, the only question is, “Did you miss it?” According to the Cultural Poetics lens, this part of writing, before the fiction begins, is where the true soul and meaning of the work can be found. From this perspective, Fitzgerald’s dedication is the doorway to discovering the meaning of his work as we analyze The Great Gatsby and try to understand Fitzgerald’s societal concerns.

Remembering that any text is a social document that responds and reflects a social and historical situation I took it a step further and assumed that the author through his writing both consciously and subconsciously reflects not only the big picture of society before him, but also the diminutive details of his personal life story. The dedication obviously suggests that Zelda, whoever she may be is an important part of Fitzgerald’s personal story and thus he couldn’t help but write her into the novel. This led me to study Fitzgerald’s personal life and specifically his love story with Zelda, in the effort to answer the question of what type of behavior and lifestyle is being promoted and supported in the pages of The Great Gatsby, as well as who is being blamed or praised as the story of the roaring twenties unfolds. Understanding the biographical facts that are relevant to the text is my in to correctly interpreting The Great Gatsby’s message.  

After a lot of research I realized that the relationship and then the marriage of Fitzgerald and Zelda was very complicated, much more complex than I expected it to be. Be that as it may, I also came to realize that all I was looking for where the overlying themes pronounced in their relationship and major events that I could find projections of in The Great Gatsby, for seeing Fitzgerald’s attitude to those themes and incidents in his life would clue me in on the things he was promoting or condemning in his writing.

Using the broadest of strokes, Zelda was the wife and muse of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He first met her in 1918, and was so enamored by her that he redrafted one of his female characters after her in This Side of Paradise. Furthermore, it is said that their first encounter was recorded by Fitzgerald in his description of when Jay Gatsby first met Daisy Buchanan. However, this proves to be just one of many instances in The Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald used semi-autobiographical content in constructing the tragic love story.

In 1920, by sending his mother’s ring to Zelda in the mail, the couple got engaged. Nevertheless in the time following that, Fitzgerald failed at convincing Zelda that he would be able to support her and their lifestyle, leading in turn to her breaking off the engagement. After months of work and struggling to keep himself afloat, which even including repairing car roofs, Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise, which became an immediate financial success and led to the reengagement of the couple, as Zelda took this for proof of a financial stable future in marriage.

I have to say that reading The Great Gatsby for the first time, I didn’t care or wasn’t interested enough to google who Zelda was or why the book was dedicated to her. Yet when I discovered who Zelda was and learned these details of Fitzgerald’s and Zelda’s lives, my interpretation changed completely. The message I began receiving at second glance warped into something opposite. After my first time through the story, I believed that Fitzgerald was condemning the sort of lifestyle he portrayed in Jay Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s lives. How could he possibly stand behind Gatsby who spent all of his life trying to earn a fortune to be with the woman he loves, and behind Gatsby’s attitude towards Daisy, if in the end Gatsby loses everything? How could Fitzgerald possibly justify or sympathize or even understand a woman like Daisy, who welcomes her daughter into the world with, “I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” and who is tossed from one man to another by the winds of financial gain?

He couldn’t. Thus The Great Gatsby couldn’t be reinforcing or even condoning this sort of stance on life. It must be meant to break the illusions the readers would have had of the roaring twenties, to show the lives of the wealthy when they are stripped of the glitz and the bling, to present a descriptive lesson to its audience about the value of life. The tragic undertones are ever present in Gatsby and how anyone could ever make different conclusions, astounded me.

In this analysis of The Great Gatsby, guided by some of the assumptions and methodologies of Cultural Poetics, informed of the complex story of Scott and Zelda, I have come to believe something entirely different about this novel. Learning that Fitzgerald, like Gatsby, had to slave away and wait for the love of his life gave me a perspective on what the author was communicating through his fictional character. Realizing that Fitzgerald, like a combination of Gatsby and Buchanan, was in love and married to a “Daisy” (for the infamous words about the baby girl were a direct quote from Zelda upon the birth of her daughter) affected how harshly I judged Daisy, her relationships and her choices. Understanding that Fitzgerald, like Nick Caraway, was documenting in his writing not only the society around him, but also his own partaking in it, added meaning and made me question my concluding thoughts of what the work was trying to convey, what it was supporting and who it was blaming.

I have come to believe that Fitzgerald is condemning neither Gatsby nor Daisy, not even Tom Buchanan really, but is rather putting to paper the odds he and Zelda had beat by ending up together. It does not reinforce or endorse the models practiced by Gatsby or the Buchanans, because their consequences often follow the tragic pattern described, yet they are not clearly condemned either because they are projections of Fitzgerald’s own life and sort of worked out for him. Although no character is constantly praised throughout the pages of The Great Gatsby, not a single one is condemned either. This is obvious in the amount of passivity and aloofness in the author’s treatment of both Myrtle’s and Gatsby’s death, as well as the Buchanans’ move to Europe and Daisy’s estrangement to Gatsby even in his death.

These are of course are only the shallows of the interpretations of The Great Gatsby. There are many more layers to the story of Zelda and Fitzgerald. There are innumerable nuances and controversies that could add to the analysis of this great literary work. However those described in the pages above are those that have helped me take a fresh view at what I was reading and these are the historical details that morphed my understanding of what and how F. Scott Fitzgerald was communicating in the pages of The Great Gatsby. For this reason, I did not and will not go more in depth into Scott’s and Zelda’s relationship. Thus I believe this conclusion and my current understanding of the literary work is appropriate when taking into account the tools and materials I have been working with. 

"People Never Notice Anything"

People Never Notice Anything, the essay on the psychological state of Holden Caulfield (the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), challenges the fear that many people have towards the great novel and its unsettling character. It highlights the hope in Holden Caulfield’s seemingly lost behavior. Readers of this essay who have had previous experience with The Catcher in the Rye will come away, recognizing their wrongful judgement of Caulfield’s character, and those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading it will have the great opportunity to meet the boy with fresh and unassuming eyes. The essay connects with Caulfield and seeks to understand him in an unconventional way, bringing readers to relate more closely to the troubled boy than they may care to admit. It explores Holden’s inner workings while imploring everyone to always give others the benefit of the doubt. - Micah Wallingford

“People Never Notice Anything” 

            The Catcher in the Rye became an enormous success and an extreme controversy within two weeks after being published. In the first two weeks J.D. Salinger’s novel made it to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Yet in the following years this book had been banned time after time from schools, communities and libraries, accused of “violating codes on ‘excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence’” and cost many teachers their jobs and reputations (Time, “Top 10 Censored Books”). For example, nine years after the novel’s release, a teacher from a school in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was fired for assigning the book as required reading to his eleventh grade class. In Ohio, a petition was started in the community of Columbus to ban the book from all the schools in the area, because the book was labeled as “antiwhite” (Time, “Top 10 Censored Books”). Several other interesting cases involved a petition to remove The Catcher in the Rye from the required reading list in 1993, in a school district in California, because it is “centered around negative activity”. And another instance in South Carolina, when two school board members banned the book from certain district schools because it “is a filthy, filthy book” (Bookczuk, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”). There have also been individual petitions started by parents against The Catcher in the Rye. In 2004, in Pennsylvania, a mother presented at a school board meeting a signed petition to protest the assigning of Salinger’s novel. The mother, Cydney Schuch, said that she “would prefer that ‘students read about a lifestyle that exemplified better morals and values’” (Lowe, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”).

Having read The Catcher in the Rye, I have inevitably joined the conversation about the novel and chosen a side in this heated debate. As I flipped through the pages and followed Holden through the streets of New York City, I savored the narrative, the simple and honest language and thoughts of a complex and distinctive young man. I enjoyed the novel greatly and found myself relating to Holden Caulfield, which was very surprising to me and perhaps to some of those who know me. Having realized the heated debate over The Catcher in the Rye that has been taking place for years now, I decided to analyze why I liked this novel so immensely. I searched within myself to see where and why I could relate to Holden. Reading Holden say, “People never notice anything” (Salinger, 5) when talking about himself and his age, I felt challenged to take a closer look at the main character himself, trying to peel back the layers and getting beyond his six foot stature and “bad boy” tag.

Holden Caulfield is a peculiar young man, with a very long and grim life story for his age of sixteen. When he was younger, he first handedly experienced loss and death with the passing of his younger brother Allie, he the also witnessed the suicide of a classmate of his and throughout most of the novel his parents seem pretty distant and aloof.

When we meet him he has just flunked out of the fourth boarding school in a row, gets in a fight with his roommate and leaves his school three days early. Then on a train he substantially lies to the mother of one of the boys attending his ex-school, telling her great stories about her rather grey son. When in the hotel he calls a stripper in hopes that she will agree to have sex with him although eventually he gets annoyed with the call and hangs up. However this is not the last of his escapades. He agrees to see a prostitute and promises to pay five bucks if she comes to his room, yet this time too he prefers having a conversation with the girl. Holden drinks a lot of alcohol throughout the time he is alone in the city, getting very drunk at one point.

All in all, these events point to the disturbed state of Holden’s mind. The rage he flies into when beating his roommate is a clear indication that there is something in his subconscious being suppressed and had been for a while and the moment when it broke free was the moment he attacked his roommate. Thinking back to the exposure he has had with violence and death, there are many possible theories as to what has been suppressed over the years; however none of the hypothesis point to anything healthy. His dishonesty with the mother of one the boys he knew from school suggests the fact that he is incapable of being truthful. The false emotion he expresses when telling these fictitious stories, in turn, suggest he lacks the facility for sincerity. The several attempts at having sex with random women, as well as his multiple discussions of sex and intimacy throughout the book, definitely point to the fact that Holden is in some way unfulfilled. It could be that he is just craving a connection with people, which he lost with the death of his brother and never regained as a result of his parent’s aloofness. The alcohol and drunkenness point to deep pain and confusion within Holden, which has obviously not been dealt with, thus his need to numb it with alcohol. His violent outburst, his fixation with the subject of sexuality and sexual intimacy and the excessive consumption of alcohol all add up to a very obvious verdict- Holden is a lost cause, deeply disturbed, perverted, an alcoholic with a moral compass totally off north.

However I believe this verdict would be completely wrong and there are many instances throughout the book that would support this different reading of Holden and whatever is brewing inside him. The fact that he removes himself from the situation in which he lost control and got violent, points to some sort of understanding of the situation and an understanding of himself. The fictitious stories he tells on the train, suggest that he is aware of the social norms that dictate one shouldn’t insult a child to the parent’s face and the social conduct acceptable in such an encounter with an older woman, especially a mother, because “Mothers are all slightly insane.” (Salinger, 30) The fact that he does not go through with his plan in either case with the women, in the end preferring to have a conversation with the prostitute, although still paying her for his time suggests his moral compass is not as far off north as all his other actions would suggest. Even the alcohol would point to the fact that he is hurting and that is a result of his feeling, not shutting down or shutting people out, he allows himself to feel. He is not numb to the pain and turmoil within him and, although only through alcohol acknowledges, the strife and chaos within. When seen in this light the listed above instances suggest that although hurt and confused, Holden is by no stretch of the imagination a lost cause; rather, he is doing pretty well. This “pretty well” is taking into account where he came from, what he has been through, and the fact that although he has had some guidance, much of life he had to figure out himself. I wish I could believe I could have done as well as Holden if I had started from his situation.

Another point worthy of attention when concerning the persona of Holden and his inner workings is the idea of “catcher in the rye” itself. Holden tells his younger sister, whom he loves dearly, that if he could be anything and could do anything he would like to be a person that stands in the rye and catches children as they run and fall of the cliff.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” (Salinger, 93)

First of all, I would like to note that this dream, this idea of being there to help out kids when they need him most is one of the noblest ideas ever. The fact that this is a sixteen year old’s dream is even more notable. What amazes me the most is that Holden has this dream of “catching children” even though throughout his life, his sixteen years, there were very few people that were willing to “catch” him. Rather it seems like most adults let Holden fall, time after time. Neither his parents nor teachers seem to be there to break his fall. The adults in Holden’s life primarily act as “the observer in the rye” and “the judger in the rye.”

Holden believes this idea of him being “the catcher in the rye” is something he gets from a poem by Robert Burns, however his sister tells Holden that Burns never wrote about any “catcher in the rye” and Holden is misremembering a line from the poem, “if a body meet a body, coming through the rye.” Holden remembers the poem as saying, “if a body catch a body, coming through the rye,” which suggests that “the catcher in the rye” is a product of his own imagination. Perhaps this could be something like a Freudian slip, just in his head, not a spoken one. This in turn would suggest that Holden wishes, deep inside, that there would be someone ready to catch children when they are falling, perhaps because he saw his classmate jump out of a window and commit suicide without anyone catching him, or perhaps because he feels like he himself is in free fall ever since his brother Allie died and no one is there to break Holden’s fall.       
            If we are to add up all the points made above I believe there is more to be said about the novel than it being “a filthy, filthy book” (Bookczuk, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”). Sure there is swearing and there is alcohol and a lot of sexual references, yet they are all true to the state of a young man who, although lost, injured and traumatized, is in search of himself, hungry for a purpose and striving to save and serve others. My deeper examination of Holden in the pages above, my analysis of his actions and words points to the fact that, although he is broken and confused, he is still emotionally developed, socially aware and his moral compass, though lapses do happen, still points north.