Blog
October 13th 2008
The power of the ellipses…
We just read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the American Lit. class I’m taking. I’d read it in high school, but reading it again - after studying quite a bit more literature - was quite rewarding and allowed for different interpretations to arise.
One of the most interesting interpretations that a classmate brought to our attention was the possible homosexuality of Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator.
In particular, Chapter 2 reads:
‘Come to lunch some day,’ he suggested, as we groaned down the elevator.
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Keep your hands off the lever,’ snapped the elevator boy.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mr. McKee with dignity, ‘I didn’t know I was touching it.’
‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll be glad to.’
...I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
‘Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge…’
Then I was lying half asleep in the lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.
My professor explained that in the 1920s, an invitation to come to lunch or to come up to look at artwork or photographs was a pick-up line akin to asking someone if they wanted to do the horizontal mumbo nowadays. The “keep your hands off the lever” comment would probably have driven the point home.
The ellipses are also interesting. Fitzgerald must have used them purposely to add to the hazy, lazy feeling of the day. However, their placement allows for some confusion surrounding how much time and what exactly has happened since Carraway agreed to go to lunch and when we hear that he is standing beside McKee’s bed and McKee is sitting between the sheets in his underwear. Regardless, it sounds like a good party.
Another interesting point is the fact that Jordan Baker is written as a fairly attractive character who is somewhat interested in Carraway, and yet our narrator is not really attracted to her.
To further this point, apparently both Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker were written as homosexual characters by Truman Capote in his screenplay adaptation of The Great Gatsby in the 1970s. However Paramount rejected Capote’s interpretation of the novel, instead opting for Francis Ford Coppola’s more traditional version for the film, which was released in 1974.
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