In this passage, Nick focuses on his memories of West Egg, the location of Gatsby's home, and describes the area as dreamlike and uncanny. El Greco painted with an odd, elongated perspective: his paintings contain some of the sense of distortion present in a dream. To Nick, the El Greco-like West Egg haunts both his dreams and his waking memories in an uncanny manner: "off," unhomelike, odd. His West End, significantly, is crowded with houses--"conventional"...
In this passage, Nick focuses on his memories of West Egg, the location of Gatsby's home, and describes the area as dreamlike and uncanny. El Greco painted with an odd, elongated perspective: his paintings contain some of the sense of distortion present in a dream. To Nick, the El Greco-like West Egg haunts both his dreams and his waking memories in an uncanny manner: "off," unhomelike, odd. His West End, significantly, is crowded with houses--"conventional" homes--but they are also "grotesque."
The uncanny is associated with death: the corpse is the figure of both what is human and non-human at the same, for we know the corpse was once a person. It is both still a person and yet is nothing like a living, moving, breathing human being: it repels us. Significantly, a corpselike figure of a woman stands at the center of this passage. She is drunk, not dead, but the imagery is repeatedly that of death: she is carried by four "solemn men" in "dress suits" on a stretcher, she is dressed in white and her hand, dangling over one side sparkles "cold" with jewels. "Gravely" the men turn towards the wrong house. Her uncanniness and the unhomelike quality of West Egg are emphasized by her anonymity. Nobody knows her name and nobody cares. West Egg remains an eery dream.
In contrast, the midwest represents normalcy. It is genuinely homelike, a place of "street lamps" and "sleigh bells," "holly leaves" and "lighted windows:" an idyllic all-American Christmasy scene. Nick says, "I am part of that."
Oddly, for all his genuine sympathy for Gatsby, and his revulsion towards Tom, Daisy and Jordan, it is not their upper-crust East Egg that haunts his dreams with a sense of distortion or nightmare. In fact, he doesn't mention East Egg specifically at all.
The El Greco passage thus suggests that Nick is, at least subconsciously, as uncomfortable with the nouveau riche Gatsby world as Tom and Daisy are. He plucks Gatsby out of it, to group him with Tom, Daisy, Jordan and himself as westerners out of place in the East, but he seems to have developed a conventional midwesterners suspicion of the new.
No comments:
Post a Comment