On finally understanding "The Great Gatsby"

Like many of us, I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s alleged Great American Novel The Great Gatsby in high school. Though if we’re being transparent, “read” is a strong word: I skimmed that thing like a sailboat. We had the requisite discussions about the book’s place in history, its thematic significance—all the hits. Again, I didn’t participate in any of these discussions because I barely looked at the thing, but I distinctly remember a lot of analysis regarding social class, how Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator, the color of Jay Gatsby’s car, and how Fitzgerald’s biography played into the story. I hated it.

I’m not going to age myself by saying how long ago that was, but an undisclosed amount of years later, I saw that Gatsby was finally entering the public domain. Realizing that we were about to be swamped with adaptations1 and that I needed to do some homework if I wanted to keep up with the culture, along with coming across some analyses that put the book in a new light for me, I finally got around to rereading it. And I was so, so wrong about this “boring school assignment.” Maybe my high school brain wasn’t quite equipped to actually engage with the material, or maybe I was just super overwhelmed because junior year was notorious for throttling students at my school, but reading this thing for real was a revelation. It’s truly amazing just how much I missed that first time; from the resplendent prose to the exquisite insults2 to the evidence that Nick probably wears a hat of someone else’s choosing,3 this book is a full-course meal that I devoured in two sittings.

In my enlightened state, I can now say that I finally understand the true essence of Gatsby. If you ask someone what it’s about, they’ll probably say something along the lines of how the American Dream is a lie, how the upper strata of society are shielded from the consequences of their actions, how much of a vibe the Roaring Twenties were, or how some people just can’t let go of the past. But the problem with all of these answers is that they’re wrong. At its core, The Great Gatsby is about having neighbors that won’t shut the fuck up.

Here’s a refresher for those who haven’t read the book since high school: Nick Carraway moves to the West Egg, a relatively wealthy area of Long Island, where he neighbors a mysterious mansion owner, Jay Gatsby, who keeps throwing ragers every weekend to tempt his lover Daisy Buchanan (married to Tom Buchanan) over to his estate. According to Nick, the “whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums” arrives by 7 PM, and they don’t stop until the wee hours of the morning. At the first of these parties Nick attends, it’s noted that the band left sometime between 2 and 3 AM. Near the end of this particular jamboree, someone crashes their car into a wall which results in a “crescendo” of “caterwauling horns” sometime past 3 AM. This is presumably not an uncommon occurrence given how much alcohol is flowing every weekend.

Good luck trying to sleep with your neighbors going that crazy all the time. If Gatsby’s parties truly are a weekly nuisance, Nick is probably accumulating a lot of sleep debt throughout the course of the novel. One study suggested that it takes 4 days to recover just an hour of lost sleep, and up to 9 days to fully recover—and Gatsby is raging every 7 days. For some quick back of the envelope math4, Nick moves to the West Egg in the spring or early summer of 1922, let’s say first week of June. Gatsby finally stops his parties in late July or early August after he’s secured Daisy’s attention, let’s say first week of August. We don’t know Nick’s exact sleep schedule, but let’s assume, on the conservative side, that he incurs two hours of sleep debt per weekend. If you recover one hour every 4 days, he’s ending every week with .25 hours left to pay off. That’s about 9 weeks of accumulating sleep debt, so by the time Gatsby’s affair with Daisy really takes off and the parties stop, Nick has incurred more than two hours of collected sleep debt, meaning that he’s basically been undersleeping by a solid amount for 90% of the book.

This matters because, as I assume a lot of people know, sleep deprivation can impact one’s mood, decision-making skills, and moral judgment—all of which Nick could seriously use some help with. He acts rude and judgmental in the book despite his best attempts to convince us otherwise, he’s complicit in engineering and covering up his cousin’s extramarital affair, and he’s probably even involved in an affair himself. Most of the actions that elucidate Nick’s less-than-honorable character and lead to Gatsby’s bloody end occur during this period of constant revelry from next door.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Nick would be a good person or that he’d be completely blameless if he got some actual shut-eye over the weekends. Nick’s most directly deadly decision—the decision not to tell Gatsby that someone is very angry at him for allegedly running over his wife with a car and that he should probably beef up his security—comes after the parties have stopped and the Egg has quieted down. He’s writing this book after leaving the Egg as well, and just about every page drips with judgment. Nick is a little bitch on a full 8 hours, don’t get me wrong.

Still, I’m positive that all those ragers didn’t help. It’s within the realm of possibility that Daisy and Gatsby never would have reunited had Nick not gotten involved by arranging their first meeting—once again, a decision made during a period where it’s reasonable to think his cognitive skills might be impaired. Then that blowup in New York City where Tom realizes that Daisy is having an affair wouldn’t have happened, so then Daisy running over Tom’s mistress (pot, meet kettle) Myrtle in Gatsby’s car on the way back wouldn’t have happened, and Myrtle’s husband wouldn’t have tracked down Gatsby and shot him in the pool. Sure, this is a long chain of cause-and-effect that would be difficult to predict in its entirety. That said, it’s not difficult to predict that something bad, maybe even deadly, could come out of an affair in which the cuckolded husband could snap someone in half. But because Nick can’t see the obvious warning signs, the plot barrels ahead, and here we all are.

After the fallout of the main plot has settled, there is one more aspect that my reading of the text makes much clearer: it’s a lot easier to believe that Nick actually did disapprove of Gatsby when he was alive. It’s difficult to take Nick at his word on pretty much anything, given how he spends so much time trying to convince us he’s trustworthy. But while a common interpretation is that Nick is lying about disapproving of Gatsby because of how he’s lionized so much throughout the book and how much Nick helped him out, remember that this book is written after Gatsby has been shot and killed. Maybe the best explanation is that Nick has come to admire Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” amid his own growing cynicism over the tragedy he’s seen (and participated in). Or maybe it’s that Nick has warmed up to Gatsby after he’s literally unable to make more noise on the weekends.5 

The Great Gatsby’s reputation as a supremely intelligent meditation on the soul of our country and the lives of the wealthy in the Roaring Twenties might be earned in some people’s eyes. But I think that hype builds up an aura of inaccessibility around the novel. I thought I didn’t care about all of that, so I didn’t care about Gatsby. What reading Gatsby now proves, however, is that humans as a whole haven’t really changed all that much in the century that’s passed between when the book is set and now. The highest echelons of society remain insulated from the mess they make, the American Dream remains a fiction to most who pursue its alluring glow, and noisy neighbors will outlive the heat death of the universe. Unless you directly contribute to their demise.