Some years ago, I joined a weight-loss program with a couple of friends. Mainly, I wanted to spend time with them and support their efforts. But I figured I could benefit from losing a few pounds too. To stay within the stingy allotment of daily food points the program allowed, I gave up three of my favorite things: Chinese buffets, ice cream, and cream in my coffee. It was hard at first. I wasn’t used to going hungry—ever—and doing so made me cranky. So to keep hunger at bay, I filled up on more healthful foods. (Fortunately, I like all food, even the healthy stuff.)
Then, a few months into these changed habits, an odd thing happened. One evening, as usual, hunger struck. Immediately, I was seized by a craving . . . for grapes. Grapes! Not lo mein, not gummy bears, not ice cream—but grapes. I actually desired more than anything else a food that was good for me. It seemed like a miracle. But it wasn’t. In changing my habits, I had developed (at least in this one area) the virtue of temperance.
Temperance is unique among the virtues. Unlike other virtues that are revealed under pressure, temperance is “an ordinary, humble virtue, to be practiced on a regular rather than an exceptional basis.” It “is a virtue for all times but is all the more necessary when times are good.”1 It is also unlike the other virtues in centering not on actions but on desires. Since we desire what is pleasurable, temperance is “the virtue that inclines us to desire and enjoy pleasures well.”2 It helps us to desire pleasures in a reasonable manner,3 desiring them neither too much nor too little, the virtuous mean between the vices of self-indulgence and insensibility.4
For Aristotle temperance concerned the physical appetites we share with animals: the desires for food, drink, and sex.5 For both humans and animals, these appetites are necessary to perpetuate life (whether individually or as a species), but they are also the source of pleasure. The Catholic Church, following Aristotle’s understanding, teaches that temperance “ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable,” but expands the role of temperance as governing “the use of created goods.”6
Temperance is not simply resisting temptation. It is more than merely restraint. Aquinas uses the example of a miser who eschews extravagance because of its expense: such a man is not temperate,7 for the temperate man would not desire extravagance. One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.
We can learn so much about God’s economy, his nature, and the way to human flourishing by observing the marvelous ways in which God has built balance, a form of temperance, into the natural order. Night tempers day. Water relieves earth. The four seasons comprise two pairs that offset each other in the stages of life: birth, fertility, decay, death. Even creating as male and female those who bear forth his image (instead of making humans capable of reproducing from one rather than two, like bacteria) reveals something about how we are to live. Yet, so often in human affairs, balance seems unnatural, prone as we are to careen from one extreme to another, both as individuals and collectively within culture. The ancients showed wisdom in understanding how foundational temperance is to human excellence.
Temperance is the virtue that helps us rise above our animal nature, making the image of God in us shine more brilliantly. For humans, unlike animals, pleasure is tempered by understanding. Developing desires for the good requires understanding. Human beings are creatures who are rational as well as spiritual and who, as such, do not approach pleasurable activities purely physically. The temperate person is one who “understands these connections between bodily pleasures and the larger human good, and whose understanding actually tempers the desires and pleasures.”8 Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”9
But while understanding is necessary for the virtue of temperance, it is not sufficient. Even Paul acknowledges the limits our understanding holds over our desires when he writes, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom. 7:15).
A HISTORY OF INTEMPERANCE
The difficulty of balancing between excessive and deficient pleasures is evident all around us in many ways, not only in the present, but in human history as well. Two ancient schools of thought that demonstrate the extremes of excess and deficiency in regards to physical pleasures are Stoicism and Epicureanism, one advocating restraint and the other indulgence as the way to the good life. We might not adopt their extremes in such intensely philosophical ways today, but the influence of these approaches is all around us. This ping-ponging between excess and deficiency in the indulgence of our animal appetites manifests in endless ways in American culture today: all-you-can-eat buffets and detox diets, pornography and purity culture, fast food and slow food, the sexual revolution and the death of sex,10 McMansions and tiny houses, the prosperity gospel and the gospel of self-denial. Even in the longer view of our nation’s history, we see this wild pendulum swing: the excesses rampant today are the counter swing to the Puritan roots of our country’s beginning. This ongoing tension that has always defined American culture is at the heart of one of the most quintessentially American novels: The Great Gatsby.
The defining quality of Gatsby’s life is excess. Even the word great in the title establishes this (although ironically, as it turns out). We see Gatsby’s greatness through the eyes of the first-person narrator, Nick Carraway. A nondescript, struggling businessman who is renting the modest cottage next to Gatsby’s lavish mansion, Nick is in every way a foil to Gatsby. The truth Nick slowly uncovers about Jay Gatsby reveals not only the humble origins of a man (whose real name turns out to be James Gatz) but also his excessive efforts both to overcome these beginnings and to suppress the very nature of his past and his identity.
But nature—including human nature—is like a balloon. If squeezed at one end, the air inside simply moves to the other end. If squeezed enough, the balloon will burst. Extremes will eventually out. The virtue of temperance keeps us from bursting at either end.
Aptly, The Great Gatsby is set during a time characterized by the impulse to suppress: Prohibition. The historical background to the story exemplifies in itself how excess in one direction can lead to an equal and opposite excess in the other direction.
Prohibition grew out of the more moderate movement called Temperance. The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826 as a call, first, to temper (or moderate) excessive consumption of alcohol, but eventually to total abstinence (teetotalism). The push toward complete prohibition developed as a reaction against another excess: the growing drunkenness (often resulting in domestic violence and familial neglect) that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In previous ages, it was common, even among some Puritans, to imbibe mild wine, mead, and beers from breakfast till nighttime with little effect. However, what had long been a healthy and relatively harmless social and gustatory custom turned into an addictive and dangerous habit for many when modern means of producing alcohol increased the potency of alcoholic beverages.11 In addition, the Industrial Revolution’s increasingly rigorous and dehumanized systems of labor prompted more workers to seek even more relief in alcohol, and an epidemic began. Alcohol consumption was so rampant in the early decades of the nineteenth century that the average American consumed 7 gallons of pure alcohol each year (compared to 2.32 gallons consumed in America in 2014).12 Efforts to address the problem culminated in 1920 with the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which made the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquor illegal. The law was so intemperate that it could only result in vice. Prohibition was an ill-fated but short-lived social experiment that, in effect, replaced virtue. In 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition.
A CORRUPTED AMERICAN DREAM
This is the setting for The Great Gatsby. Written in 1925 and set in 1922, during the time between these two Amendments, the novel presents a society that replaced moderation with excesses on both ends of the spectrum. Self-governance, the principle many observe to be the foundation of the American experiment, diminished, and with it the virtue of temperance to which it is connected. The Great Gatsby interrogates, eerily and prophetically, the reckless excesses of American life during the Prohibition era, excesses that would contribute to the economic crash a few years later, bringing about the Great Depression and the tumbling down of the American Dream.
The American Dream takes various forms, of course, and has not vanished entirely. But some forms of that noble ideal are corrupt, as Gatsby’s version is. Gatsby’s life is essentially a lie, one told in the service of a distorted dream. Not only does this false dream take Gatsby’s life, but it prevents him from truly living even when he is alive. His “intemperance has consumed him from his youth,” leaving his mind and spirit always “in a constant, turbulent riot.” The mad dreams and desires that fill his soul are but “founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”13
Even his sexual appetites were intemperate from the time of his youth: “He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.”14 Yet Gatsby considers himself “careful” in his liaisons because he refrains from any among the wives of his friends.15 His intemperance leads him to regard women as objects that either belong to other men or are free for the taking.
Even the mean of an intemperate life is intemperate.
A poster boy for the American Dream, young Gatsby envisions for himself some vague “future glory.” Lacking the patience and humility to work his way up from his job as a college janitor, he chooses to ingratiate himself to a wealthy millionaire to become his heir.
After he has gained wealth and reinvented himself, Gatsby meets Daisy, “the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known,” who from the start inflames Gatsby’s desires more.16 With their first kiss, Gatsby vows that the act would “forever wed” his immortal dreams to her mortal being, and consequently, “his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”17
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
Gatsby’s lust for Daisy is not merely sexual, however. Daisy, an upper-class Southern belle, is part of a world Gatsby wants to enter but can never be from. Gatsby’s worldview is the product of the new culture of consumer capitalism where, “rather than wealth or political or economic power,” desire had become democratized. The rising consumerism of these years turned desire into “a spur to effort, forcing people to compete, discipline themselves, and deny present comfort for future pleasures.”18 Thus when Gatsby loses Daisy to a man who comes from long-standing wealth and power, Gatsby devotes his life to accumulating even more wealth in hopes of regaining her. We meet Gatsby five years later when he has succeeded in this goal to a level that can only be called obscene.
His enormous mansion’s “purposeless splendor”19 includes music rooms, salons, a pool room, dressing rooms, period bedrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths.20 Preparations for his weekend parties begin each Monday when eight servants and a gardener begin their daily labor. Crates of fruit are delivered from the city each Friday, and each Monday carried out “in a pyramid of pulpless halves.” Caterers cover buffet tables with appetizers, meats, salads, and pastries. An orchestra performs as guests arrive in cars parked five deep in the driveway. Fashionable people fill the rooms, and “the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.”21
Gatsby’s excessive materialism reflects the culmination of American history decades in the making. Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, capitalist ventures birthed a new ethos in America. This “consumer capitalism” created “a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods . . . one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions of republicanism and Christian virtue.”22 This old culture, based on values rooted in tradition, community, and religion, was replaced by a new culture that promoted “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness.”23 A few years before the time of The Great Gatsby, the term “conspicuous consumption” originated in economic theory to describe the values of this new culture, in which those who were made wealthy through opportunities offered by the Industrial Revolution sought to acquire and flaunt material possessions as symbols of their new economic power. America became what the turn-of-the-century marketing pioneer John Wanamaker called the “land of desire.”24
Today conspicuous consumption has spread even more throughout American culture. A recent four-year study, for example, found that the lives of the middle class are “overwhelmed” by stockpiled supplies, clutter, and toys. Three out of four garages are too full to hold cars, and while the United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children, it has 40 percent of the world’s toys.25 Consumerism sells the idea that material things will make us happy. To counteract this excess, an entire industry in minimalism promises to rescue those drowning in stuff. The downside of this excess stuff is more than simply material or financial, however. “Economic plenty seems to impose materialistic limits on imagination and people devote themselves to recreation, entertainment, and physical pleasure. Freedom consequently becomes trivial. . . . Everyone lives in about the same way, and it may be difficult even to think of a different way.”26
Intemperate consumption and accumulation is something I struggle with in my own life. My grandparents, who lived through the Depression and lifelong poverty, threw nothing away. Whatever potential value even junk might hold was enough value to justify keeping it. My mother, despite rising to the comfortable middle class, was habituated by this upbringing to seek and buy bargains, an example I followed from early on and have continued far past its necessity or even its usefulness. Only in recent years have I slowly begun to shed the irrational sense that not taking advantage of a good deal is a loss, whether I need it or not. In fact, owning far more things than I need has become a great burden. Even so, changing my thinking has proven easier than changing my practices. (Although it is nice to know we will never run out of toilet paper in this house.) Temperance is, for many of us raised in a culture birthed by consumerism, a virtue difficult to attain.
The Great Gatsby offers a larger-than-life picture of a life spun out of control by excess. If temperance is “selfless self-preservation,” then Gatsby is the epitome of intemperance: “self-destruction through the selfish degradation of the powers which aim at self-preservation.”27 Nick recognizes the fatal nature of this intemperate world when he observes that in it “are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”28 Consumption does indeed consume us.
An early scene in the novel reveals the suffocating weight of excess consumption. A small, drunken party takes place in an apartment kept by Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, in New York City where he and his married mistress, Myrtle Wilson, have their regular rendezvous. The apartment is crammed with people and stuff, “crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually.” The passage brims with words suggesting oversaturation, such as “large” and “full.” There is even an “over-enlarged photograph” of a “hen sitting on an enlarged rock.” One day, Tom takes Nick there, and Nick drinks excessively for only the second time in his life.29 The apartment is a microcosm of the larger world Gatsby inhabits, a world riddled with vices: materialism, adultery, drunkenness, organized crime, and domestic violence.
TEMPERANCE AND TIME
Yet temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than simply negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means to “bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.”30 This is why the process of strengthening a metal is called “tempering.” Evenness or balance brought about through mixing diverse elements can be seen in many spheres: the truth spoken in love, vegetation that flourishes in receiving both sun and rain, the one-flesh relationship formed by the marriage of a man and a woman, or the distinct satisfaction of a salty snack chased down by a sweet beverage.
Temprian is derived from the Latin temperare, which means to “observe proper measure, be moderate, restrain oneself” or to “mix correctly, mix in due proportion; regulate, rule, govern, manage.” This word, in turn, may come from another root, tempus, from which we get the word temporal, related to time and seasons.31 (Interestingly, the original meaning of tempus is likely “stretch” or “measure.” From this comes the word temple, a space made sacred by being marked out and marked off.32)
The motif of time, or tempo, is prominent in The Great Gatsby and echoes throughout the novel in several ways. First, tempo characterizes the language of the novel, language sometimes effusive, sometimes economic, often delivered in measured beats that achieve powerful effect. Similarly, heavy use of symbolism compresses time by packing much meaning into few words. Tempo is at play, too, in the many polarities of the novel: ideal and real, myth and truth, hero and anti-hero, the upper and working classes, old money and nouveau riche, East Egg and West Egg, the Old World of Europe and the New World of America, the American Dream as materialist and the American Dream as transcendent, the American West and the American East. The failure of the characters to harmonize the tensions within these pairings is part of what destroys everyone caught between them.
Probably the most significant of these polarities is past and present. The sense of time is, in fact, a prominent theme in the novel, as seen in one of its most famous lines, which occurs when Nick tries to temper Gatsby’s expectations regarding his reunion with Daisy:
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”33
The novel makes many such explicit references to time. Gatsby talks of the past often, Nick says, observing Gatsby’s longing for something passed: “I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself.”34 Gatsby is “never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.”35 Nick feels the oppressive weight of time when he says that the “relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me.”36 And, of course, the novel’s last line closes on this theme: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”37
SELF-IMPROVEMENT
But time is not on Gatsby’s side. This is the story of time running out. When Gatsby dies, a scant few attend his funeral. One person who does show up is Gatsby’s father. He shows Nick an old book Gatsby had as a boy.
He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word Schedule, and the date September 12, 1906, and underneath:
| 6.00 | A.M. | Rise from bed |
| 6.15–6.30 | ˝ | Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling |
| 7.15–8.15 | ˝ | Study electricity, etc |
| 8.30–4.30 | P.M. | Work |
| 4.30–5.00 | ˝ | Baseball and sports |
| 5.00–6.00 | ˝ | Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it |
| 7.00–9.00 | ˝ | Study needed inventions |
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents
Gatsby’s father says he found the book by accident. “It just shows you,” he explains to Nick, “Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something.”38
This notion of self-improvement is woven deeply into the fabric of American culture, beginning with the arrival of the Pilgrims and their Puritan work ethic. It advanced with Benjamin Franklin’s famous program of “moral perfection” that he began at age twenty and continued through most of his life. In his autobiography, Franklin explains, “I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”39 Franklin lists thirteen moral virtues with brief descriptions. First on his list is temperance: “Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”40 Franklin’s plan was to work on each virtue, one week at a time, and improve in each area over the course of his life. Born poor and receiving little formal education, yet becoming one of the most respected intellectuals of his time, Franklin is perhaps the best success story for the school of self-improvement.
For the Puritans, virtue could not exist apart from God—specifically, faith in Christ. For Franklin, Christ was not so much a source as an example worthy of emulation, no different from Socrates. By the time we get to Gatsby, God—or religion or faith—is utterly effaced, replaced by the gods of materialism and self. The source, motive, and goal for Gatsby’s virtue is himself. Even attainment of Daisy is less about her than it is about him. Indeed, Gatsby does not even seek the real Daisy, but merely a fantasy of her.
FANTASY NOT REALITY
Gatsby has been obsessed for five years with winning Daisy back. (The fact that she is married does not factor into his thinking. She is not married to one of his friends, after all.) He has read the newspaper faithfully for years in hopes of coming across Daisy’s name. Gatsby’s lavish home, outrageous parties, and ostentatious lifestyle are all to fulfill the fantasy Gatsby has for their eventual reunion. But Gatsby loves an ideal, not a woman. He loves an idea—winning the prize that to him symbolizes the attainment of his dreams—not flesh and blood. Daisy is for Gatsby like the volumes of books that fill his library shelves: with pages uncut and unread, their value is in what they symbolize, not what they are. Gatsby’s vision of Daisy, and of love and life itself, is disconnected from reality. This disconnect began in his youth, when his sense of shame over his “shiftless and unsuccessful” parents inspired a revisioning of himself and his own origins, and “to this conception he was faithful to the end.”41
Gatsby’s faithfulness to this false vision continues through and beyond his faltering reunion with Daisy. His desire has been for something that does not even exist, and he has no taste for what really does exist. It’s significant that when they meet for the first time all these years later and she puts her real arm through his, Gatsby cannot enjoy the connection. Instead, he is “absorbed in what he had just said.” Not surprisingly, his long-anticipated reunion with Daisy is a devastating letdown. After Daisy leaves, Nick reports,
As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way.42
Daisy, a flat, two-dimensional character, becomes a canvas upon which Gatsby paints the false visions of his imagination. The real presence of Daisy shatters “the colossal significance” of the symbol of her—the green light at the end of her dock, situated across the sound from the mansion Gatsby bought precisely so he could gaze at her dwelling place. That symbol has “now vanished forever.” Gatsby’s “count of enchanted objects had diminished by one,”43 for intemperance is “a disease of the imagination.”44
Like Gatsby, Daisy is materialistic, although she is cut from different fabric. She is as ungrounded in anything substantial or real as Gatsby is. Nick’s first sight of Daisy, accompanied by her friend Jordan Baker (soon to be Nick’s lover), captures her ethereal fairy nature: “The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”45 Daisy’s shallowness culminates in one of the novel’s most famous passages, which takes place when Gatsby takes her for the first time on a tour of his magnificent home, purchased and outfitted for the sole purpose of someday winning her back. When Gatsby and Daisy, accompanied by Nick, arrive finally at Gatsby’s bedroom, Gatsby throws open two cabinet doors:
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, . . . and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.46
Daisy’s response is odd for two lovers reunited at last in the bedroom. But it is fitting for someone consumed by materialism: “‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’”47 This image—of Gatsby carelessly throwing his costly shirts into the air and Daisy clutching at them in ecstasy (material rather than spiritual in origin)—is as inevitable as it is startling.
Daisy’s response to the shirts can be understood in terms offered by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle. Consumerism has created a society, Debord argues, in which appearance has replaced both being and having.48 “The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities,” Debord explains. Consequently, “the consumer is filled with waves of religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities.”49 Daisy’s ecstatic worship of the shirts reflects a society in which commodities have become god.
THE GOD OF CONSUMERISM
This false, modern American god is displayed in the novel as leering over the aptly named “Valley of Ashes” in the form of a billboard bearing the spectacled eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Notably, not long before the time in which the novel is set, prior to the rise of consumerist capitalism, such a garish sign would have been scorned as the stuff of “circuses and P. T. Barnum hokum.”50 The symbolic connection of the billboard to God becomes explicit after Daisy accidentally strikes and kills her husband’s mistress with Gatsby’s car. The dead woman’s distraught husband, George Wilson, says to his friend Michaelis, about Myrtle,
“I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window”—with an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it—“and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”
As he speaks, Wilson is “looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.”51 But while the “God” of Gatsby’s world sees, he does not act. Therefore, Wilson takes justice into his own hands. Repeating “God sees everything,” Wilson draws a false conclusion based on what he himself sees and takes Gatsby’s life—and, in the process, his own.
HOW THE STORY IS TOLD
While Henry Fielding’s conception of God in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling is reflected by an omniscient and authoritative narrator, the narrator of The Great Gatsby embodies a modern worldview that cannot conceive of a God who acts and intervenes in human affairs. The paradox is that even a view of God as impersonal and distant affects the course of human affairs, a paradox reflected in the way that the unreliable, passively observant narrator Nick Carraway changes the course of the story.
Unlike God, Nick does not see everything. Moreover, he cannot even be trusted to report what he does see. For good reporting requires good judgment, and Nick refrains from judging. The novel opens on this very point, with Nick confessing that his father cautioned him against being too quick to criticize others. As a result, Nick is “inclined to reserve all judgments.” This “habit” of withholding judgment has made him the confidante of people’s “secret griefs,” of the sort that were told to him by Jay Gatsby.52
Nick assumes the posture of an innocent observer who reserves judgment, but beginning this story in this way cues the reader to withhold trust—for how can trust be given to one who will not judge?
Furthermore, the mere presence of a witness can change the course of events. This idea is illustrated in the observer effect, a component of the study of physics, which suggests that the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes that phenomenon. As we’ve seen, Nick’s presence as an observer alters the events of Gatsby’s life (and with that, the lives of others). This is just one layer of the effect that the “passive observer” has on Gatsby’s life. But another layer is added when Nick returns to the scene, so to speak, years later in order to tell Gatsby’s story. Nick becomes a witness to Gatsby’s life in two ways: first, in being present during the events of the story, and, second, in testifying to what he has observed.
The narrative demonstrates Nick’s active effect on the story—even in his passive way—in a subtle scene at the end of the novel. When Nick returns to the vacant mansion sometime after Gatsby’s death, he reports, “On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.”53 Nick’s act of erasure is a reminder that every telling of every story requires judgments, choices of what to leave in, what to leave out, what best to remember, and what best to forget. In showing us Nick’s choice to erase the insult to Gatsby, the novel reminds us that we too are unreliable narrators of our own stories. And therefore the judgments made by our own limited perspectives must be tempered against the all-seeing eyes of God.