out "year by year [to] recede before us," our boats being "borne back ceaselessly into the past," yet where the mind consolingly retrieves from a half-enchanted past the Dutch sailors and their magnitude of wonder. The triad structures, too, the essential outline of the narrative and the mood-modulation of the parties. Those parties which open with blue gardens, where "men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (39), but falter into violence, drunken stupor, screaming wives, and cars in the ditch, close upon the glance backward to Gatsby alone on his lighted porch bidding courteous farewell. Missing its final triumphant harmonic, the beat of a sacramental rhythm becomes the pulsing headache of private tragedy; Fitzgerald the mystic turns nostalgic drunk. As this brutally condensed outline suggests, Gatsby, on one crucial plane, is a religious, almost a crypto-theological narrative, displaced thoroughly and with explicit, ironic inadequacy into the secular discourse of a sharply portrayed social formation. And within this particular society, "the unutterable visions" of this "son of God" (112, 99) may no longer figure and excite an assimilation to the universal, a passage from epiphany to serene contemptus mundi. They are socially conditioned, on the contrary, to kindle a strife for merely personal and financial achievement, to seek a "vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty" (99). I have emphasized this "religious" dimension at length because I think it vitally important to appreciate the power, centrality, and dignity of this rapturous pull toward the ideal — its "colossal vitality," as Fitzgerald puts it: "no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart" (97) — in order to understand both Fitzgerald and ourselves. The Platonic and medieval worlds — though doubtless deluded in their metaphysics, which they moreover betrayed in t...
