Gatsby

Countless literary characters feel painfully alienated from the social institutions that surround them. Some, like Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, feel alienated from their own communities. Others, like Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, feel alienated from their closer connections, including family members and loved ones. Still others, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, feel alienated by the religious institutions in which they have been raised; sometimes this type of alienation extends so far that the character or characters feel alienated from God himself. Perhaps the most extreme form of alienation lies in characters such as Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, who feels alienated from everything with which he comes into contact: his family, his society, and the whole of modern life. The proliferation of literary characters who struggle with alienation is a result of the real-life struggle many human beings have with feeling disconnected from, shunned by, and unrelated to other human beings and the societal institutions that shape and guide us. Alienation is a powerful force, one that moves humans toward the negative impulses of self-pity, vulnerability, and violence, but that can also result in the positive results of deep introspection and intellectual independence. Many would associate alienation primarily with the 20th century and beyond, and indeed, the modernist movement, dated roughly from 1890 to 1950, has as one of its central themes the idea that in the modern era, with its increased reliance on science and technology, and the gradual removal of the individual from rural community into urban isolation, the individual and society are at odds with one another. Modernism explores how our relationships with each other and with social institutions such as the church, school, work, and family have grown weaker, leading us to be increasingly individualistic in our thinking and thus, alienated. In fact, the works listed above are all works in the modernist tradition. In addition to those novels and their alienated characters, modernism produced works such as T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and “The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock,” both poems that explore at length human beings’ alienation from one another and from the world around them. For example, in “Prufrock,” even though the speaker begins by saying, “Let us go then, you and I” (l. 1), the poem never feels like it is telling the story of a couple, as though the speaker is pretending to be working under the misconception that he is part of a community but is actually quite alone. The “you” has been variously interpreted to refer to the reader, the author, or some missing part of the speaker himself. It is precisely this problem—that the speaker is not  alone but is clearly disconnected from his companion— that creates the feeling of alienation. Near the end of the poem, the speaker says, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each / I do not think that they will sing to me” (ll. 124–125). Again, he is alive and moving through the world, but he is disconnected from it, hearing but not listening. Other 20th-century works explore the general condition of alienation by depicting characters who are cut off from one another despite familial connections or close daily proximity. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, the title character, Jay Gatsby, born Jay Gatz, has cut himself off from his past, thus alienating himself from what might be called his natural place in the world. He has done this so that he may infiltrate Daisy Buchanan’s world—a world of wealth, society, and superficiality. Yet despite making this transfer, he remains alienated, as Daisy’s circle see him as foreign and out of place. He yearns to be a part of her world, but he does so because he thinks that is the way to win her love. Because he moves along this route, which is unnatural to him, his attempt is doomed to fail. The modern world Fitzgerald depicts in The Great Gatsby—with its artificial distinctions between West