Chapters SIx Through Nine of Gatsby: "I disapproved of him from beginning to end."

I am dissatisfied with the finale of this book. Hemingway was right, Fitzgerald is so romantic and predictable that he ends up diving headlong into cliche. The Sun Also Rises is much more satisfying as a novel; somehow Hemingway lets all the right people live, and all the right ends left unravelled. Hemingway throws a rotten tomato onto a canvas, and then lets it dry -- Fitzgerald does the same, and then tries to make a torte out of it. Still, I find Gatsby quite fascinating, and I will have such a good time analyzing it.

I think I identify most with Nick. It may seem like I've slammed him in previous posts, but I've really come to love him. He's so scared and confused, and I find myself feeling empathy for the way that he can't tell the truth. He doesn't search himself for the true feeling; instead, he searches his thoughts for right feeling, and then presents such as the honest emotion or the passionate conclusion. That he ever "loves" Jordan is laughable. Their final meeting is so perfect -- it was the only thing I really liked about the ending.

What I didn't appreciate was the violence that suddenly erupted. Compared to the violence in The Sun Also Rises, the death of Myrtle and Gatsby and Wilson left me a little perturbed, but perhaps that was the intent. I much prefer it when everyone gets to suffer indefinitely, as Brett and Jake do, when they vanish into obscurity at the end of the novel.

Last semester I read Judith Butler's 1988 essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," and remnants of this work have been popping up in the my mind as I've examined the characters in Gatsby. Statements like "gender...is an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts," and "is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self," have cast a pretty convincing shadow over the novel, and have persuaded me to watch the characters actions and understand them as struggles to form a gender identity. I know the story consistently presents images of money and industry and class structure, but I can't help but see the drama enfold and enter into chaos through confusion concerning gender, and what Butler calls the "heterosexual contract." Lines from this essay are almost essential to my ideas about Moby-Dick and Gatsby, one of the best being:

As Foucault others have pointed out, the association with a natural sex with a discrete gender and with an ostensibly natural "attraction" to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural conjunction of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.

My only fear is that I'm, as my literary criticism instructor often put it, using literary theory like a sausage machine -- you put the work into the system and get a pristinely packaged thesis. I'm also a novice -- so I consistently have to test out my new legs; they're wobbly, to say the least. I can attest, however, that my ideas about Moby-Dick and gender and reproduction were formulated long before I read Butler or Foucault, and I'm going to allow myself a small measure of pride in authenticity for that, even though it's quite apparent that theorists like Foucault have been such an influence in general that my ideas could have been shaped by him without a formal knowledge of his existence. Still, I don't know that Melville or Fitzgerald have been analyzed in this way yet, and if the essays are any good. I wonder if I have a book of my own on my hands, or just single works.

Also, is my syntax terrible? I need an editor.