The Carraway Confessional

Abstract Chapter 6 argues that the holy grail of Gatsby’s idolatrous love for Daisy, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, presents a profound challenge to the prepped and Ivied Midwestern Protestantism of Nick Carraway, who turns out to be an emotional exhibitionist not just an emotional voyeur. In “Absolution,” the story first intended as the novel’s first chapter, Fitzgerald establishes the theo-ontology of the gorgeous radiant lie, which because of its occasioned theatricality (witness critics Mitchell Breitwieser and Tracy Fessenden) courts ineffability, catechetical casuistry notwithstanding. To Nick, Jay Gatsby manifests a radiance that co-exists, somehow, with everything for which he has “unaffected scorn,” including nouveau-riche vulgarity, gangster-derived upper-class brutality, and delusional, out-sized masculine desire—for it calls, again mysteriously, to his homo-eros and own precarious class positioning (mirrored variously by the three women) and manifests itself in the tension between a Protestant transcendental “symbolist aesthetics” and a Catholic material sacramentality that descends even more directly from Hawthorne. In Nick’s literary confessional, the witness he bears to Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” is in itself more outrageously romantic still: that is, it is the testament of a seducee-convert to the passional incarnation of incommensurable love, as Marian Catholicism concentrates it, in the face of linen so dirty it can’t be laundered. At the last, what Nick has to confess is not his own myriad sexual and social foibles but rather a love for (the idol of Gatsby) so outsized and imminently felt it it courts, manifests, and arguably sanctions “an ineffably gorgeous lie.”