The Fisher King of West Egg
2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.44
ISSN1755-6333
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoF. Scott Fitzgerald's self-proclaimed “profound admiration” (Life in Letters 137) of T. S. Eliot shines an important light on Fitzgerald's composition of The Great Gatsby. In October of 1925, Fitzgerald sent a copy of his novel to Eliot with the following inscription: For T.S. EliotGreatest of Living Poetsfrom his enthusiastic worshipperF. Scott Fitzgerald (Life in Letters 128) The following February, he commented to Maxwell Perkins that “T.S. Eliot for whom you know my profound admiration—I think he's the greatest living poet in any language—wrote me he'd read Gatsby three times + thought it was the 1st step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James” (Life in Letters 137).Eliot's influence on Fitzgerald surpassed general awe and inspiration; in fact, there are many indications that The Great Gatsby is in part an emulation of The Waste Land (1922). Several critics have already elucidated this literary relationship, such as Jeffrey Hart, who points out in his article “Rediscovering Fitzgerald” that “Fitzgerald studied The Waste Land … while he was working on Gatsby” and that “[t]he book both salutes Eliot and answers him” (208, 209). Careful readings of each text indeed reveal numerous similarities between The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the most notable parallel is the presence of the “valley of ashes … the waste land” in Gatsby, home of George and Myrtle Wilson and setting for Myrtle's death (Gatsby 23, 24). Other intriguing echoes of The Waste Land include the water imagery that pervades The Great Gatsby. The “small, foul river” in the valley of ashes seems to be a counterpart of the “dull canal” in The Waste Land (Gatsby 24; Eliot 189). Nick lamenting Gatsby's death by the waters of Long Island Sound evokes Eliot's narrator who weeps by the waters of Leman. Imagery of water and color even suggest a similarity between Fitzgerald's Daisy and Eliot's hyacinth girl. When Daisy meets Gatsby at Nick's house, she appears “under the dripping bare lilac trees…. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops” (Gatsby 85). Similarly, Eliot's hyacinth girl returns “from the Hyacinth garden,” her “arms full, and [her] hair wet” (37, 38).Just as The Great Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land, so too is The Waste Land indebted—“deeply … indebted,” to use Eliot's own words—to Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920). In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot credits Weston's book for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” (21). Weston, a lifelong scholar of grail texts, wrote From Ritual to Romance as a culmination of her studies of pre-classical, classical, and medieval myth. From her enormous breadth and depth of research, she drew the conclusion that the grail legends are not rooted in Christianity or British folklore, but in the secret rituals of pre-Christian fertility cults. The symbolism that Eliot adopted from Weston's book includes not only that of the grail quest, but of these fertility rituals as well. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot says of From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890–1915) that “anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies” (21).Themes of fertility, regeneration, and the quest are similarly important in The Great Gatsby. The quest motif in particular has received much attention from critics. Owing heavily to Nick's claim that Gatsby “had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), most critics have concluded that Gatsby becomes an anti-hero who symbolically capsizes all romantic and honorable notions of a quest by pursuing wealth as a means to win back Daisy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Essay, Edwin Moseley analyzes the novel as an “initiation and quest for the grail,” arguing that The Great Gatsby is “the initiation story of Nick Carraway and the story of Jay Gatsby's misdirected quest” (22). Robert J. Emmitt, in “Love, Death, and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby,” argues that “Gatsby's romantic quest, with its search for a grail and its parodic connotations of the Christian sacrifice, is a parable of the fate of idolatry, and a commentary on its particular American manifestations” (283). In their article “Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest,” D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper characterize Gatsby as a quester and conclude that the grail is “personified by Daisy Buchanan” (203). Similarly, in The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Kim Moreland calls Gatsby's story a failed romantic quest and Daisy “a false grail” (143).Indeed, The Great Gatsby is rife with symbols of a quest; however, each of the aforementioned arguments presupposes that the novel's quest motif is ironic, even “parodic.” It seems that none of these critics has considered that perhaps the quest motif has a much more serious, profound, and primeval significance than an ironic comment on contemporary American values.A close reading of The Great Gatsby unveils numerous allusions not only to the grail quest as Weston explains it in From Ritual to Romance but also to the specific mythical elements in which she believes the grail quest is rooted. Considering Fitzgerald's affinity for The Waste Land, he was undoubtedly aware that in the notes to the poem, Eliot states that “Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble” (21). While Fitzgerald's letters do not explicitly mention Weston's work as they do Eliot's, myriad allusions in the novel—along with Eliot's reference to Weston—suggest that Fitzgerald was indeed inspired by From Ritual to Romance and that the grail quest motif in The Great Gatsby, like that in The Waste Land, was influenced by Weston's work. This likely source opens up a new realm of possibility for the significance of the quest in The Great Gatsby and allows us to view Gatsby and Nick not as, respectively, an amoral and a superficial anti-hero, but as archetypal characters in an ancient ritualistic drama.According to Weston, the purpose of the grail quest was not the possession of a material object but, as in the rites of ancient fertility cults, an apotheosis in which the quester gains true knowledge of physical and spiritual life. If we read The Great Gatsby from this perspective, the idea that Daisy is a personification of the grail and that Gatsby plays the role of the quester seems erroneous. As to Nick's assertion that “Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail” (149), it is likely that Fitzgerald intended to draw attention to the grail quest motif in the novel, but not in the way that most critics have interpreted it. While there is a dearth of evidence to support the idea that Gatsby mimics the quester and Daisy the grail, abundant evidence exists to suggest an alternative theory: The Great Gatsby is the story of a quest; but not, however, the romantic version of the grail quest associated with King Arthur and Lancelot and the search for a holy relic, nor the quest of Gatsby as he seeks material wealth in pursuit of Daisy. Instead, it is the story of a quest undertaken by Nick Carraway, who seeks gnosis of mortality and divinity, with Gatsby fulfilling the role of the maimed Fisher King who inadvertently leads Nick to his apotheosis. Throughout the novel, thorough evidence verifies that while Gatsby may have “committed himself to the following of a grail” (emphasis added), he is not in fact following the grail. Instead, it is Nick who seeks the grail, and his quest for initiation echoes the rituals of the mystic life cults in which the grail quest is rooted.Before exploring the ways in which The Great Gatsby mirrors the elements of the grail quest presented in From Ritual to Romance, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of Weston's argument. During her thirty years of studying grail texts, Weston came to doubt the common belief that the myth emerged from either Christianity or British folklore, finding that both explanations of origin proved to be paradoxical, isolated, and disjointed. After studying Frazer's The Golden Bough, she began to formulate an explanation of the grail myth's origins that could reconcile these incongruities. Intriguing similarities between the grail stories and the descriptions of the nature cults in Frazer's book led her to believe that the grail legend may be a record of a life ritual commonly practiced in pre-Christian times and covertly observed in the centuries following the spread of Christianity.The true nature of the grail, Weston claims, can be illuminated by examining the task of the grail quester and its expected results. Scrutinizing the three cycles of the legend that feature Perceval, Gawain, and Galahad as quester/heroes, Weston found that in the majority of existing grail texts, the hero's task is to heal the Fisher King from a debilitating illness or injury, thereby regenerating the king's wasted lands as a result.In most versions of the legend, the exact affliction of the king is quite mysterious. However, Weston discovered in the Sone de Nansai (1250–75) an explanation that she claims applies to all versions in which the king suffers. In this romance, the Fisher King slays the Pagan King of Norway but subsequently falls in love with his daughter, the pagan princess. He baptizes her, though she is not a true believer, then marries her, provoking God's wrath. As punishment for his blasphemy, “His loins are stricken by this bane / From which he suffers lasting pain” (Weston 22). But that is not the only consequence; the Fisher King's infirmity not only emasculates him but renders his lands infertile as a result. As such, it is necessary for the hero to heal the king and in so doing, to restore his lands to vitality.This theme can be traced to earlier literature, most notably to the Rig Veda, or The Thousand and One Hymns (ca. 1500–1200 BC). Written in ancient India and sacred to Hindus, this collection of hymns and praises of the mainly agrarian Aryan population is dedicated to Indra, the god responsible for the rains. More significantly, Indra is praised in the Rig Veda for the “freeing of the waters” (Weston 26); when the evil giant Vritra imprisoned the seven rivers of India and thus imposed drought and starvation on the people, Indra slew him, freeing the rivers from their captivity and restoring the lands back to life and fertility. Weston notes that Indra's accomplishment is the same for which Perceval and Gawain are exalted in grail legend.Like the ancient Aryans who worshipped Indra, most nature cults personified the seasons, weather patterns, vegetation, and other natural elements as divine figures that resembled humans and their experiences. Since these deities symbolized the natural processes of the earth, they were believed to progress from birth to death in the course of a year. One of the primary examples that Weston cites is the Phoenician-Greek god Adonis, who represented the spirit of vegetation. Adonis's annual disappearance into the underworld brought death and sadness to the land; when he returned again in the spring, restoring his reproductive energies to earth, there was tremendous cause for celebration among the nature cults: vegetation bloomed, animals gave birth, and rivers flooded the plains (Weston 40, 43–44).A significant element in the story of Adonis is his cause of death: the vengeful Ares, jealous of Adonis's love affair with Aphrodite, sends a wild boar to wound Adonis mortally in the thigh. Interestingly, Weston points out, scholars generally agree that Adonis's thigh wound is euphemistic for an emasculating injury that symbolizes earth's infertility, with which his death is associated (Weston 43–44). The story of Adonis, a divine youth beloved by a goddess, whose loss of reproductive abilities came to represent the degeneration of earth in autumn and winter, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Fisher King's loss of fecundity, and that of his lands, as punishment for his love of a pagan princess.A final critical point in Weston's argument is her discussion of the “central rite” that explains the mystery of the grail. She tells us that nature cult rituals consisted of two separate rites: public celebrations, in which feasting and other physical pleasures were enjoyed by all members of the cult, and mystery rites observed by only a select few, in which the benefits were individual, spiritual, and often “aimed at … the attainment of a conscious, ecstatic union with the god” (140). These rituals, Weston claims, lie at the very heart of grail legend, for the secret of the grail is “a double initiation into the source of the lower and higher spheres of Life,” the lower sphere being knowledge of human life upon earth, the higher sphere being an understanding of the spiritual forces of life (159). Just as the ancient initiates sought a union with the gods of the nature cults, who transcended earthly existence by bringing the divine gifts of water and vegetation to an ailing land, so the grail quester seeks the ability to heal the king—who, like the fertility gods, embodies humanity and its struggles—thus achieving gnosis of human life.A critical reading of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of From Ritual to Romance reveals numerous striking parallels not only between Gatsby and the Fisher King, but between Gatsby and Adonis as well. Furthermore, extensive evidence links Nick to both the quester in grail legend and to his predecessor, the initiate of the mystic life cults. In many compelling ways, the roles of Daisy and Tom, as well as the novel's setting and plot, further support this theory.To Weston, the Fisher King is “the very essence” of the grail story; he “stand[s] between his people and the land, and the unseen forces which control their destiny”—namely the drought that wastes his lands as a consequence of his illness and the rains that result from his salvation (136). Like the Fisher King, Gatsby's life stages seem to function with the forces of nature. Several of the novel's important events, especially those pertaining directly to Gatsby, occur at a change of seasons. Nick arrives in Gatsby's domain of West Egg around the time of the summer solstice; “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,” he feels “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (4), and indeed his life takes a new turn when he meets Gatsby. The day that Daisy and Gatsby choose to reveal their affair to Tom—also the day of Myrtle's death—is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, day of summer” (114). Most importantly, the day on which Gatsby is killed holds “an autumn flavor in the air.” Gatsby's death is sprinkled with images of autumn: it is a “cool, lovely day” when Gatsby walks to his pool against the backdrop of “yellowing trees,” and his gardener tells him that he intends to drain the pool since “leaves'll be falling pretty soon” (153). When Gatsby's body is later discovered, “a small gust of wind” blows the mattress on which he floats, and around it revolves “a cluster of leaves” (162). The autumnal setting of Gatsby's death evokes the death of Adonis, predecessor to the Fisher King; in Cyprus, Adonis's death falls “on the 23rd of September, his resurrection on the 1st of October,” and his feast is celebrated on the autumnal equinox (Weston 46). Given Nick's references to the weather, it is likely that Gatsby's death also falls on or around 23 September, the day after what Nick calls “almost the last … day of summer.”Not only the timing but also the imagery of Gatsby's death highlights a fascinating similarity between Gatsby, Adonis, and the Fisher King. Gatsby is discovered floating on a “laden mattress” that “moved irregularly down the pool” like a bier carrying him to a watery grave (162). This scene resembles Weston's description of the “ceremonies of mourning for the dead god” Adonis, in which mourners “commit[ed] his effigy to the waves”; in some variations of the ceremony an effigy or head was borne “by a current … to Byblos” (Weston 47). Furthermore, in grail legend, the quester often finds upon arrival at the grail castle “either a dead knight on a bier … or a wounded king on a litter” (Weston 48). The portrayal of Gatsby's death scene mirrors these images of Adonis's and the grail king's lifeless bodies, a point also made by Jeffrey Hart, who argues that “at the end Gatsby himself surrounded by dead leaves lies in his pool, death by water, like the dead fertility god of the myths” (208).The regeneration of the Fisher King results in rains that rejuvenate his lands; similarly, Adonis's annual death and resurrection herald the rainy season that ultimately restores life to the earth. Gatsby's death, too, immediately precedes the rain; therefore, given his likeness to Adonis and the Fisher King, it follows that in Gatsby's death we find signs of rejuvenation. The setting of Gatsby's funeral is awash in rain imagery: mourners’ cars “reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet,” followed by a few of Gatsby's servants, “all wet to the skin.” As the participants straggle away “through the rain,” one of them murmurs, “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” to which Owl Eyes replies, “Amen to that” (174–75). Along with this benediction, the pervasive rain—a mythical symbol of regeneration—suggests Gatsby's resurrection. As connected as Gatsby is to the forces of the earth, it is natural that his resurrection should bring rain to the scorched lands on which the inhabitants of Long Island suffered only a week before. Nick describes the effects of the “broiling” heat that preceded Gatsby's death: As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. (114–15) New York and its citizens are plagued by this miserable heat, which is broken by Gatsby's death and the “thick drizzle” (174) that begins the day of his funeral, just as the revivifications of both the Fisher King and Adonis bring rain and therefore life back to their own parched kingdoms.As Gatsby's connection with the seasons likens him to the Fisher King/Adonis, so does his constant affiliation with water throughout the novel. Weston tells us that “the Grail castle is always situated in the close vicinity of water, either on or near the sea, or on the banks of an important river,” and that furthermore “the presence of water, either sea, or river, is an important feature in the Adonis cult” (51). As many critics have already pointed out, multiple water images permeate The Great Gatsby; Margaret Lukens remarks on “how profoundly informed the prose is by marine imagery” (44). This well-established importance of water symbolism can be reconciled with the seemingly unrelated yet equally notable presence of the grail motif by reading Gatsby as the Fisher King and not the quester.Like the Fisher King whose castle is “always situated in the close vicinity of water,” Gatsby's physical propinquity to Long Island Sound is particularly emphasized in descriptions of his mansion. Very much like a castle itself, Gatsby's home is compared to “some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side … and a marble swimming pool.” Gatsby's castle is located “only fifty yards from the Sound,” across from which “the fashionable palaces of East Egg glittered along the water” (5). Here we find a double allusion to the grail castle; Gatsby's house is not only near the sea but also clearly defined as a palatial structure. Beyond its location on the shore, Gatsby's castle is often characterized by its aquatic features, as is Gatsby himself. Before meeting him, Nick says that “I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana” (49). Later Nick visualizes Gatsby, in his mythical wealth and prosperity, “in his palace on the Grand Canal” (67). Among Gatsby's party guests, “there was one persistent story that [Gatsby] didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore” (97). Gatsby's parties take place in his “blue gardens,” and Nick explains that “at high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the water of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam” (39). In the evening, “floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden.” Here laughter is “spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word” (40). Gatsby's guests “glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color,” and Nick finds himself “among swirls and eddies of people” as “a tray of cocktails floated at [him] through the twilight” (41, 43). By late evening, “the moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes” (46–47). The fish imagery that Fitzgerald introduces here intensifies when Nick later describes Gatsby's party guests, who include “Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine … the Fishguards … Ripley Snells … S. B. Whitebait … the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga's girls” (61–62).The fish, says Weston, “is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity,” which partially explains the significance of the title of Fisher King (125). However, a more specific origin of the name can be found in Robert de Borron's Joseph of Arimathea (ca. 1200), the first text to narrate Joseph's inheritance of the Holy Grail. Weston explains that “during the wanderings of that holy man and his companions in the wilderness, certain of the company fell into sin. By the command of God, Brons, Joseph's brother-in-law, caught a Fish, which, with the Grail, provided a mystic meal of which the unworthy cannot partake…. Henceforward Brons was known as ‘The Rich Fisher,’” though in other versions of the story “the title is as a rule, Roi Pescheur” (116–17). This story of Brons, provider of the mystic meal, illuminates another link between Gatsby and the Fisher King. If we carefully read through the descriptions of Gatsby's party, we notice a conspicuous lack of any description of eating, although Gatsby too provides a mystic meal: “spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold” (40). Gatsby's guests, a gluttonous, ungracious, and unruly bunch who gratuitously drink alcohol and slander their host “on the courage of Gatsby's liquor” (169) are never described as partaking of the feast, for certainly they are among the unworthy. Yet the feast is offered; Gatsby, like Brons, provides the sustenance.Fitzgerald's portrayal of Gatsby's parties contains some of the most compelling evidence connecting Gatsby to the Fisher King and Adonis. Like Adonis, Gatsby becomes the center of hedonistic rituals; therefore it is fitting that several rites of the Adonis cults, which Weston traces through numerous versions of grail legend, are also practiced at Gatsby's parties.The belief that Adonis died each autumn and came back to life each spring was cause for lamentation and celebration marked by rites of a very specific nature. According to Farnell's The Cults of the Greek States (1896), the birth and death rites of the Adonis cults included “the din of cymbals and drums, the meaningless ecstasies of sorrow and joy” (Weston 46). Weston describes some intriguing details of these ceremonies, stating that “the most notable feature of the ritual was the prominence assigned to women” and, quoting Vellay, that “it is the women who weep for [Adonis] and accompany him to his tomb. They sob wildly all night long” (47). Furthermore, “one very curious practice during these celebrations was that of cutting off the hair in honour of the god,” an obligation that also fell to the women of the cults. Similarly in grail legend, we find upon entering the grail castle our “wounded king on a litter; when wounded the injury corresponds to that suffered by Adonis.” Weston notes “the presence of a weeping woman, or several weeping women” in the grail castle as well as “the curious detail of a maiden who has lost her hair as a result of the … sickness of the Fisher King” (49, 51).Each of these details bears a distinctive connection to events at Gatsby's parties. Echoing “the din of cymbals and drums, the meaningless ecstasies of sorrow and joy,” Gatsby's festivities feature “a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolo, and low and high drums.” The clamor increases as the night progresses: “as the earth lurches away from the sun … the opera of voices pitches a key higher,” and “by midnight the hilarity had increased” (46). In the small hours of the morning, there is “uncontrollable laughter” as the “fraternal hilarity increased”; later Nick describes the “bizarre and tumultuous scene” of a car accident, in which “a harsh, discordant din … had been audible for some time, and added to the already violent confusion of the scene” (47, 50, 53). Inside Gatsby's house, when the chaos has reached its apex, we are told of a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks. (51; emphasis added) The presence of this weeping woman resembles the weeping women in the Adonis rituals and in grail legend. Furthermore, hauntingly reminiscent of the “maiden who has lost her hair” in grail legend and the women who cut off their hair in the nature cult rituals is the presence at Gatsby's parties of women with “hair shorn in strange new ways” (40). In isolation, these peculiar haircuts may be dismissed as nothing but a fashion of the era, and the portrayal of the weeping singer may simply attest to the egregious drunkenness at the party; however, when juxtaposed with the numerous other allusions presented in this scene, these images evoke cult ritual turned grail legend.Weston also makes reference, in her explanation of the origin of the grail knights, to a ritual of the Maruts as they worshipped their god Indra, freer of the waters; in this ritual, “youths of equal age and identical parentage … are always depicted as attired in the same manner.” These youthful twins “are presented as Dancers, and always as Dancers” (82). Weston goes on to explain that “the importance of movement, notably of what we may call group movement, as a stimulant to natural energies, is thoroughly recognized among primitive peoples” (88). Here we find a captivating parallel to yet another mysterious feature of Gatsby's party: “two girls in twin yellow dresses” who perform a dance in the midst of an increasingly frenzied scene: There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden … a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps…. [B]etween the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume. (46) The similarity between the Maruts who dance to worship Indra, predecessor of Adonis and therefore of the Fisher King, and the twin flappers who dance in celebration of the hedonistic bacchanal that is a tribute to Gatsby's riches cannot be ignored, nor can it easily be explained if one is to read Gatsby as a quester. Nor can Gatsby's parties simply be explained as an image of the corruption of the Lost Generation, a snapshot of hilarity and profligacy, for Nick feels at one point in the evening that “the scene had changed before [his] eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound” (47). The significance that Nick detects evokes the “ecstasies of sorrow and joy” of the nature rituals: the intense emotions and frantic actions of the celebrants may become chaotic, but they are centered on the worship of their god (Weston 46). Gatsby, whose energies are given to “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (Gatsby 98), becomes the god of these venal partygoers who worship his mystery, his money, his excess. They revere him in their vapid way, for “there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world” (44). Their secret accusations that Gatsby is a bootlegger, a German spy, even a murderer, are alleged “eagerly” in tones of “enthusiasm” and “romantic speculation,” indicating more admiration than disapproval of Gatsby's mysterious power (44). His elevation to a god-like being further supports Gatsby's complex role as counterpart to Adonis and the Fisher King.This connection becomes even stronger when we examine the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy and its disastrous consequences. Even before his death, Gatsby shares the affliction of Adonis and the Fisher King, who suffer emasculating injuries as punishment for loving dangerous women. Gats
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