Mortal Solitudes - DE Book Club

Inevitable and indomitable, death is the ultimate expression of human frailty. We cannot escape its judgement, and we cannot share its experience. Death leaves us naked and alone against the universe. Modern writers believe that because of its own frailties, language, the written and spoken word, ultimately does the same.

Words are merely symbols for the notions they designate. Depending on our respective experiences and imagination, they can be interpreted in a number of ways, rendering our individual perspectives unique and impossible to communicate. Like humanity, language is imperfect. Modern writers mean to display the often forgotten weaknesses of the written word, how it ultimately leaves us in a state of eternal solitude. Modernists mean to expose the mortality of language.

The notions of death and solitude are linked in both F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. In Fitzgerald's novel, Gatsby's scarcely attended funeral is a final testimony to his solitary existence. In Faulkner's book, Addie's demise isolates each character in his or her own grief. This essay examines in what ways these lonely deaths are in fact extensions of equally lonely lives. It then explains how the connection between death, life, and solitude is used as a metaphor for modern writers' elucidation of the solitary confinement in which language leaves us.

Gatsby's funeral is the most pathetic scene in The Great Gatsby: "The minister glanced several times at his watch, so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn't any use. Nobody came." Despite Nick's best efforts to "get somebody for him", no one knows or cares enough about Gatsby to mourn his death: "as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end."

Even when he's alive, Gatsby's acquaintances are quick to forget him. To them, he is merely a host: "He's just a man named gatsby." Though they "go there by the hundreds", not a single guest cares where Gatsby is: "People of whom I asked his [Gatsby's] whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied vehemently any knowledge of his movements." The name Gatsby means no more to his guests than that of a pub or prestigious club where they spend their nights.

When Gatsby dies, the club shuts down. That is the extent of their commitment to him. At the news of Gatsby's demise, Klipspringer declines attending the funeral for "a sort of picnic or something": "I'm staying with some couple up here in Greenwich, and they rather expect me to be with them [...] What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it'd be too much trouble to have the butler send them on." Even Daisy, a woman who claims to love him, "hadn't sent a message or a flower."

Wolfshiem states that we should "learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." Gatsby was shown empathy at neither time. He died the way he lived: drowning in a luxurious pool, half-naked and alone. The luxurious pool is an emblem of the lifestyle he tried to acquire but never successfully embodied: "I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck [...] whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd." His skimpy attire represents his seldom apparent vulnerability: "You [Gatsby] are acting like a little boy [...] Not only that, but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all alone." Finally, his solitude is a representation of the true nature of his existence. All delusions of grandeur stripped away in a single, final moment, the great Gatsby dies humiliated.

In contrast to Gatsby's, Addie's death in As I Lay Dying comes as a salvation: "I knew that living was terrible." Revealed twenty-six chapters after her death, Addie's perspective can be heard or understood by no other character in the novel. In fact, Addie's relatives can barely understand one another, especially regarding her death: "Darl begun to laugh. Setting back there on the plank seat with Cash, with his dead ma laying at his feet, laughing. How many times I [Anse] told him it's doing such things that makes folks talk about him, I don't know." Each member of the family perceives Addie's death in a different manner:

"'Jewel's mother is a horse,' Darl said.
'Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?' I [Vardaman] said.
Jewel is my brother.
'Then mine will have to be a horse, too,' I said.
'Why?' Darl said. 'If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel's is?'
'Why does it?' I said. 'Why does it, Darl?'
Darl is my brother.
'Then what is your ma, Darl?' I said.
'I haven't got ere one,' Darl said. 'Because if I had one, it is was. And if it was, it can't be is. Can it?'"

Addie's demise affects her relatives on such complex and intimate levels that it becomes difficult for even the readers to follow their reasoning: "Then it [the fish] wasn't and she [Addie] was, and now it is and she wasn't. And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there won't be anything in the box and she can breathe." Incapable of communicating the intricacy of their mourning, they lash out at one another: "Jewel, I [Darl] say, Who was your father, Jewel? Goddamn you. Goddamn you." The depth of their grief alienates the characters from the rest of the world.

At the end of the novel, Darl, the most recurring narrator and the most articulate, is even estranged from his own identity. He refers to himself in the third person: "Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what it is. 'Is that why you are laughing, Darl?'" Prompted by his mother's death to question existence itself and, ultimately, to contemplate his inescapable solitude, the misunderstood Darl loses his sanity.

In both The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying, death, the ultimate manifestation of human limitation, brings to light a solitary existence. This correlation between limitation and isolation is applicable to the modernist take on verbal communication (or any form of communication, for that matter). Modern writers believe that because language is merely a system of signs susceptible to interpretation, humanity is doomed to an eternal state of estrangement. If words and phrases have different meanings depending on our experiences and imagination, how can we efficiently communicate an instant or a state of being that is exclusively ours? And, since every instant is lived from our individual perspectives only, what experience is not exclusively ours? As Addie says, "I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at."

To convey the imperfection of language and thus of his work, Faulkner places obvious and deliberate inconsistencies in his novel, such as the chapter Addie narrates well after her death: "And then I could get ready to die." Another such discrepancy occurs when Addie dies. Though Darl is miles away with Jewel, on a "yellow road neither of earth nor water, down the hill", he is capable of narrating the circumstances of his mother's death as if he were there:

"She [Addie] lies back and turns her head without so much glancing at pa. She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them."

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald also demonstrates the restrictions of a single perspective. In his narration, Nick must frequently piece together what happened. He admits to his uncertainty: "I guessed right about those missing hours." Furthermore, through the mysterious owl-eyed man, Fitzgerald explains the deceptive nature of his craft:

"The books? [...] Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they'd be nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real [...] It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What can you expect?"

For all intents and purposes, the books are real: they have pages with printed material on them. Yet, the owl-eyed man treats them as fakes. That is because real books are, by nature, forgeries. They claim to represent a certain reality but cannot do so without reinventing said reality, and that's not reality at all. The words chosen, the point of view selected, and the gaps filled in order to tell a complete story make the content of a book more imagination than truth. Language is simply not equipped to fully express our experiences in all their depths and complexity.

In both F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, death and solitude are connected. This correlation is used as a metaphor for the link between the imperfections of the written word, as perceived by modern writers, and our inability to articulate our thoughts and experiences. Hopefully, instead of driving us mad as it did Darl, the knowledge of our unavoidable solitude will eventually make us, as Fitzgerald suggests, "too old to lie to [ourselves] and call it an honor."

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