God in The Great Gatsby

(This too-long post is only somewhat related to the writing prompts.)

George Wilson doesn’t have a church, but he does think that God is watching. He says that he told Myrtle, “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!” (159). He recounts this while staring at the advertisement of the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg—which implies that he, in a sort of mad way, believes he is looking at the eyes of God. The first time we encounter the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, Nick describes them like this:

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive . . . the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes . . . are blue and gigantic . . . . They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them . . . , and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. (23–24)

Adding Wilson’s belief that Eckleburg’s eyes are God’s eyes to Nick’s initial description of the eyes, we begin to recognize how Nick (and maybe Fitzgerald) feels about God’s place in Gatsby’s world. Because if Eckleburg’s eyes represent God’s eyes, Nick (or Fitzgerald) is suggesting that God is watching, but disembodied, forgotten, dim.

None of that is particularly insightful on my part; I just remember it from high school. And maybe this next bit isn’t either.

I was thinking about the people who show up to Gatsby’s funeral—Nick, Gatsby’s father, the minister, and the man with owl-eyed glasses, whom Nick had met three months earlier in Gatsby’s library and whom he hasn’t seen since then. In the library, the owl-eyed man had been “drunk for about a week now” (46). After the funeral, the owl-eyed man says to Nick, “I couldn’t get to [Gatsby’s] house” (175).

Now, the first time Nick mentions glasses is, I think, in his description of the dim, faceless eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, and we learn later that Eckleburg’s eyes represent God’s eyes. So if bespectacled eyes symbolize God, when Nick calls attention to the drunken man’s owl-eyed glasses, perhaps Nick wants us to associate him with God. The man is in Gatsby’s house at the party, but he’s alone and on a weeklong drunk. Then he tries and fails to return to the house. So maybe Nick/Fitzgerald is saying that God is as disembodied and faded as the advertisement and as drunk, withdrawn, and impotent as the man with owl-eyed glasses—at least in 1920s New York.