Nick’s Retreat: Race and Genealogy in The Great Gatsby
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Recasting Nick’s role in the assessment of The Great Gatsby’s nativist and racist ideology mainly espoused by Tom Buchanan, this paper seeks to make further contributions to the plethora of new historicist criticisms that examine the function of race in this novel. This paper claims that Tom’s professed racism and the crisis of “whiteness” as embodied in Daisy, are shared, even if covertly, by the unusually reticent Nick, which intimates a silent complicity. I also show that Nick’s racial anxieties are repeatedly revealed in his various encounters with the racial “other.” In this context, Nick’s fixation with genealogies—Gatsby’s and his own—reveals Nick’s underlying desire to establish racially “pure” genealogies, which in the end leads to his retreat back into the Midwest. I read his retreat as a failure to reclaim a racially pure past and foresee an unadulterated future. Thus, my reading shows that The Great Gatsby is an elegy for the passing of a fantasized (white) nation, rather than the American Dream.
Abstract
Recasting Nick’s role in the assessment of The Great Gatsby’s nativist and racist ideology mainly espoused by Tom Buchanan, this paper seeks to make further contributions to the plethora of new historicist criticisms that examine the function of race in this novel. This paper claims that Tom’s professed racism and the crisis of “whiteness” as embodied in Daisy, are shared, even if covertly, by the unusually reticent Nick, which intimates a silent complicity. I also show that Nick’s racial anxieties are repeatedly revealed in his various encounters with the racial “other.” In this context, Nick’s fixation with genealogies—Gatsby’s and his own—reveals Nick’s underlying desire to establish racially “pure” genealogies, which in the end leads to his retreat back into the Midwest. I read his retreat as a failure to reclaim a racially pure past and foresee an unadulterated future. Thus, my reading shows that The Great Gatsby is an elegy for the passing of a fantasized (white) nation, rather than the American Dream.
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