Anti-Petronian Elements in The Great Gatsby

Robert J. Sklenár (University of Tennessee)

That F. Scott Fitzgerald initially intended to incorporate the name of Trimalchio into the title of his most enduring novel is well documented (West xvii); that he intended Gatsby to recall Petronius’s Trimalchio is equally clear from the famous opening sentence of Chapter 7: “It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.” Yet Gatsby is in certain respects the diametrical opposite of Trimalchio, and The Great Gatsby likewise, as this paper will argue, an anti-Satyricon.

The contrast between Gatsby’s romantic extravagance and Trimalchio’s coarseness has been noted in the scholarship (MacKendrick 308, Briggs 229), but not developed; on closer reading, one finds not mere contrast, but systematic opposition. Gatsby, unlike Trimalchio, is never coarse in his behavior; he is a genuine if misguided aesthete, his taste more reminiscent of Des Esseintes than of Trimalchio. It is rather Tom Buchanan, the wealthy man by inheritance, who behaves boorishly and is crude in his tastes, and is therefore much closer in spirit to Trimalchio than the man born as James Gatz (see Briggs 230). In fact, the real counterpart of Trimalchio’s banquet is the drinking scene in Chapter 2, set in the apartment where Tom Buchanan has installed his plebeian mistress. Nick Carraway’s disgust at the coarse goings-on not only parallels that of Encolpius, it also contrasts pointedly with the scene’s immediate successor, the languidly gorgeous description of Gatsby’s party in chapter 3.

Despite his failure to win Daisy Buchanan, and despite his inevitable downfall, Gatsby succeeds where Trimalchio fails: he makes of his life a glorious--and, thanks to Fitzgerald and to Nick Carraway, permanent--work of art.