A PATTERN OF PARALLEL AND DOUBLE: THE FUNCTION OF MYRTLE IN "THE GREAT

GATSBY"
Author(s): E. C. Bufkin
Source: Modern Fiction Studies , Winter, 1969-1970, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1969-1970),
pp. 517-524
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26278942

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A PATTERN OF PARALLEL AND DOUBLE: THE
FUNCTION OF MYRTLE IN THE GREAT GATSBY

E. C. Bufkin

The enormous amount of criticism devoted to The Great Gatsby

has established and not infrequently reaffirmed, from numerous
points of view, Fitzgerald's mastery of technique and structure in
that novel. From intensive reading of works by Henry James and
Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald learned much about the craft of fiction1—
a craft he had only sporadically and fortuitously practised in This
Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, artistically inferior
predecessors of The Great Gatsby. Of his third novel, shunning such
imperfection, Fitzgerald strove deliberately and sedulously to create
"something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately
patterned"; it would be, in short, "a consciously artistic achieve
ment."2 The eminence of The Great Gatsby, its unstinting popu
larity with readers, and its undiminishing attraction for critic and
scholar attest superbly to Fitzgerald's successful actualization of his
purpose.3 Rereadings and reexaminations of this work continue to
discover in it fine examples of artistry and craftsmanship.
One aspect of the novel heretofore given incidental mention but
little relevant treatment is the pattern that makes Myrtle Wilson,

i For discussions of these and other influences, see, inter alia, James £. Miller, Jr.,
F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and Hit Technique (New York, 1964); Henry Dan Piper, F.
Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York, 1965); Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The Last LaocoSn (New York, 1967). Also, for Conrad's influence only: Robert W. Stall
man, "Conrad and The Great Gatsby," Twentieth Century Literature, I (April, 1955), 5
12; Jerome Thale, "The Narrator as Hero," Twentieth Century Literature, XII (July,
1957), 69-73; Robert Emmet Long, "The Great Gatsby and the Tradition of Joseph
Conrad," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VIII (Summer and Fall, 1966), 257
276, 407-422!
Fitzgerald's most explicit acknowledgment of Conrad's influence on Gatsby is to H. L.
Mencken: "God! I've learned a lot from him," he declared. The Letters of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Tumbull (New York, 1963), p. 482.
'Quotations from letters to Maxwell Perkins. The first—Fitzgerald's description of
the "something new" he strove for in Gatsby—is quoted in Arthur Mizener, The Far Side
of Paradise (Boston, 1951), p. 170; the second is from the Letters, p. 163.
Cf. Maxwell Geismar'! note in The Last of the Provincials, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1949), p.
315: "What Fitzgerald has done technically in The Great Gatsby is to bring over the tight,
well-knit, and sometimes trick patterns of his short stories to the irregular and broken
novel form which he has been using in . . . [his earlier novels]. So every symbol and
almost every detail here is meticulously plotted, and usually balanced off later on in the
story. In fact, Gatsby was probably the most perfect example of a planned novel in our
modern tradition up to this point—planned, I mean, in this mathematical sense of a
Bach concerto...."
• For a dissenting voice, see Gary J. Scrimgeour, "Against The Great Gatsby," Cr
VIII (Winter, 1966), 75-86.

517

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through parallels, the double of Gatsby.4 This pattern is an im
portant yet still neglected one in the "system o£ carefully plotted in
terior parallels and cross references" in Gatsby noted by John W.
Aldridge,5 and I believe that, for several reasons, it deserves further
attention. Once marked, it acts as a corrective to such unpersuasive
readings (or rather overreadings) as that by Douglas Taylor, who
endeavors to impose upon the copious richness actually within the
novel a so-called mythic pattern that ingeniously presents Jay Gatsby
as an allegoric jazz-age Christ.6 Further, it illustrates that, most
likely from Conrad, Fitzgerald learned use of the paralleling of scenes
and of characters as doubles, a thematic-structural device equally im
portant in Gatsby as Marlovian first-person narrator and rearranged
chronology.7 And finally the parallel of Gatsby and Myrtle as doubles
reveals niceties of structural detail that are illustrative of Fitzgerald's
mastery of control and distancing, which averted the easily obtained
effects of sentimentalizing the character of Gatsby.
The word double as used in literary criticism, Albert J. Guerard
has pointed out, is "embarrassingly vague." He finds that the double
exists in many forms. Principally pertinent to my use of the idea—or
technique—is Guerard's observation that a minor character may be a
major character's double by reenacting the major character's trau
matic experience.8 Gatsby and Myrtle, sharing many features, are, I
suggest, doubles in this sense; and various duplications occur in the
novel that establish and strengthen these two characters' identification

♦E.g.: John W. Bicknell, "The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald," Virginia Quarterly
Review, XXX (Autumn, 1954), 556-572; A. E. Dyson, "The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years
After," Modem Fiction Studies, VII (Spring, 1961), 37-48; Aerol Arnold, "Picture, Scene
and Social Comment: The Great Gatsby," University Review, XXX (Dec., 1963), 111-117;
Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor, 1965); Charles Thomas Samuels,
"The Greatness of 'Gatsby,' " Massachusetts Review, VII (Autumn, 1966), 783-794. Noting
many patterns, Victor A. Doyno, "Patterns in The Great Gatsby," Modem Fiction Studies,
XII (Winter, 1966-1967), 415-426, does not note this one. The fullest discussion of
Fitzgerald's "use of ironic parallelisms" in Gatsby, though it deals with only one of
several, is by John W. Aldridge, "The Life of Gatsby," in Twelve Original Essays on
Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 1958), pp. 210-237. He does not
pursue or analyze in detail the Gatsby-Myrtle parallel.
s "Life of Gatsby," p. 220.
'"The Great Gatsby: Style and Myth," University of Kansas City Review, XX (Au
tumn, 1953), 30-37. Of similar kind and equally unconvincing are Edwin M. Moseley's
reading in F. Scott Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, 1967) and David F. Trask's in "A Note on
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby," University Review, XXXIII (March, 1967), 197-202.
7 Nostromo, which Fitzgerald is known to have read before writing Gatsby, contains
such parallels as do numerous other novels by Conrad, especially Lord Jim. (On parallels
in Nostromo, see Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel [New York, 1966].) This prin
ciple Fitzgerald used again in Tender Is the Night. See Arthur Mizener's comment on that
novel in Twelve Great American Novels (New York, 1967), p. 113: "Perhaps [Fitzgerald]
did not manage to give Dick all the cohesion he might have, but the real difficulty is that
the source of Dick's disaster is indescribable. It can be shown and felt, but it can no
more be analyzed than Hamlet's disaster can. . . . What Fitzgerald can—and does—do is
to create for the reader a group of characters who, as dramatic parallels or contrasts with
Dick, show what he is" (my italics).
8 "Concepts of the Double," in Stories of the Double, ed. Albert J. Guerard (Phil
adelphia, 1967), p. 3.

518 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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as such. The strategy is not only to make the reader see Myrtle, in
Aldridge's words, as an actor "in a dumb show caricaturing Gatsby's
tragedy,"9 but to make him see Gatsby more objectively as one who,
though he was "worth the whole damn bunch put together," was yet
a "poor son-of-a-bitch."10
Details of age, conduct, and social standing proclaim the doubles.
Gatsby is "a year or two over thirty," and Myrtle is "in the middle
thirties." Just as Gatsby is a mysterious figure who leads a secret or
hidden life, so Myrtle is, according to her husband who should know,
"a deep one," who leads a secret life as paramour of Tom Buchanan.
Both Gatsby and Myrtle are victims11 and are socially inferior to
Nick, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker. Tom calls Gatsby
"Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" (a social as well as professional, or
business, epithet), and this identification, or lack of it, is applicable
to Myrtle.
Far more important, however, is their relationship to the Bu
chanans, those other two-of-a-kind. Gatsby is engaged, above all, in a
romantic quest for a beau ideal—"the king's daughter, the golden
girl," Daisy; as quester he is playing the same role as Myrtle.12 Her
quest is for Tom, the rich man. Although Myrtle's quest is to her as
romantic and as idealized as Gatsby's is to him, its squalor and its
frankness create an obvious surface contrast to his. Yet this contrast
of superficial dissimilarities tellingly and pointedly signalizes basic
sameness, which is less readily perceived. Both Gatsby and Myrtle, as
Aldridge has mentioned, are "given vitality by a dream that is far
larger than any possibility of fulfillment."13 Gatsby, as he tells Tom,
intends to take Daisy away and marry her, to lead her to the mar
riage that is the logical continuation and culmination of the court
ship—and the physical relationship—begun with her in Louisville
and interrupted by his war service in Europe. Myrtle, as her sister
Catherine tells Nick, intends, likewise, to marry Tom, who is (she
says) going to divorce Daisy. This marriage too would follow—logi
cally, according to Myrtle's mode of thinking—a sexual relationship
that is seen against a background of war; in this case, it is the
domestic strife between Myrtle and her husband who mistreats her
and locks her up. This restriction of freedom, keeping Myrtle from
Tom, is itself paralleled in the situation of Gatsby, who was kept on

»"Life of Gatsby," p. 235.

"Quotations from Gatsby are from the Scribner Library edition (New York, 1953).
References are given in the text.
»Bicknell, p. 559, finds Myrtle and Gatsby, as victims, pathetic; Samuels, p. 787,
contrasts pathetic, physical Myrtle with tragic, spiritual Gatsby.
"Kenneth Eble sees three paralleling love relationships as structural basis of plot:
Gatsby-Daisy, Nick-Jordan, Tom-Myrtle. F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1963), p. 88.
u "Life of Gatsby," p. 235.

THE GREAT GATSBY 519

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in England after the war by some official "complication or misunder
standing" and was consequently for a longer while not free to return
to Daisy.
Naively, both Gatsby and Myrtle see their quests as only elegant
and sublime. Each, according to them, is motivated and championed
by genuine love. Proud Myrtle fancies herself vastly superior to her
husband George ("he wasn't fit to lick my shoe"); and, as her sister
confides to Nick, Tom is her first real "sweetie." Gallant Gatsby
states that Tom is unworthy of Daisy and confesses to Nick that he
has never singleheartedly loved anybody but Daisy, the "first 'nice'
girl he had ever known."
The unrealistic outlook of these two social innocents, Gatsby and
Myrtle, is emphasized in the origin of the affairs of both. Each
pair of lovers—Gatsby and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle—is brought
together by chance, by sheer accident, and each is immediately at
tracted by the other's material or physical qualities. Gatsby meets
Daisy while he is a young officer at Camp Taylor in Louisville; Myrtle
first encounters Tom in a train. "He [Tom] had on a dress suit and
patent leather shoes," Myrtle says, "and I couldn't keep my eyes off
him. . . This report echoes what Jordan Baker says of seeing
Gatsby with Daisy for the first time: "The officer [Gatsby] looked
at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants
to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I
have remembered the incident ever since." Gatsby, says Nick, "knew
that he was in Daisy's house [in Louisville] by a colossal accident,"
yet like Myrtle he is dauntless in the attempt to build a life on
chance. Full of overtones, "colossal accident" refers, ironically, to
both the initiation of these affairs and their termination: one
"colossal accident" is to end not only the relationships of Myrtle and
Gatsby with Tom and Daisy but their lives also. The forces of society
and money as well as the force of character predetermine the failure
of the two unrealistic questers.
The purpose of this particular paralleling is, clearly, to keep a
moral perspective dramatically before the reader. Gatsby's goal is
actually no more admirable, despite the ensplendored vision he
takes of it, than Myrtle's. Daisy is no more worthy than Tom, and
Gatsby's thinking her so does not make her so; thus the materiality
and carnality of Myrtle's quest act as a moral balance to Gatsby's.
Nick's report of Gatsby's report of his affair with Daisy could describe
equally well Myrtle's affair with Tom: "He took what he could get,
ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still
October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her
hand." Myrtle is thus Gatsby's double in another way. She repre
sents Gatsby unadorned—his instinctual, unrefined, consciously re
520 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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pressed self; and lier doubling presence in the novel places him quite
outside the tradition of Clirist-like heroes and directly in a line that
runs from Rastignac and Julien Sorel to Joe Lampton in Room at
the Top.
One should note further how, in a brief scene in Chapter IV,
Myrtle as double functions exactly to this same purpose, providing
structural instead of narrative comment on Gatsby. The technique
is Conradian in that the reader's response is never allowed to become
simplistic or to remain static; his sympathetic admiration of Gatsby
is constantly tempered with impartial judgment.14 Gatsby has just
told Nick, while they are riding in his "gorgeous car," a fantastic
story about his life because "I don't want you to get a wrong idea of
me from all these stories you hear." Then as they travel along, "the
valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us," says Nick, "and I
had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with pant
ing vitality. . . The juxtaposition here creates a grim comic
irony: Nick listens to pretentious Gatsby and sees Gatsby's double;
what-is impinges upon what-is-said-to-be, both pumping.
Fitzgerald, going further, has underscored the parallel of the
yearnings of the doubles Gatsby and Myrtle toward an illusory
higher world by use of duplication of symbolic pose and gesture.
During the scene on the night when Nick first sees him, Gatsby
stretches out his arms in the direction of the Buchanans' home across
the bay from which shines a green light (itself an ironic symbol).
Myrtle, fleeing to Tom whom she mistakenly believes to be in
Gatsby's car, which she has been closely watching for all afternoon,
rushes out into the "gathering darkness" with outstretched, gesticulat
ing arms, "waving her hands."15 Importantly, Michaelis, who saw
and reports the scene, says that the car, when it struck Myrtle, had
appeared to him to be "light green." Color thus connects questers as
well as house and car as images of Daisy and Tom, their goals.
Even in their deaths the parallel of Gatsby and Myrtle is sustained.
Both are destroyed, of course, through their association with the
"careless" Buchanans, who "[smash] up things and creatures," as Nick
says. Tom of the "cruel body" crushes Gatsby spiritually and meta
phorically; after coming up against him in the scene in the Plaza
Hotel in New York, Gatsby is, as Nick later recapitulates, "broken up
like glass against Tom's hard malice"—against Tom's ethically wrong
behavior. Discussion of Daisy is the link between that scene and its

"Cf. Albert J. Guerard's exemplary analysis of this technique in Lord Jim in Conrad
the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).
«Cf. the scene of Gatsby's return to Louisville after Daisy's marriage: "He stretched
out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot
that she had made lovely for him."

THE GREAT GATSBY 521

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parallel. In their New York apartment Tom also breaks, actually,
Myrtle's nose; that scene, coming earlier, thus not only parallels but
foreshadows. But Daisy too destroys Myrtle, mangling her:
Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirt
waist, still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose
like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was
wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up
the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. (p. 138)

As unethical as Tom, Daisy hits and runs.

After being struck down by Daisy, Myrtle kneels in the dust, her
blood dropping onto it. Gatsby, shot floating on water, drips blood
into it. The parallel is as exact as the related elemental contrasts
that compose it: man-woman, water-dust.16 And there is continuation
of parallel in the removal of bodies. Myrtle as corpse lies in the
garage, in the valley of ashes, viewed by curious passers-by; Gatsby as
corpse lies in his mansion by the bay, grotesque counterpart of garage,
where prying youngsters come to look in.
Toward the end of the novel, Gatsby's father shows Nick "a ragged
old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy," on the last fly-leaf of
which is written an itemized two-part list of self-improvements; this
list had been composed long ago by the young James Gatz in the at
tempt to become better than he was and in the determination "to get
ahead." The "SCHEDULE" includes "Dumbbell exercise and wall
scaling" and "Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it"; th
"GENERAL RESOLVES" includes "No more smokeing or chewing,
"Bath every other day," "Read one improving book or magazine per
week," and "Be better to parents." The placing of this list causes
it to create at first, in this context, an effect of pathos and to elici
admiration for the ambitious boy. But by reference to a parallel tha
has occurred earlier on, the effect is altered. Myrtle, also attemptin
to rise, to make herself more appealing and more attractive than sh
actually is, spouts a list of self-improvements: "I'm going to make a
list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave, and
collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash-trays where you
touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grav
that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forge
all the things I got to do" (p. 37). The urge to improvement is
beyond question commendable; but, even bedecked and disciplined
Myrtle and Gatsby—the one buying dogs17 and displaying cosmopoli

»•Gatsby is connected with water throughout the novel: he lives on the bay; he ha
a hydroplane; he swims out to Dan Cody's yacht; he is shot in his pool; he is reunited
with Daisy, and later is buried, in the rain; finally, he is associated at the end with th
Dutch sailors. Likewise, Myrtle is connected throughout with dust and ashes.
"Dogs, too, connect and parallel Myrtle and Gatsby. When she has Tom purchase he
a dog—one of indeterminate breed—she asks if it is "a boy or a girl." Tom, crude state

522 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

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tan magazines and "an over-enlarged photograph" of a "stout old
lady" in a bonnet, who is her mother; the other buying palaces and
displaying "real" books and a "large photograph of an elderly man
in yachting costume," who is Dan Cody, his surrogate father—these
doubles remain flamboyant and tawdry failures. Going beyond the
merely minor role of a character to illustrate promiscuous Tom's
philandering and whoring, Myrtle exists in the novel as a major
instrument that continually mirrors for the reader the real nature,
the basically unattractive essence, of Gatsby himself.
For the two are, at bottom, alike; and if Gatsby is, as Nick suggests,
a knight ("he found that he had committed himself to the following
of a grail"), then Myrtle is a courtesan in a cosmopolitan court of love.
Wife at garage, she is mistress at apartment and, like knightly Gatsby,
gives parties, not dissimilar to his.18 Each playing self-consciously and
affectedly the role of host, he entertains to Daisy, she to Tom. Nick
is guest at and chronicler of both parties. It is important to notice
how Fitzgerald has placed the Myrtle episodes structurally: they
closely precede the Gatsby episodes to which they are enforcing
parallels and, so, adumbrations as well. Nick attends Myrtle's party,
then Gatsby's just afterward. Significantly, the earlier section of the
novel contains a series of three climactically arranged parties, all
attended by Nick. First he goes to the Buchanans'; the small inti
mate gathering is disrupted by a telephone call from Myrtle—a neat
transitional device to the second party, which is Myrtle's. The con
trast is sharp, socially. Myrtle's party is larger and rowdier than the
Buchanans', but it is still small enough to be intimate. Again Fitz
gerald uses an anticipatory, transitional device: Myrtle's sister talks to
Nick about Gatsby. The third party, Gatsby's, is a kind of grandilo
quent synthesis of the other two; it combines the monetary "quality"
of the first with the vulgarity and pretension of the second—the world
of Daisy, to which Gatsby desires to belong, with the world of Myrtle,
to which he does in fact belong. Without the intervening party at
Myrtle's apartment, the meaning and the value of the party at
Gatsby's mansion would be less fully exposed.

of facts, refutes the seller's reply that it is a boy and says "decisively": "It's a bitch."
The pointed, lowering reference to Myrtle herself is obvious. At Gatsby's funeral, Owl-eyes,
also stater of facts, says of him: "The poor son-of-a-bitch." See also the comment about
the driver of the "death car," supposedly Gatsby: "She [Myrtle] ran out ina road. Son-of-a
bitch didn't even stopus car"; and Tom's remark to Nick that Gatsby "ran over Myrtle like
you'd run over a dog. ..."
uCf. Arnold, pp. 116-117. At Myrtle's apartment her "tapestried furniture" depicts
"scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles." At Gatsby's mansion, the party
in Chap. Ill includes "dancing ... on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young
girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously,
fashionably, and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing indi
vidualistically. . . Moreover, it is surely not accidental, in so selective a novel, that
at both parties a guest is named Lucille—a further link forcing attention to parallelism and
the doubles.

THE GREAT GATSBY 523

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 The crucial Myrtle-Gatsby parallel is that which concerns their
common determination to attach themselves, at last, to their lovers.
Myrtle, at the garage, has decided to leave George for Tom, and
Gatsby, at the Plaza, has decided to take Daisy away from Tom. It
is a master stroke of plotting that arranges events so that one action
and one agent destroy the doubles, Myrtle and Gatsby. Actually, it
becomes evident, one set of doubles kills the other.19 Daisy as driver
of Gatsby's car now doubles for Tom, and when she kills Myrtle she
simultaneously kills Gatsby. Thus Myrtle now emerges as a "ghastly
harbinger of death," which Otto Rank identifies as one of the double's
great roles.20 The coming of Gatsby's own actual death, thus antici
pated and already vicariously enacted by his double, is merely a matter
of time, and it is fitting that the murderer of Gatsby—Myrtle's hus
band George—be sent to finish the working out of the symmetrical
plot by Daisy's double, her husband Tom.
The compactness and constriction of The Great Gatsby required
the use of such an economical technical device as the parallel
double. It must very likely have come to Fitzgerald from Conrad.
But its effects, not the least of which is dramatic intensity, must have
derived from Henry James. Myrtle, a double-figure in Fitzgerald's
splendid carpet, functions as a source of Jamesian operative irony,
indicating not only Gatsby's basic nature but (that possible other
case) what, without "his Platonic conception of himself," he might
have remained and so not "turned out all right at the end." "If
he'd of lived," his father proudly says, "he'd of been a great man."
As Gatsby's double, as the vulgar suppressed self, Myrtle is an
image of the road not taken by Gatsby.21 The ironic contrast between
the doubles finally redounds to Gatsby's favor, of course, or else
Fitzgerald's novel would have failed. Because of his "heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life" and his "creative passion," Gatsby
does "get ahead." After scaling walls and attaining poise at last,
he transcends, to a peculiar eminence, the primitively impassioned
and lurid cheapness that keeps Myrtle forever earthbound, kneeling
in dust. She, then, is the device by which, through paralleling and
doubling, we can accurately align our vision of Gatsby; by which,
without exaggeration, we can truly gauge and evaluate his greatness.

»Extremely effective and reminiscent, ironically, of the numerous parties that have
gone before is the scene, framed by a window, of Tom and Daisy over chicken and ale In
their kitchen after Daisy has killed Myrtle: "There was an unmistakable air of natural
intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said they were conspiring together."
These likes, not seen alone together before, reunite after careless destruction in their money
and "secret society," letting "other people clean up the mess they had made."
"> Quoted in Guerard, "Concepts of the Double," p. 10.
11 Cf. Guerard, "Concepts of the Double," p. 10.

524

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