“The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. ”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Sometimes you read a piece of writing and are so touched by it that you think, “I just don’t know how they did it!”. Sometimes a good piece of writing feels like witchcraft. But sometimes a writer, like a master craftsman, dazzles their reader simply by executing an ordinary writing technique flawlessly.
Chapter Seven of The Great Gatsby is a taught high-wire performance that builds not to one but two explosive climaxes: Tom and Gatsby’s confrontation in the suite at the Plaza followed by that fatal car crash. It is an ambitious sequence of events to tackle one after the other without losing dramatic tension. But F. Scott Fitzgerald accomplishes it with aplomb. And he does it with the use of a straightforward literary device: his continual reference to the New York heat. It is simple. It is not witchcraft but it works so well.
The “broiling” heat that kicks off this chapter and so oppresses Nick in the train carriage is briefly interrupted when he joins Gatsby, Jordan and Daisy in a cool, dark room in the Buchanon’s home. These characters are in harmony with one another, there is little tension between them. However, once Tom joins them, he insists on going out onto the veranda so Nick and the reader are made to feel the warmth of the day and the brewing trouble between Daisy, Gatsby and Tom.
“Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days along-shore”.
As the day continues and the characters interact awkwardly with one another, Daisy talks incessantly about the heat: “But it’s so hot,” she insists and “everything’s so confused.” Her voice is described as struggling on “through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senselessness into forms”. Her preoccupation with the heat and her inability to stop talking about it mirrors her own stress at finding herself flanked by her husband and her lover. It likewise mimics the way in which she worsens the situation with her own actions. As Tom says, “You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
The increasingly uncomfortable characters race into the city where the heat continues to rise. Their room at the hotel is “stifling” and opening the windows admits only a "gust of hot shrubbery from the Park”. Daisy calls for more windows to be opened and when there are no more to open she calls for an axe. She is not serious but the image suggests her desperation to escape her predicament and foreshadows the violence to come.
Instead of an axe, Tom calls for drinks to be sent to their suite and this is when the scene takes another dramatic turn. Fitzgerald writes:
“As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from the ballroom below.”
Talk turns to Daisy’s own wedding and quickly sours into Tom’s interrogation of Gatsby’s past. The tension between the two men that has been broiling, “compressed” by social niceties and lies, explodes into sound: the pair finally confront one another.
After some uncomfortable back and forth, Tom takes back control of the situation and of Daisy, Gatsby, Nick and Jordan. He orders them all to drive home, commanding that Gatsby drive Daisy and demonstrating his own confidence that his wife will not leave him.
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
As they drive, the evening descends and the temperature drops. Perhaps, the reader thinks, the worst is over. But Fitzgerald does not let up. Unbeknownst to Nick, Gatsby and everyone else, Mr and Mrs Wilson are arguing. They are making a scene, Myrtle Wilson “rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting” and is hit by Gatsby’s speeding car. Though her body is “still damp with perspiration”, she has been killed, and her life is “violently extinguished”. The second explosion has taken place and the reader sits back, stunned.
Creative Writing Exercise
Using Chapter Seven to guide you, write your own scene in which the environment mimics and adds to the drama of a scene.
This could be through the use of extreme weather like heat or cold or it could be through something else like sound ( the ticking of a clock, the drip of a tap ) or some other contextual factor like the presence of a mosquito, a child or a waiter.
If you would like to read the chapter in full, you can access online copies of The Great Gatsby for free via the link below or, of course, borrow it from your library. For an onscreen example, take a look at the bottle episode of Breaking Bad entitled Fly where Walt’s mounting guilt is suggested in his hunt for a fly. And if you want to go old school you can take a look at Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene in Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 1).
Links:
The Great Gatsby: Gutenberg Ebook
Breaking Bad - Fly:
Macbeth - Out Damned Spot: