Looking at the works of three authors studied in this course, compare and contrast how these works “search for meaning”. In your answer, consider how they wrestle with the absence of meaning and the challenge to meaning; consider also what meanings, if any, they find along the way.
...Be sure to consider themes... [and] literary techniques (imagery, form, character and plot development)


Without a doubt 20th century literature has been irrevocably changed by the drastic global events which occurred during the century. These events, namely the two world wars and the cold war, brought huge amounts of death, injustice and horror to the world, and whilst there were times of courage, faith and virtue, the general social malaise that arose from the ashes of these events is one defined by the absence of faith in our global society, particularly in the Western world.

Literature is inextricably linked with the social milieu in the modern world, ergo; it is possible to peruse important novels and works and to find in depth information about the social milieu of the time in which the literature you are reading was created. If the work is exceedingly insightful it usually does not go unnoticed for too long – three examples of insightful and popular works of literature are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hauntingly romantic book The Great Gatsby and the poetry of Philip Larkin, particularly Church Going. These works all contain questions pertaining to the meaning of life, what comes after death and what is the role of faith in our modern world. These books and poems address the aforementioned questions. The answers are noticeably different between each work due to the different personal environments of which the authors experienced in their lives, even so, the answers fundamentally share the same notion: that the absence of our faith has left us with a search to “set ourselves free from our disbelief”, and such a dream is not easy to realise because our motivations are constantly apprehended by our fear of losing the safe, cynical rationalism that keeps us from being wrong. Therefore, through critique and consideration of the works and the context surrounding the works, it is possible to formulate a solid understanding about life, death and faith from three starkly different periods and places in time.

The first and most raw and most scary place to start is with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian author and ex-prisoner of the now defunct Communist state. Solzhenitsyn holds the answer to the crisis of secular rationalism, a crisis that consumes the speaker of Larkin’s poem Church Going, in his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In this book Solzhenitsyn shows the reader that Christian Asceticism provides the path to a virtuous life away from the evils of communist, totalitarian, capitalist demons. Such demons exist in concrete vision in the life of Jay Gatsby, the loveable romantic from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Solzhenitsyn has a wise understanding about the world based on his brutal experiences in the Russian prison camps. His time away from the ‘reality’ actually allowed him to come closer to the one true reality, that is God, and through this Solzhenitsyn finds wisdom, and he so prophetically states:

Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the process loses his soul

This is exactly true. The problem with the 20th century is that consumerism, materialism, dictatorships and the quest for power almost completely consumed the socially accepted understanding of the human soul. It is the Catholic Church that upholds this understanding to this very day, even though the weight of the clammy-darkness is suffocating the beauty, faith and hope of this world. The Church stands united and strong. United and strong are perfect adjectives to use when describing Solzhenitsyn’s faith and reason, both of these faculties were united and strong in him as he lived – and this shows in his novella, One Day. The events of the 20th century turned men into mice, souls into paper-bills, and real human lives into ashes. It is both humbling and emphatic that one of the most endearing and faithful books of the 20th century was written by a prisoner of one of the most brutal regimes seen during this time.

As much as One Day humbles us, it also challenges us to try to see a more Christian life, to see the beauty in life, and to see it in the simple things… Like a piece of bread, or a smile from an inmate who is struggling just as much as you are. Solzhenitsyn understood what he wanted to write one day whilst he was working in the prison camp, he knew that he wanted to write a portrayal of “the totality of our camp existence”. He wanted to explicate a “thorough description of a single day” making sure to provide “minute detail” and to focus on “the most ordinary kind of worker”. And in the end, the book would describe a “completely unremarkable [day]”. This shows the kenotic bonds that form the meaning of One Day, it is the Christian asceticism, the Christian hope that is the strength of Shukhov. He does not need thousands of dollars to be happy, he does not need a dream-like lover; he does not need cars and big houses and parties and gossip, fame or infamy. All he needs is patience, humility, faith in God above. With these simple things Shukhov is able to stay sane and positive in one of the worst circumstances. And it is a testament to Solzhenitsyn that he too embodied the virtues of Christendom and maintained a love for Christ, faith and hope in the world even when he suffered further difficulties and set backs. Solzhenitsyn finds peace, hope and faith in the little, simple things of life just as Shukhov does in the book. And similar to how Shukhov meditates to find recourse to the sacred dimension; the reader is called to meditate upon One Day in order to find the familiar recourse. Such things we might meditate upon are the ways in which Solzhenitsyn makes the invisible visible, pulls the imperceptible into our awareness, and gives an identity to each of the starving, cold prisoners huddled in a mass. It seems simple as you read it, but the beauty of this work is that these simple notions are actually very important, because Solzhenitsyn is returning meaning back to people, and things and ideas that had their meaning stripped away from them by the evils of the Communist regime.

Humility, the highest Christian virtue, is the key to survival in the prison camp. The theme of One Day is the authoritative oppression and camp survival. We experience this theme through Shukhov’s eyes, and it is through Shukhov’s kenotic notions that he survives day to day. Such a virtue, humility, is rarely seen in The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby the reader is constantly flooded with situations taut with fear, insincerity and evil. Awkwardness and confusion abound because nobody really understands themselves or why they do the things they do. They all share the same gut-feeling, that something is wrong, that there is a puzzle-piece missing – but they try to drown out that steady thumping drown that comes from our souls with liquor, debauchery, violence, gluttony and lasciviousness. In the end, none of these things can answer the call, none of these things could ever add up to the true feeling of contentment that is found in the Church. Gatsby throws party after party trying to get the love-of-his-life’s attention, Daisy, and eventually, when she comes to his party, after meeting him again for the first time in five years awkwardly in Nick’s home, it turns out she does not appreciate the extravagance of Gatsby’s parties at all. She does not even bother to play nice, or to appreciate the fact that he has gone to some effort to impress her. She is honest, and raw, like an accountant or a bank manager when you have not paid your fees.

It is this let-down that Gatsby suffers, the eventually will kill him. He has placed all his eggs in one basket, a basket desiring of more than just the temporal motions of man, there needed to be something eternal in there, a transcendent knowledge. Faith was lacking, God was absent in his life, and in many lives of the young growing up in the 1920s. They tried to find meaning in materialistic things but the search was doomed from the beginning, and when the great depression came rolling around they were really left up a certain creek without a paddle. Philip Larkin writes about faith in his poem Church Going in a way that gives the reader a vague, post world-war II answer to a problem that existed back in the 1920s, more about that will be discussed later.

One of the first and most interesting things one should know about Fitzgerald is that he died suddenly and in obscurity, with all of his novels out of print. However, it was his death that would bring him back into the lime-light, and most importantly and most intensely; it would be primarily Gatsby that gave people a reason to raise Fitzgerald from the dead.

Gatsby is the “definitive romance of the American Dream” and this is a “concept or vision that haunts our society” according to the esteemed literature critic and professor, Harold Bloom. In Nicolas Tredell’s accurate words, Gatsby is a “relatively short work that has proven remarkably fertile”. Both Bloom and Tredell accurately explain aspects of Gatsby; the American Dream is encased within this novel, in the heart of Gatsby himself, and just as Gatsby’s life is short, so is the novel, and just as when Gatsby dies only three people turn up to his funeral, when The Great Gatsby is published it receives barely any of the positive reviews it gets today, and as such, it is when Fitzgerald dies that Gatsby truly lives.

There are many beautiful things about Gatsby and one of them is that Fitzgerald has layered this book with an immense amount of themes and imagery, so much so that it is “intricately patterned” whilst remaining “widely accessible”. Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby during the 1920s. He both lived in this time and defined it. New York, and most of the Western World, was a rich society that had braved a war and was looking for fun, laughter, love and intensity away from the battlefield and the cold churches of yesteryear. The flappers of the day, young empowered women who cut their hair short, had money, sexual power and a zest for life in all its many wonders, really took hold of the social scene. However, as much as they tried to show their zest for life, they could not shake the feeling of being ‘lost’. And fittingly, history would class these young people as the ‘Lost Generation’. And such a generation was:

A lost generation of men and women adrift in a chaotic hell of their own solipsism

The chronic lack of faith and the disorder of this generation was unsuccessfully hidden by the extravagances, relativism and debauchery of the parties, evil deals, and immoral actions prone to occur during these early years of the 1920s. Kathleen Parkinson writes that “they are members of the ‘lost generation’, but their great wealth insulates them from awareness of this”. Parkinson is correct, but it must also be acknowledged that their great wealth was lost by the time the 1930s rolled around, and the true raw, bubbling hell that had been boiling beneath the drugs, alcohol and sex finally broke the surface. This hell would embody itself in the coming atrocities of the Second World War. Before these horrors would arise, the Western World sank into a great depression. Fitzgerald understood that the thirties, not only the 1930s, but being thirty years old, meant the end of fun, the end of the good life. This is prophetically acknowledged by the fact that Gatsby starts his high and rip-roaring life in his early twenties and it he is dead by his thirties. Ironically, Fitzgerald suffers in a similar fashion, without the final nail being knocked into his coffin until he is much older, however.

Gatsby’s funeral is attended by only three people: his decrepit father, Nick Carroway the narrator, and an aged party-goer, Owl-Eyes. Owl-Eyes correctly, however harshly, understands Gatsby to be a “poor son-of-a-bitch”. This is true and we see it through Gatsby as it chronicles the life of a man constantly searching for love in such fierce ways that he is willing to turn to crime to finance his desires. He then is so disillusioned by the central fallacy of the secular materialistic society (which is the idea that it is possible to fill the hole in our souls with temporal, material, mundane, profane things. The only true way to heal this hole is through love for the eternal, love for the transcendent, love for God) it leads him to host tremendous parties every week to try and coax the girl from the green light into his backyard. Such incredible situations juxtapose strongly with the scenes from One Day. When you contrast how the characters from Gatsby dulled their senses with liquor, distracted themselves with profanity and pitifully, absent-mindedly, searched for meaning through social exchanges such as parties and mundane relationships, with the dull, painful, cold and humiliating surroundings of the Russian prison camp, it is easy to come to a decision, based upon the materials of the two situations, as to where you’d rather be. The irony is that in the end it is the Christian Asceticism that succeeds where secular and disordered materialistic values fail.

Even so, it was this fundamental illusion that Fitzgerald capitalized upon in Gatsby which made it such an immense work in the years to come. This is correctly understood by Richard Lehan:

The sense of personal destiny in the novel gives way to a sense of national destiny and that in turn to a romantic state of mind

It is the romantic vision of Gatsby that held up the American Dream and through Fitzgerald’s novel, Gatsby came to speak for a whole generation of ‘lost’ people; people that lived on hype, away from the true realities of life. Daisy is a superb example of this ‘lost’ generation, like many people of the 1920s, she had “convinced [herself] in the way that the desperate are convinced” and through this she had “averred her own sophistication” thus coming to believe her own hype.

Throughout the novel Fitzgerald employs an immense range of symbolic imagery. Take, for example, the role of the car in the novel. The cars driven by the major characters define these characters. Nick drives a “conservative” Dodge. The Buchanans, who live are wealthy but see no need to flaunt it, drive a modest blue coupe and Gatsby, the nouveau-riche man, drives an array of intricate amalgamations of windows, boxes, windshields and other mechanical bits and pieces that not only represent Gatsby, but West Egg as well.

The valley of ashes is another symbolic place. It is the place of decay and death. Death and decay are major motifs in Gatsby. There are three major areas of decay, the valley of ashes, the conflicts between humans and the decaying morality of society. As Parkinson states, these three categories are featured in a famous line spoken by Nick Carroway:

No, Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Light, and the absence of it, features as a strong and constant symbolic image throughout the book. Without a doubt, this imagery works to establish Gatsby as a novel about vision, “seeing and misseing”. There is perhaps no more obvious and stunning image than the “blue and gigantic”, god-like, eyes of Dr. T. J. Ecklberg. Always looming over the valley of ashes, sometimes obscured by a cloud of dust tossed up by a car, or a zephyr.

Stylistically, Gatsby is very similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And this is on purpose, Fitzgerald like the intense and dense imagery and symbolism of Conrad’s writing. Fitzgerald imitated one of the best and as such Gatsby is now one of the defining texts of modernism, alongside Kerouac’s On the Road, Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Wasteland.

All in all, the major theme of the novel is the absolute tragedy of a human being passionately giving their heart, soul and mind to an unworthy and perhaps evil thing. As long as the Gatsbys of our lives continue to put their hearts, minds, and souls into places other than faith, the Christian Church, and God, they will continue to fall from grace and into the inevitable depression of secular rationalism. The green light will eventually fade, or worse, it will burn them. And this is not the conclusion drawn by Gatsby, no, there is no real opinion given by Fitzgerald as to what is the right thing to do. He, as Nick Carroway, famously states at the end of the novel, in a tone of defeated honesty:

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past

Gatsby pursued a dream and was in the end defeated by reality. Through this development, the destruction of a dream, the realisation of the harsh realities of life, one can easily understand how a cynical and rationalistic approach to life would be developed as a reaction to the disordered nature of the 20th century. For some people, it is the only way they can stay sane – others turn to God, whilst these people turn to nothing, and they keep on turning, happily oblivious to what is truly out there. However, all things must come to an end, and one person who has experienced the desire to “set ourselves free from our disbelief” is Philip Larkin.