great gatsby and great ambivalence

am·biv·a·lence

amˈbiv(ə)lən(t)s/

the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.

We escape to books and films because reality is more disappointing than we would like it to be. In children's novels, there is a clear hero and villain, a princess and a witch, a wolf and a little red riding hood. Then there is a slightly more complex level that you find in YA novels and popular movies, wherein characters can have more than one dimension (for depth!). But at the end of the day, there is still a clear line drawn between good and evil, so that you know who to root for. Good always wins. That is the nature of much of popular teen media.

But in real life, we don't often deal with nefarious villains. Only other, ordinary people.

In the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, we can see his ambivalence towards the culture of the 1920s displayed in the narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick describes himself as someone who "withholds judgements", and yet his judgements are littered all throughout the novel. They are quite literally everywhere. I guess that is the job of the narrator, to supply his judgments to make the story more interesting. Regardless, Nick likes to cast himself as the morally superior man, looking upon all the distasteful actions of the consumerist society. Yet, he finds himself drawn in by Gatsby, the embodiment of every ideal he stands against. In Nick's eyes, Gatsby is a good person despite his unsavory qualities. My question is, how do you even characterize a good person?

Is it by their beliefs? Their actions? A combination of the two? Are we supposed to form a ledger of all their traits and weigh them on a scale of good and bad? Or is it just an arbitrary judgement we make based on the interactions we've had with them? What then, makes these judgements credible in any manner? Can we say that we are good enough of people to render them credible?

Who even knows? Not me. Lol!

Anyway, we are always surrounded by those we consider unsavory. They say and do things that we don't agree with, they hurt our feelings and our friends, so we make villains out of them, placing ourselves on opposite sides. We try to draw that line of good and evil that we've seen in the movies. It's more comfortable to create an "us-versus-them" situation, to protect ourselves, rather than to just forgive the other person or try to understand them. In other words, it's easy to deal with people we don't like.

What's difficult is when we discover that the people on the "us" side are just as human as people on the "them" side. When our own family and friends hurt us, how can we protect ourselves from them? The truth is, the people closest to us are the ones that hurt us the most. We spend all our time with them, and naturally we come to see every facet of them. Especially the ones that are not so romantic. They are the ones that know how to upset us in the worst way, and when conflict strikes, they often do. They are also selfish, also arrogant, also hypocritical. They also do things we don't like. In fact, they are often all the things we dislike about other people. And yet we choose to forgive them. We want their approval, we want to spend time with them-- we want to like them even though they hurt us, even though we dislike them at times. Everyone does this. We are enamored with people that arent morally upstanding in any way. Even the people we dislike the most, the ones we deem the worst of the worst, have those who are on their side.

Maybe it's because we feel it is our duty to make exceptions for the people we love, and that's the reason we call it "unconditional". Or maybe, we are more afraid of being alone than we are of being hurt.

This is something I have had to grapple with as I've grown older, as the grayness of the world has made itself more and more apparent to me. This ambivalence has become a part of me, in a way. It's a sticky, dull feeling, like overchewed gum that lost its flavor thirty minutes ago. But I wouldn't say that viewing life in black and white would be much better either.

The nature of fictional characters is to be fictional. They are idealized versions of us. So the nature of humans is to be realized, to see ourselves in both the good guys and the bad guys, because that is who we are.

This post probably reads more like a question and less like an opinion, but that's because I am still struggling to figure out my feelings on this issue. Morality has always been something that's eluded me. After all the one-am chats I've had with my friends on whether this person or that person was doing the right thing or not, I'd leave feeling more lost than I was before. Perhaps there will be an answer for me, somewhere in the future. Perhaps I'll find it in the Great Gatsby, in those golden-monocled eyes that Nick describes so extensively...but likely not. I have a feeling that it might take me a whole lifetime, and another feeling that there is simply no answer at all.