In my younger and more vulnerable years...

May 24, 2007 2:39 PM

"The master's body!" roared the butler into the mouthpiece. "I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it — it's far too hot to touch this noon!" What he really said was: "Yes… yes… I'll see." I've always wondered what this passage from The Great Gatsby means.

To see the context, the full text is here.

posted by matthewr to Writing & Language (15 answers total)

Someone has called to inquire about the car. The butler is half-deaf, right? So he mishears the caller - "The master's body!". The narrator, who is very hot, thinks irritably to himself that it's entirely too hot to be furnishing any bodies. He imagines the butler saying so, but what the butler really said was that he would go and fetch his master.
posted by muddgirl at 3:00 PM on May 24, 2007

That's the more literal translation. I think there's something else there that refers to Christ and perhaps communion. There's an explanation in this article, I think, but I don't have access.
posted by acoutu at 3:09 PM on May 24, 2007

acouto, all that article adds is:


Nick goes on to say: "What he really
said was: 'Yes . . . Yes . . . I'll see.' "
Clearly Fitzgerald seeks to jar us into
awareness of the relationship between
seeking communion (Gatsby's purpose
in visiting Daisy) and the "master's
body," which has been in "hell."
posted by vacapinta at 3:15 PM on May 24, 2007

mudgirl, I'm confused by your interpretation. Via my reading, the butler picked up the phone and said, "Yes... yes... I'll see." Nick, the narrator, has a fleeting fantasy that instead of "Yes... yes... I'll see," the butlers says something much more sinister and pulp-fictionesque.

For a second, Nick tries to fool the reader into believing the more romantic version, but Nick is a cynic (or at least he thinks he is), and he undercuts his own trick by exposing the mundane reality in the next sentence. "Gatsby" is full of these sorts of clashes between romance and hum-drum (Jay Gatz vs. Jay Gatsby, etc.)

The effect is similar to this...

A: What did you do today?

B: I climbed Mt. Everest, rescued a princess and sunk twelve U-boats ... actually, I sat at home, waiting for the plumber.
posted by grumblebee at 3:25 PM on May 24, 2007 [2 favorites]

hmmm, I would be inclined to agree with you, grumblebee, except the two sentences are actually in different paragraphs like so:

"The master's body!" roared the butler into the mouthpiece.

"I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it — it's far too hot to touch this noon!"

Leads me to believe that they aren't part of the same thought. I do agree re: romanticising the situation - it's been a while since I read the whole book, so I was trying to avoid actual literary criticism.
posted by muddgirl at 3:32 PM on May 24, 2007

So you think he ACTUALLY said...

"The master's body! Yes... Yes... I'll see."

But Nick changed it to...

"The master's body! I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it -- it's far too hot to touch this noon!"

?
posted by grumblebee at 3:36 PM on May 24, 2007

No. He actually said the first part. Fitzgerald tricks you into thinking the butler said the second, then admits he really said the first part.
posted by acoutu at 3:41 PM on May 24, 2007

I assumed the conversation was:

Caller: "blah blah blah"
butler: "The master's body!"
Caller: "BLAH BLAH BLAH"
butler: "Yes, yes I see."

That's how I've always read it. You might be right.
posted by muddgirl at 3:42 PM on May 24, 2007

Er, by first part, I mean the sequence you quoted, Grumblebee.
posted by acoutu at 3:43 PM on May 24, 2007

Response by poster: I searched JStor before asking this, and found three articles: The Gospel of Gatsby, Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America, and The Occultism of the Text. None, as far as I can tell, explain what the passage is actually about. The first, with a spectacular misuse of the word "clearly", suggests it has a allegorical Christian meaning. The second suggests that the lines refer to "murder as a social problem and symbolic act". The third claims that the passage is an explicit manifestation of "the underlying essence [of some sort of occultism]", and proceeds to discuss the "pandeterminism of an occult shadow world".

I agree with grumblebee's interpretation, that Nick is idly imagining a dramatic, sinister scene. I'm inclined to agree that "The master's body!" is part of Nick's imagination. If not, what on earth is the butler referring to?

I wondered if there was some significance to the content of the fantasy (the master's body being too hot to furnish), that helped it make more sense (like it being a reference to another book, or something).
posted by matthewr at 3:43 PM on May 24, 2007

Response by poster: muddgirl: "except the two sentences are actually in different paragraphs"

They aren't, in my offline Penguin edition.
posted by matthewr at 3:48 PM on May 24, 2007

Well, I thought the suggestion was that the master's body was in hell, although it was pretty hot in reality. You have that mixed up with the commutation ticket, which kind of pulls in the idea of punishment. I may be out to lunch, though.
posted by acoutu at 4:01 PM on May 24, 2007

Could the next part shed light on this:

He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take our stiff straw hats.
"Madame expects you in the salon!" he cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

The exclamation point after salon makes it seem plausible (to me) that the butler said out loud:

"The master's body! Yes... Yes... I'll see."

which Nick momentarily imagined as:

"The master's body! I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it -- it's far too hot to touch this noon!"
posted by sharkfu at 6:02 PM on May 24, 2007

By making Gatsby's original name Gatz, I thought Fitzgerald meant to imply that Gatsby was a Jew trying to pass, but here is an article saying it's an ambiguous name and that Fitzgerald chose it for that.

I don't know where the idea that Gatsby was seeking communion from Daisy comes from in the book, as alluded to in the quotation in vacapinta's comment, but it's interesting that Nick sees and hears a National Biscuit Company factory first thing after passing through a dark tunnel (suggesting a trip to the underworld) into the (shadowless?) noon of extreme heat. That the master's body might be "far too hot to touch" does seem to place Tom at least among the demons, if not at their head.

Another intriguing religious reference in this passage is the description of Daisy and Jordan as "silver idols," which has an odd resonance with Daisy's voice, so famously full of money, as well as the Golden Calf, and tempts me to think of Lilith and Eve (recall that Jordan is an inveterate cheat at golf), and which is crowned by a very strange reference to Daisy's little girl: "Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before," which appears to deny the girl's very humanity.
posted by jamjam at 6:26 PM on May 24, 2007

Nick was lamely joking that Tom was dead. I think that he wants to see Daisy and Gatsby together.
posted by frecklefaerie at 9:32 AM on May 25, 2007