the end, Tudy ’ s attraction to Riccard remains unplumbed, and Tom ’ s fear that his
love for her may be more paternal than romantic passes without resolution. As such,
“ Image on the Heart ” suggests Fitzgerald was conglomerating familiar themes and
motifs instead of molding them to a structure that could give them a unifi ed and
balanced shape. The story confi rms a general criticism made by Henry Dan Piper:
“ Practically all of [Fitzgerald ’ s] poorer stories suffer from the burden of too much
plot ” (171).
In his dependency upon storyline to instill a sense of drive and purpose in his short
fi ction, Fitzgerald stands apart from the main thrust of modernism, which tended to
fragment story structure into vignettes or slices of life that emphasize one or more of
the parts of the Freytag structure, but rarely the whole. Hemingway ’ s celebrated
technique of omission, for example, does not do away with plot so much as it is apt
to do away with climax, so that a story consists entirely of either exposition or rising
confl ict. In his earliest successful experiment in this approach, “ Out of Season ” (1923),
an expatriate couple bickers over an Italian fi shing guide who badgers the husband
into contracting his services ( Short Stories 135 – 9). There is no explanation for why
these Americans are abroad, nor any real sense of what is causing the domestic discord
in their dialogue. Much later, in the posthumously published A Moveable Feast (1964) ,
Hemingway would imply that perceptive readers could infer the climax – Peduzzi,
the guide, commits suicide (75)
–
yet nothing in the text itself hints at such a
304
Kirk Curnutt
dramatic turn of events. Instead, the text is composed of conversation that seems to
go nowhere, with its tension arising from the fact that it seems to go nowhere. Several
other classic Hemingway stories ( “ The Killers, ” “ Hills Like White Elephants ” [both
1927]) create suspense through this method, though, interestingly, the two greatest
accomplishments at the tail end of his story - writing years in the mid - 1930s ( “ The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, ” and “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro ” ) are more
Freytagian than one would expect from such a committed miniaturist. Other modern-
ists emphasized other parts of the pyramid: Gertrude Stein ’ s Three Lives (1909) and
Toomer ’ s Cane (1923) are almost entirely composed of exposition, while the epiphany
stories of James Joyce ’ s Dubliners ( 1914 ) – “ Araby ” being the most famous, of course
– unexpectedly climax without any subsequent denouement to resolve the action. Still
other authors – Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, Porter, Kay Boyle – demonstrated
their versatility by emphasizing different plot parts in different stories instead of
associating themselves exclusively with a single one.
Regardless of what particular segment of plot they focused upon, modernists who
defi ned themselves as such by virtue of their experiments in form rejected the well -
wrought story structure. This is not to deny that any number of other excellent writers
besides Fitzgerald relied upon plot. Although the
“
O. Henry
”
label had already
devolved into a pejorative description by the early 1920s, William Sydney Porter ’ s
stories reveal how effectively twist endings and foreshadowing could create internal
drama. James Branch Cabell ’ s The Line of Love (1921), Ellen Glasgow ’ s The Shadowy
Third, and Other Stories (1923), and Ring Lardner ’ s How to Write Short Stories (1924)
are three additional examples of collections whose contents are generally Freytagian.
The same can be said for the hardboiled fi ction of Dashiell Hammett that fi rst
appeared in the pulp periodical Black Mask . Although Hammett mastered the art of
producing stories that could easily be revised into novel chapters – Red Harvest (1929)
and The Maltese Falcon (1930), most famously – the free - standing short fi ction post-
humously collected in The Big Knockover (1966) demonstrates how adept he was at
climaxes and reversals. That said, unlike Fitzgerald, none of these authors was con-
sidered particularly modernistic. In the end, his use of structure might be said to
resemble most closely that of Willa Cather, whose Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920)
is wholly modernist in theme but whose stories remain heavily plotted. Like Cather,
Fitzgerald was modern more in material than in form, and though she belonged to
the older realist generation, her fi ction shares with his a marked preference for linear
development rather than the spatial depth of Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and others.
Narrative Technique, Point of View, and the Animadversions
of Direct Address
One of the more persistent criticisms to dog Fitzgerald is that he was sloppy in
what modernists deemed a major obligation of craft: maintaining the consistency of
a chosen narrative perspective – a consistency measured, moreover, by the criterion
F. Scott Fitzgerald
305
of impersonality. Modernists inherited from their realist predecessors the Jamesian
notion, best summarized by Wayne C. Booth, that fi ction ought to strive for
“
freedom from the tyranny of subjectivity,
”
an imperative that resulted in
“
the
predominant demand … for some sort of objectivity ” (67). Subjectivity and objectivity
are far from absolute terms, of course, for the most innovative of modernist narrative
techniques – the Joycean stream of consciousness – is nothing if not the quintessence
of the subjective, immersing as it does a reader into the unmediated swirl of a
character ’ s random thoughts and feelings. What Booth properly means is authorial
objectivity, which creates the appearance of narration unmediated by any agency
intervening between the reader and the character. At its crudest, this requirement
meant that writers were not to enter into the fi ction to comment upon the action,
as was habitual for early purveyors of the nineteenth - century tale such as Hawthorne.
As Morton P. Levitt succinctly puts it, the imperative of
“
Modernist Masters
”
was to create “ innovative points of view whose major purpose was to eliminate the
authorial presence within the [fi ction] and to substitute for it the presence of the
reader ” (8 – 9).
In addition to the aforementioned stream of consciousness style, a shortlist of
those innovative points of view would include: (1)
internal monologue
, a strategy
whose interiority closely resembles that of stream of consciousness but which
prefers a more structured presentation of phenomena to the stream ’ s fl agrant, free -
association collage of impressions (Mansfi eld
’
s
“
Miss Brill
”
); (2) the
camera - eye , a
rigorously externalized perspective in which the focus is on gesture and dialogue
instead of psychology (Hemingway ’ s “ The Killers ” being the classic example);
and
(3) the metafi ctional conduit , in which the narration is cast in the form of another
mode of literature, mostly commonly the theatrical script (Fitzgerald, a frustrated
playwright, employs this method in both “ The Debutante ” and “ Porcelain and
Pink ” ; after incorporating the former into This Side of Paradise , he would reemploy
the technique in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned [1922]). For all the
experimentation associated with modernism, however, the bulk of canonical stories
the movement produced are actually staged in a technique developed by that grand
master of realism, Gustave Flaubert, that has subsequently been labeled free indirect
discourse
(FID). Also known as
libre indirect
, FID presents a character
’
s innermost
thoughts and feelings in the third person. Fitzgerald ’ s “ Absolution ” (1924) offers
an effective example of this approach by capturing young Rudolph Miller ’ s mindset
as he prepares for confession: “ He must convince God that he was sorry and to do
so he must fi rst convince himself ” ( Short Stories 261). Joyce ’ s “ The Dead ” is likewise
written in this eminently fl exible narrative mode, as are several of Hemingway
’
s
Nick Adams stories – most notably, “ Indian Camp ” and “ Big Two - Hearted River ”
(both 1924).
Given how prevalent the use of free indirect discourse is throughout twentieth -
century fi ction, it should come as no surprise that many of what have come to be
considered Fitzgerald ’ s best stories employ this narratological strategy: in addition to
“ Absolution, ” “ Babylon Revisited, ” portions of “ Winter Dreams, ” “ Jacob ’ s Ladder ”
306
Kirk Curnutt
(1927), the thirteen entries in the coming - of - age sequence featuring Basil Duke Lee
and Josephine Perry that he wrote between 1928 and 1931, “ Crazy Sunday ” (1932),
and “ The Lost Decade ” (1939) all channel their drama through the perspective of a
chief protagonist (or, in the case of “ May Day, ” several protagonists) whose perceptions
are the only moral scope through which readers are allowed to view the action. Fitzger-
ald no doubt felt comfortable writing in FID for a very simple reason: its main attri-
bute is that it creates ambiguities of motive and morality that perfectly enabled the
author to plumb his ambivalence toward the ethical balance between self - control and
indulgence. In “ Babylon Revisited, ” for example, libre indirect allows Fitzgerald to
imply Charlie Wales ’ s subtle nostalgia for the days when he could tip an orchestra a
thousand francs for playing a single musical request: “ [The money] hadn ’ t been given
for nothing. … It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offer-
ing to destiny ” ( Short Stories 620).
As Karl Kroeber argues, the primary effect of free indirect discourse is to demand
a “ continuous complex intensity of response ” that requires readers to assess the moral
valence of the protagonist ’ s thoughts without benefi t of an authorial baseline. That
is, because the author is not actively commenting upon the character ’ s statements,
instructing the audience on how to interpret them, we are caught in an interpretive
bind whose confusion Kroeber nicely captures by casting it in the form of an inter-
rogative:
“
Do these words represent the character
’
s or the narrator
’
s perception?
”
(106). To put it another way, in a passage such as the one quoted above, we must ask
whether Fitzgerald wants us to agree with Charlie ’ s self - assessment and concur that
losing his family was a necessary experience that he has to undergo in order to appreci-
ate the value of what he has lost. Or we wonder whether the author injects a bit of
pretension into that “ destiny ” line, so we might appreciate the self - justifi cations that
color his remorse and cast doubt on his claims of rehabilitation. The answer is that
either answer is speculative, arrived at through interpretation, and not provided by
defi nitive textual proof. As such, FID is a device not only for engaging audiences in
the narrative but for layering it with the formalist complexity that was a hallmark of
modernism.
But if Fitzgerald proved more than profi cient in mining the narratological potential
of libre indirect , he also exhibited a marked tendency for those selfsame authorial intru-
sions that supposedly excuse readers from that
“
continuous complex intensity of
response. ” His pre - 1925 stories in particular evince the sort of storytelling chattiness
that fl outed the obligation of objectivity. An exaggerated example of this habit can
be found in “ The Jelly - Bean ” (1920), whose opening paragraphs fi nd Fitzgerald ref-
erencing his own role in the creation of the story so persistently that the plot seems
to have trouble fi nding its traction: “ Much as I desire to make [Jim Powell] an appeal-
ing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point ” ( Short
Stories 142 – 3).
One can fi nd similar if less over - the - top instances throughout several stories. The
recently rediscovered “ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ” begins with the declara-
tion that its eponymous hero was fi fty years ahead of the historical curve of health
F. Scott Fitzgerald
307
care when he was born in a hospital in 1860. Fitzgerald no sooner notes this fact than
he teases the reader with its potential irrelevance to the peculiar predicament of his
hero, who emerges from the womb in a senescent body and “ matures ” into infancy
over the course of his life: “ I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for your-
self ” ( Short Stories 159). These intrusions are not always opening gambits. In other
cases, Fitzgerald intervenes to offer moral apothegms, or simply to tell readers what
details are (and are not) important, as when he insists that “ Winter Dreams ” is not
Dexter Green ’ s biography, even if certain details that “ have nothing to do with those
dreams he had when he was young ” (the story ’ s real subject) inevitably creep into the
narration ( Short Stories 221, 233). In some cases, Fitzgerald even mocks his own repu-
tation for cashing in on his notoriety as the scribe of the Jazz Age, as when he wryly
boasts in “ Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar ” (1923) that he would like to sell this latest
fl apper love story to Hollywood ( Short Stories 238).
As taboo as such intrusions were in the avant - garde stories favored by little maga-
zines, they were perfectly at home in the commercial slicks, in which a foregrounded
relationship between authors and readers was key to establishing rapport. When
Fitzgerald appended a moral ending to a story such as “ O Russet Witch! ” he was not
pandering to the audience of Metropolitan Magazine – a moralist himself, he derived
a satisfying closure by deducing the overall import of his storylines. The gesture of
wrapping up the plot was thus extended to the audience, ensurin
g readers that they
shared a common bond of values. In the case of “ O Russet Witch! ” , that value rein-
forces a thoroughly 1920s ’ notion of carpe diem : when Merlin Grainger realizes only
too late in life that he has squandered his chances for an exciting life by choosing
dour Olive Masters over the impetuous Caroline (who actually turns out to be famous
dancer Alicia Dare), Fitzgerald summarizes his resulting regret with a short conclud-
ing paragraph from which audiences are invited to abstract a credo: “ He had angered
Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven,
where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth ” ( Tales of the Jazz
Age 238).
As “ O Russet Witch! ” suggests, even in Fitzgerald ’ s most didactic stories, his
morals were never preachy. Indeed, he was apt to phrase them as pseudo - aphorisms
rather than employ the imperative voice or invoke the same fi rst person that he used
so freely in staging the opening of tales such as “ The Jelly - Bean. ” Nor did he veer
toward the pontifi cal even when he employed the fi rst person. “ The Rich Boy ” (1925)
demonstrates how the border between objectivity and subjectivity collapses when an
unnamed narrator - observer strikes up a relationship with the reader without revealing
much information about himself: “ Let me tell you about the rich. They are different
from you and me ” ( Short Stories 318). Arguably, the mystery of the identity of this
“ I ” is more curious than the case study of aloof Anson Hunter, whose sense of supe-
riority makes him incapable of identifying with others as the narrator does. Although
“ The Rich Boy ” is a veritable case study of Fitzgerald ’ s Princeton classmate Ludlow
Fowler, his narrative strategy makes it clear that readers are not to assume that the
speaker is F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rather, his narrator enters into the fi ction just enough
308
Kirk Curnutt
to make himself a character: he meets Anson in 1917 as an aviation offi cer stationed
in Pensacola, Florida, later socializing with the young heir at the Yale Club in New
York before fi nally crossing the ocean with him as Anson expatriates to Europe after
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 67