We Whisper Together Are Quiet And Meaninglessness In The Great Gatsby

Eliot expresses the nature of American society during the Jazz Age as being meaningless, while also describing those who took part in it as “hollow.” He uses repetition throughout the poem to bury this “hollow,” image of a population into his reader’s minds and directly states in lines 6-7 that, “We whisper together…Are quiet and meaningless.” The ideas expressed in the poem very closely align with the ideas presented by Fitzgerald throughout The Great Gatsby. The Owl Eyed Man from Gatsby’s party, a seemingly random civilian who found himself in attendance at one of Gatsby’s many luxurious summer time parties is a prime example of the hollow and meaningless nature of society during the time period. While rampaging Gatsby’s library, he says

to Nick and Jordan, ““I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library,” (Fitzgerald, somewhere in chapter 2). He goes on to be a passenger in the first car accident Nick sees in West Egg. The irresponsibility and blatant lack of self-care presented by this random man perfectly embodies the nature of the Jazz Age. They drank to excess, partied all night and into the early morning in order to distract themselves from the things that actually mattered in their lives. In avoiding the harshness of their individual realities, the “hollow men,” in the poem found themselves in between Heaven and Hell upon their deaths, having worn their souls down to a point of being unrecognizable. In The Great Gatsby, the character’s represented the wealthy of America, who used their wealth to live lavishly intricate lives that ultimately left they unfulfilled. While the poem speaks more to the common man and The Great Gatsby speaks to the one percent, both are necessary components in understanding the conditions that existed during the American Jazz Age. Their recklessness and lack of care was what ultimately lead to its demise, in the form of the stock market crash that plunged the United States into the Great Depression.