On Cracking Up

So this blog post is gonna be about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, because I’m a nerd, and have nothing better to do with my time than write blog posts about class readings. Cool.

I had some mixed feelings about this essay. A few general notes first, I thought the tone and voice of the essay were much more formal than some of the other essays we’d read, and I thought some of the language was archaic and came across as a bit stuffy. None of that really bothered me. I read it while I was sitting in Grainger, and I always feel all scholarly and smart there, so I was cool with the formality. That said…

Most of the essay I really liked. And by most of the essay, I mean everything but page 34. Like we talked about in class, his metaphors and imagery are really great, and he’s got this snarkiness running throughout the essay that keeps it semi-light despite the depressing subjects.

But…. I like complaining more than I like praising, so let’s move on to the final pages, because that is where everything went off the rails for me. 

I felt as if the whole essay had been setting up a nice fall/redemption arc – he was super driven, slipped behind, cracked, struggled to regain a sense of purpose, nearly slipped into a depraved, depressed, hostile mindset , and then realized himself again, but instead the essay stops in the middle of the depraved part! He’s just like, I decided to let orphans die without lifting a finger to stop it because the world is just like that, and I really felt thrown off!

First, there was a very abrupt tone shift, as well as a shift in his voice. Like I said earlier, his tone is a bit stuffy to my modern ears, but overall he does still have a wry humor and thoughtfulness throughout the rest of the essay. But this section felt almost like someone else altogether – the narration just becomes very weird, hostile, and cold, very fast. It threw me out of the essay, just trying to figure out his thought process.

On page 525, he says “since that day I have not been able to fire a bad servant, and I am astonished and impressed by people who can. Some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone.” This is set before the tonal shift, and to me it signifies that he was the sort of person who didn’t want to punish people or make their lives harder. Even if he himself didn’t approve of that fact, that was still the person he had developed into: someone who didn’t want to hurt others for the sake of it.

But then, if you skip ahead a few pages, he completely changes. “There was a whole shaft of letters to be tipped into the waste basket when I went home … letters that wanted something for nothing.” (530) “didn’t care if the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses.” (530) “I would not so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed.” (530-1). The amazing thing is that these are only a few of the quotes I found! It seems like two separate people, one of them worn-out and exhausted but generally a good guy, and one actively cruel and cynical are fighting over the direction in which the essay should go.

Also, I just didn’t approve with the thesis on humanity that he comes to. By the end, he argues than all adults live in a stage of murky unhappiness, and that just sounds very boring to me. I’d hope when I become an adult, I keep some sense of purpose, and like…excitement to learn new things – I feel like that’s almost what qualifies you for human status, that you still interact with and are curious about the world. My least favorite part of the whole essay was the line “I felt, therefore I was.”(528). It’s sad obviously, but it also just annoyed me. He isn’t accepting his lack of humanity, as he implies. He acts as if he had no bearing over this loss of his humanity, but he is a human! We are all human! Our being humanity doesn’t slip away from us in the night – that was a conscious choice of his -- to, in his words, act “like the beady-eyed men,” (530) -- yet he tries to push the blame off of himself onto the world around him.. The fatalistic attitude combined with his literal cruelty made it so I just didn’t like the narrator as a person!

I know there’s that whole Lopate idea about honesty being more important than likeability, and that’s fine. As an essay, I think it’s very well done. But this is my blog, and I don’t want to talk about Fitzgerald’s skill at writing a personal essay. I want to talk about how he’s a horrible person!

My biggest problem with the ending wasn’t that it was badly written, or even that it didn’t make sense. I just literally disliked it. I’m the sort of person who is always trying to move forwards. If I have a problem, I want to move forward and conquer it, because I believe if I just try to stand still, I’m going to be pushed backwards instead. So by the same logic, if I read an essay entitled The Crack-Up,and the ‘crack’ is referring to a human, I would assume that there is a goal, a goal to mend the crack. Crack: Mend. Problem: Solution. But his decision to just accept it & act like this completely different person is really strange to me.

Basically, I thought the essay and the narrator were really interesting until the end when he RANDOMLY becomes all doom and gloom and suddenly becomes really unlikeable and it feels like a whole different essay.

Ohhhh….that’s why it’s called The Crack-Up, isn’t it?

Cause there’s like … a crack in the essay.

I get it.