The Great Gatsby & the Transformations of Space-Time

Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative and the New Physics of Albert Einstein

Raymond M. Vince
Dreams , Eden, & the Loss of Innocence
24 min readDec 28, 2014

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By Raymond M. Vince, MA, MTh, MSc, PhD.

The problematic nature of space, time, and narrative is woven into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). In Bruccoli’s phrase, this novel is “time-haunted,” dealing with time and the loss and reshaping of memory (10–12). There is a tension between human time as we perceive it and time in a more cosmic, invariant sense. There is a sense of dislocation: a disturbing feeling that we are experiencing Time Out of Joint, the title of the 1959 novel by Philip K. Dick, but also of course an allusion to Hamlet’s more famous words from Shakespeare,

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right” (Hamlet I, 5, 188).

But this is not simply Hamlet’s problem, nor Fitzgerald’s. This has become our problem also. Both time and space have been transformed throughout history. But in particular, dramatic transformations occurred early in the twentieth century, linked in large part with the name of Albert Einstein. They form part of the matrix for the development of the artistic revolutiond we call Modernism and for new kinds of narrative — including The Great Gatsby. So, let me take you on a strange journey!

1. Clocks, Calendars, and Anomalies

Not all problems in space-time are due to Einstein and the new physics. The measurement of time had always been problematic for mankind — especially since it was realized that the lunar month of 29.5 days would never easily divide into the solar year of about 365 days. In 45 BC Julius Caesar gave us a revised and quite accurate calendar, yet it had its problems. These were largely corrected by the Gregorian Calendar of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. However, Protestant Great Britain and the American colonies was in no mood to adopt this “popish” measurement of time, at least not until 1752. Then, by Act of Parliament “Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday September 14” (Duncan 225). In reaction, there were bloody riots in the streets, with people crying, “Give us back our eleven days!” Gradually, the calendar changes were more or less accepted.

The accurate measurement of space has also been problematic. While global lines of latitude are fairly straightforward — the Equator and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn have been known for centuries — the accurate calculation of longitude — the North-South lines — proved to be one of the great scientific challenges of the ages.

To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude — at the very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation (Sobel and Andrews 7).

It sounds easy, but proved almost insoluble, until John Harrison (1693–1776) and others invented accurate chronometers in the decades leading up to the year 1776. But even though such accurate clocks slowly became available, each person still occupied his or her own private time. Despite Newton’s axioms of absolute space and time, these were really only philosophical ideals, not practical realities. But two further inventions were to change this: the railroad and the telegraph.

A useful work, which outlines how modernity is inescapably linked with our measurement of time, is Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks and Poincarés Maps (2003). Galison describes how, in the nineteenth century, the anarchy in space and time was gradually brought to order with a series of international conventions, such as the Convention of the Meter in 1875. To measure space, we now had the standard meter, yet each village, city, and railroad still had its own time. Eventually, in 1884 the World Time Conference set Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, agreeing — despite the opposition of the French — that Greenwich Mean Time would provide the basis for the standardization of time. The world of modernity was becoming a world of synchronized clocks.

The classical physics of Sir Isaac Newton had been the controlling framework of the Age of Reason, indeed well into the nineteenth century. As many have done, we could call that framework the clockwork universe. Yet towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was becoming apparent that Newton’s classical synthesis was beginning to break down, particularly over the nature of light and the concept of the ether. Anomalies were discovered; cracks appeared in Newton’s physics — which had been the best-confirmed scientific theory of all time. The clockwork universe was becoming more than a little fuzzy.

There were several forerunners to Einstein, especially Michelson and Morley — who in a beautiful experiment in 1887 found to their amazement that the speed of light was the same whatever the speed and orientation of the observer. Other forerunners were Poincaré, Lorentz, and FitzGerald. Fitzgerald, you say? This was not F. Scott Fitzgerald the American novelist but the Irish physicist, George FitzGerald. In response to the strange anomaly of the Michelson-Morley experiment, both Lorentz and FitzGerald, apparently independently and in the 1890s, suggested that:

Bodies moving through the ether would contract and that clocks would slow down … such that people would measure the same speed for light, no matter how they were moving with respect to the ether (Hawking 6).

Lorentz and FitzGerald were even able to predict by how much space and time would change, the so-called Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction. But before Einstein neither they nor anybody else had any explanation for this strange anomaly. Their Contraction was simply an ad hoc equation: it was a fudge factor that, mysteriously, seemed to give the right answer.

So, by 1875 the meter had been standardized to an incredible accuracy. In 1884 standard time had been agreed upon. But now — a mere two decades later — meters are changing length, standard clocks are obviously not standard. What on earth (or in the heavens) was happening? Well might Hamlet speak for us when he said, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right”

2. Einstein’s Transformations of Space-Time

Along comes Albert Einstein. In 1902 he began work at the Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland as Patent Examiner, Second Class. While working there, he changed our concepts of space and time.

Galison tells us, “Every day he had to walk past the great clock towers residing over Bern, their time coordinated” (244). Many of the patents that crossed Einstein’s desk were on clocks, chronometers, and problems of synchronicity. His feet were firmly planted in the concrete world of modern clocks. But Einstein was to revolutionize physics and transform our concepts of space, time, matter, and energy. These transformations have shaped our modern world—with its smart phones, computers, nuclear power, GPS, the Web, and so much of our technology.

In his “miraculous year” of 1905, Einstein published five articles in the famous scientific journal Annalen der Physik. These articles initiated not one but two major revolutions. In his foreword to an edition of Einstein’s 1905 papers, Roger Penrose describes these two revolutions:

The first of these upturned our conceptions of space and time, combining the two into what we now call space-time, a space-time which is found to be subtly curved in a way that gives rise to that long-familiar, omnipresent but mysterious phenomenon of gravity. The second of these revolutions completely changed the way in which we understand the nature of matter and radiation, giving us a picture of reality in which particles behave like waves and waves like particles, where our normal physical descriptions become subject to essential uncertainties, and where individual objects can manifest themselves in several places at the same time. We have come to use the term “relativity” to encompass the first of these revolutions and “quantum theory” to encompass the second. Both have now been observationally confirmed to a precision unprecedented in scientific history (Penrose vii).

In response to the anomalies about the ether, Einstein had taken a bold step. If we could not detect the ether, then the idea was redundant. So why keep it? His revolutionary postulate was that the speed of light was independent of our motion, and the same for any observer. That suggests that his theory was as much about invariance — the lack of relativity — as it was about relativity. Yet, for good or ill, the name Relativity has stuck. So, what do we infer from this? In his recent book, The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), Stephen Hawking puts it this way:

This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks would measure. Instead, everyone would have his or her own personal time. The times of two people would agree if the people were at rest with respect to each other, but not if they were moving (Hawking 9).

Can you see the irony? For millennia, human beings experienced their own personal time. Then, in 1884, the World Time Conference defines universal time. But two decades later, in his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein abolishes universal time and returns us to our own personal clocks.

Then, around 1915-1917, Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity incorporating gravity. He showed that space-time is curved in strange and complex ways, described by non-Euclidean geometries. Not only had the physics of Newton been dethroned; so also had the geometry of Euclid. Our deepest ideas and perceptions of space & time, of matter and energy, were being transformed.

But are they “merely” theories, as some who are afraid of Science would suggest? Do his Special and General Theories have any practical import? Have they really changed our world or is this only hyperbole?

In fact, Einstein suggested that his General Theory could be tested during a total eclipse of the sun—by observing the bending of distant starlight in a strong gravitational field. Moreover, he predicted an exact amount of such bending. During the horrors of the 1914–1918 Great War, such tests , as we might imagine, were impossible. But in May 1919 two British expeditions traveled across the world to make their observations. Their observations during the eclipse corroborated Einstein’s predictions.

Therefore, on November 6, 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, Einstein’s prediction and his theory were confirmed. Joseph Thompson, in the chair, pronounced, in effect, the canonization of Einstein to the world, saying,

“This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day […] The result [is] one of the highest achievement of human thought” (Pais 305).

Another of Einstein’s 1905 papers, on Brownian motion, dealt with thermodynamics, the second law of which concerns entropy, a scientific paradigm that has probably had more effect on literature and culture than relativity. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was increasing concern about the “heat death of the universe.” Such concern probably helped to contribute to the pessimism of the fin de siècle, the end of the age.

As Kimball reminds us, the pervasive influence of entropy in the general culture seems somewhat ironic in the light of C. P. Snow’s use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in his 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture as a kind of shibboleth to distinguish between enlightened scientists and benighted literary intellectuals. Originally formulated in 1850 by Rudolf Clausius, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that,

A spontaneous process is always accompanied by an increase of entropy of the system and its surroundings (Glasstone & Lewis 103).

That means that in a spontaneous process, while some energy is available, some is inaccessible. This inaccessible energy is represented by the new concept of entropy. Ludwig Boltzmann added to this idea that entropy is a measure of the chaos of a system, and is related to the probability of different states. Since chaotic states will be more probable than ordered ones, the natural tendency will be for a system to run down or to increase in entropy. There is no free lunch: no process or “heat engine” is perfect. Some energy will always be inaccessible, unavailable.

But what does this have to do with time? It was Arthur Eddington who, in 1928, described the Second Law as occupying the “supreme position” among the laws of nature, for it alone revealed what he called time’s arrow. Only the Second Law, he said, reveals the direction of time. Entropy seems to suggest that despite our best efforts, time is irreversible and the universe is running down, a pessimistic vision of time expressed in Oswald’s Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), which Scott Fitzgerald claims to have read.

Before turning to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, let me summarize so far. These transformations in space and time — describable as a changing series of paradigms — have included the long struggle for a true calendar, the development of accurate clocks to measure space in terms of longitude, the international agreement that divided geographical space into standard time zones, the formulation of entropy as time’s arrow with the sobering recognition that the universe was running down, and Einstein’s dramatic denial of absolute space and time and his revolutionary development of a four-dimensional curved space-time. It seems that both space and time are, indeed, out of joint!

3. The Great Gatsby, Space, and the American Dream

Like much of American literature, The Great Gatsby (1925) is in part a reinterpretation of the American Dream. That dream, born in 17th and 18th century ideas of the New Eden and the quest for a New World, evolves in Fitzgerald’s work between various spatial poles: between old world and new world, between East and West, and between home and lack-of-home. Fitzgerald’s novel is a retelling of the story of America, but in an ironic tone and with multiple viewpoints.

The story begins, as Nick tells us, with Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness” (Fitzgerald 6), but ends with Gatsby’s death, on a note of nostalgia and loss, which can be seen in terms of degradation, chaos, and increasing entropy. Yet Fitzgerald the romantic ends The Great Gatsby on a note of muted optimism. Like Hemingway’s ironic ending to The Sun Also Rises (1926), Fitzgerald’s novel concludes with a wistful reaffirmation of the original dream.

The story is also both a quest and a romance, personified in the figure of Gatsby and his tragic dream of Daisy, and told by a rather modernist troubadour, Nick Carraway. Gatsby is, in Bloom’s words, “the American hero of romance, a vulnerable quester whose fate has the aesthetic dignity of the romance mode at its strongest” (Bloom 1). Like all quests, The Great Gatsby is in part mythological and in part placed within the space-time world. Because of this double character, we can see the quest — the romance — as a kind of warping of time and space, a distortion of both history and geography. As Stallman puts it, Gatsby

“resides only particularly at West Egg, for he exists simultaneously on two planes: the mythic or the impersonal and the human, the immaterial and the real” (56).

In The Great Gatsby, space is partly real and partly symbolic, expressed — as I mentioned before — in the polarities of old world and new, East and West, home and lack-of-home. This is not really the medieval world of Faerie. Yet it is not quite the real world of the 20th century either.

But then — in the light of the strange space-time transformations of relativity and quantum mechanics — perhaps it is more accurate to say that reality itself is a very problematic concept in the 20th century. Perhaps, as Dr. Phil Sipiora would say, we should always write it “reality.” This is so not only in the soft world of literature, it is equally so in the hard world of modern physics. We accept hardheaded physicist Roger Penrose giving us:

A picture of reality in which particles behave like waves and waves like particles, where our normal physical descriptions become subject to essential uncertainties, and where individual objects can manifest themselves in several places at the same time (Penrose vii)

Can we not accept romantic storyteller Scott Fitzgerald when he has Gatsby placing San Francisco in the “middle-west”(Fitzgerald 69–70)? Neither Gatsby nor Fitzgerald need necessarily to be lying — or geographically challenged. Are we not in a realm of distorted space-time, a sort of waking dream, a world in which West is both a term of geography and also a mythical symbol for the American Dream — the moving frontier that in the 17th century began a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and by the time of Turner’s famous 1893 paper had reached the Pacific? As David Weber has said, “For much of this century, Frederick Turner’s frontier thesis has been regarded as a most useful, if not the most useful, concept for understanding the distinctive features of American civilization” (66).

While some historians now question the relevance of Turner’s thesis, the concept of frontier does usefully bring together these spatial polarities of Fitzgerald’s American Dream: old and new world, East and West, home and lack-of-home. In the poignant ending to The Great Gatsby, Nick reflects on the first of these polarities: the old and new world,

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailor’s eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder (Fitzgerald 189)

The tragedy of The Great Gatsby is that such “capacity for wonder” is now in part transmuted into the ash heaps and decadence of the East. A few pages earlier, Nick had thought of his home back in the Midwest — the home also of Gatsby and the other characters,

That’s my middle-west — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow [….] I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all –Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly inadaptable to the Eastern life (184).

So this novel is after all, according to Nick, “a story of the West.” In contrast, the East, while possessing a kind of excitement, has “a quality of distortion” (185), a dreamlike character. Yet even the fresh, original, world, as seen by those first Dutch sailors, was a kind of illusion that had “pandered” to their desires, like naïve strangers entering the world of Faerie. As Nick or Fitzgerald had suggested, “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent” (Fitzgerald 189).

What of the distinction between home and lack-of-home? In many ways, there is an absence of genuine home in The Great Gatsby. Family, houses, personal identity, cultural roots, possessions are the elements that usually provide a sense and experience of home — yet all these elements are problematic in this novel. As space and time become distorted, so the sense of home may disappear.

Home, after all, is our first and deepest reference point in space-time. As Nick tells us at the beginning, “Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe” (7). Gatsby’s house is never a home: after Gatsby’s death, it is hardly even a house. It reverts to being, in Nick’s words, “that huge incoherent failure of a house once more” (Fitzgerald 188). Even in life, Gatsby’s possessions had seemed empty; his identity a construct of others, his family and cultural roots an illusion. Yet, what is true of Gatsby seems scarcely less true of Nick and the other characters.

Is this sense of loneliness and estrangement — this longing for home — in some fashion endemic to the American Dream? In an interesting article on The Great Gatsby and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, D. G. Kehl writes of such longing — such homesickness — in these terms,

A pervasive quality of modern American literature, but one which has received hardly a critical nod, is longing, homesickness, nostalgia. “Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest [235],” Carson McCullers wrote in 1940, referring specifically to Thomas Wolfe as being “maddened by unfocussed longing” [239]. More than simple longing or nostalgia, however, and lacking a sufficiently expressive English term, this quality can best be characterized by the German term Sehnsucht (a compound of the verb sehnen, “to long for,” and the noun sucht, “addiction), an intense addiction of and to longing (310).

The longing that Gatsby has for his beloved, Daisy, is symbolic of a deeper longing, a hunger of the soul.[15] As Kehl says, “Daisy is the epitome of Gatsby’s deeper yearning for that which he himself cannot identify” (316).

4. Time, Order, and Entropy

Such a longing — at least in Gatsby’s case — seems also to be a desire to evade the limitations of time: to avoid the irreversibility of the “arrow of time,” expressed in the concept of entropy. It is a longing not merely to fashion a new persona but to create a new space-time world. It is a desire to rewrite history, which brings us to the concept of time in The Great Gatsby. When Nick warns Gatsby that the past cannot be repeated, Gatsby replies,

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow if his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” (116–117).

Fitzgerald’s story is permeated by the struggle against time. Bruccoli, citing over 450 time words, has said that from beginning to end the novel is “time-haunted” (11). After character names, the second most frequent noun is the word time itself, occurring 87 times (Bruccoli 11). When in Chapter 5 Gatsby and Daisy meet again, Gatsby nearly knocks the clock off Nick’s mantelpiece (Fitzgerald 91). Bruccoli comments, “The irony of this symbolism may be too blatant. Gatsby, the time defier, rescues a defunct timepiece, but time will put him back in place” (11). Later, when touring Gatsby’s house, thee three of them listen to Klipspringer playing the piano: the lyrics are “in the meantime, / In between time” (101). Stallman, citing these lyrics, believes that Gatsby lives in a “confused time-world” (56).

What is defined here is a hole in time. It is this empty in-between time that Fitzgerald renders in The Great Gatsby, that void of the corrupted present canceled out by the corrupted past–America’s as well as Gatsby’s. Gatsby has violated time [….] What more colossal hubris can “a son of God” commit than to tinker with the temporal order of the universe! To fix time and reinstate thus the past in the present (as though the interim were unreckoned and life has passed unclocked), to wipe the slate clean and begin anew–that is Gatsby’s illusion (57).

Tom’s meanderings about the sun getting hotter, or is it getting colder, seem to allude to the irreversibility of time and the “heat death of the universe,” reflecting perhaps the pessimism of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918).

Robert Scott sees literature repeatedly “making concrete” the tragic truth of life and death symbolized by the concept of entropy: that “moments, chances, choices” in the end are lost in time (81). We try to save the good moments from such loss, but their very value comes from our inability — ultimately — to preserve such moments unchanged. Scott continues,

In The Great Gatsby, we see the Second Law of Thermodynamics made concrete by examples of the corrupting effects of time and wealth, which disorganize and then destroy the ecology, the complex sensitive sets of relationships on which life and hope depend (81).

That is the truth that Gatsby seems unable to accept, “we see what Gatsby does not want to see, that no amount of faith or hope will change the way the world works” (Scott 82). Scott cites Fitzgerald’s description of the valley of ashes as “ashheaps” as evidence that he was alluding to Henry Adams’ The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, published in 1919. In this work, Adams used the Second Law of Thermodynamics to suggest that the “ash-heap” of the universe “is constantly increasing in size” — the universe is running down, time’s arrow is irreversible.

In its transformations of time, The Great Gatsby is also one of the archetypal modernist narratives, attempting to come to terms with the desire to “make it new.” Fitzgerald’s novel powerfully evokes a new reality — a reality shaped by the traumas of the Great War and the intellectual and social transformations that mark our modern world. Among those transformations is the new physics of Einstein — a set of paradigms that has redefined our views of space and time, matter and energy. Michael H. Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2002) has explored some of the relationships between British modernist literature and the new physics in a very cogent way, but far less attention has been paid to the American context of authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Moreover, while the concept of time in literature seems to have adequately surveyed in works by Meyerhoff, Lukacs, Kern, and many others, a recent article by Mark Hama in South Atlantic Review has argued strongly that so many of these discussions use a simplistic dualism between “subjective” time and “objective” time.[17] Hama believes that Henry James in The Ambassadors well expressed the complexity of “modern time,” and in so doing,

Underscores the inadequacy of the dualistic model of time prevalent in modernist time-criticism over the past century, a model which posits time as an irreconcilable battle between subjective and objective time (10)

5. Conclusions

Hama’s argument is timely. While introductory works on the novel, for example, by Kershner and Matz have quite useful discussions of time and space in the modern novel, more advanced works such as Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, (Volume Two, 1985) and Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction (1983) seem blissfully unaware of any 20th century developments in our concepts of space and time. We do need to bring far greater sophistication to our discussions of narrative and the transformations in space-time they reflect.

As Thomas Kuhn argued in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the transformation from “a Newtonian to a relativistic universe was one of the most profound changes in ‘scientific’ paradigms that history offers” (Kershner 57). So how can we understand Fitzgerald’s temporal innovations in the light of Einstein? What are the relationships between the metaphors of modernist literature and the new physics? If we as modern people have, at least tacitly and albeit with some conceptual difficulty, moved from a Newtonian paradigm of absolute space and time to Einstein’s strange paradigm of a space-time continuum, what implications should this have for our current readings of The Great Gatsby, and for our understanding of narrative?

Let me offer three brief suggestions. First, a simplistic application of “relativism” to all and sundry has nothing to do with Einstein’s theory. His aim was to find that which was invariant ­­– that which did not change — so as to better appreciate that which did. Is there something invariant in narrative? Is the role of the observer in science in any way commensurate with multiple viewpoints, stream of consciousness, or focalization in literature?

Secondly, literature has always been influenced by scientific and cultural paradigms — Darwinism in American Naturalism, entropy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1925) and Everett’s many worlds interpretation of quantum theory (1957) in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) come to mind. Writers have often exhibited great sophistication in dealing with such scientific ideas, and translating them into cultural terms. What are needed are more historical and theoretical treatments of such ideas, with intelligent comparisons of metaphor in both science and in literature.

Thirdly, we need to move beyond the simplistic dualism of time — subjective and objective or private and public. Even a brief examination of the complexities of calendar and clock shows us the inadequacy of such binary thinking, let alone adding the mysteries of relativity and quantum mechanics. Works like James Joyce Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita, and the works of Pynchon and Dick, among many others, exhibit great subtly and innovation in narrative form in space-time, as does modern cinema. Although often marginalized, Science Fiction is also willing to explore the complexities of time, narrative, and metafiction. The Great Gatsby, a fascinating blend of quest and romance, works at many conceptual levels to reinterpret the American Dream, and thereby provides a Modernist meditation on the complexities and paradoxes of space, time, and narrative fiction.

Raymond M. Vince / © 28 December 2014

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Note

This paper was originally written in 2005, and presented at the Eighth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference at Hofstra University, New York, 14–16 April, 2005. An expanded and revised version was published as “The Great Gatsby and Transformations in Space-Time: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative and the New Physics of Einstein” in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 86–108. I wish to thank Jackson R. Bryer, at that time a co-editor of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, for his considerable help and encouragement in that 2006 published version.

For online publication here in Medium.com, this paper has been abbreviated and the footnotes removed. Some of the Works Cited below refer to sources in those footnotes, but since the sources record the thinking that went into my original paper, I have left them in.

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Raymond M. Vince
Dreams , Eden, & the Loss of Innocence

I am a writer, editor, & teacher, living in Florida. My fields are American Literature, Writing, Christian Spirituality, Contemporary Science, & War Studies.