Hollow Men, Eyes, and Oxymorons
A few of the main characters from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have much in common with T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Many of the characters Fitzgerald introduces in the first few chapters bear strong connections to many parts of Eliot’s work. These characters are Tom and Daisy Buchanan, as well as Myrtle Wilson. To begin with, they strongly resemble the hollow men described in the first stanza of “The Hollow Men.” They can also be connected to the eyes Eliot refers to repeatedly throughout the poem, which represent the conflicts that the aforementioned characters constantly and deliberately avoid. Finally, these characters strongly relate to the oxymorons and contradictions in the poem, which represent the difference between the façade these people try to project and who they really are.
The first stanza of “The Hollow Men” describes “the hollow men…the stuffed men…headpiece filled with straw.” Tom, Daisy, and Myrtle resemble these hollow, stuffed men in the sense that their heads are stuffed with “sophistication” and things of that nature which society tells them are important. There are many examples of this in the first chapter when Nick visits the Buchanans at their house. Nick sums up the sort of unimportant babble they undergo constantly when he says, “Sometimes she [Daisy] and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire” (17). There is no question that these people are high-class and “sophisticated,” yet their heads are filled with unimportant nonsense and gossip, of no real use to any of them. They can have pretty much anything they desire, yet they are just as hollow, if not more so, than a bottom-of-the-barrel, low class person. And there is no doubt that they are more stuffed.
