Trivia Question Answer & Winner

What famous fictional character in American literature claims to have received a military decoration from Montenegro?

Clive MacDonald very quickly answered the trivia question I posed in my last post (In the Vacuum of Belief): What famous fictional character in American literature claims to have received a military decoration from Montenegro?

The answer is Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby.

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances, which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

The narrator, Nick Carraway, doesn’t really believe that the decoration is real. And yet, maybe it is. In his zeal to accomplish as much as he can in a few short years in order to impress a girl—in this case, Daisy Buchanan (née, Daisy Fay)—it turns out that James Gatz (AKA, Jay Gatsby) has actually done quite a bit.

Here it is interesting to note Fitzgerald’s repetitive reference to Gatsby’s smile. In this instance, the narrator doubts that his smile is an expression that corresponds to the truth of a matter. Contrast it with the following reference, which strikes me as the most winning passage in all of American literature:

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

While this moment strikes me as impossible to recreate cinematically, I think that Leonardo DiCaprio did a pretty good job, though I suppose it’s possible that the affect derives mostly from the actor’s dashing good looks.