I do not know whether to trust the enneagram, and I am no expert on it, but it is compelling. Perhaps it is simply a template we force things into, a mode of understanding human nature we try to prove correct by shaping all the evidence to fit into it. Christians do this with scripture all the time, for example, and scientists do it when the scientific method is not scrupulously followed.
However, sometimes the enneagram is intriguing. It might be used as a literary tool to help us analyze how a given novel works or does not work. While reading The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, and listening to Richard Rohr’s Youtube lectures on the subject, I found myself thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I think the enneagram can help explain what constitutes the particular power of this novel–one of my favourites.
I have no idea whether Fitzgerald consciously wrote with the enneagram in mind, or whether he had even heard of it. But it seems quite possible that he intuited something about the relationship between these three numbers that gave the book a profound and solid spiritual and psychological basis. It is my contention here that Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy, the three main characters of The Great Gatsby, form not only a love triangle, but specifically what might be thought of as an enneagram love triangle in the form of 3-6-9 respectively. Each character is a fascinating study of one of these three numbers and moves in this triangle towards false consolation or disintegration rather than moving in the opposite direction, towards true consolation, integration, or redemption. It must be noted that Rohr and Ebert point out, “The game of ‘who matches whom?’ can’t be carried over to the Enneagram. There are no ‘super partners’ who automatically make a good match” (228). So I am not asserting that any of these three characters should or should not have been friends or lovers. I am saying, however, that the relationships between these three characters (plus Tom, who is also significant enneagramatically) and what those relationships mean can be elucidated by the enneagram.
First, let us take a look at the enneagram diagram as taken from page 218 of Rohr and Ebert’s book. (I have added the names of the three characters.) Note that this version of the diagram includes arrows which indicate true and false consolations. To move in the direction of the arrow is to move towards false consolation, and true consolation is found in the opposite direction (more on this shortly).
Now for the characters and their corresponding numbers.
Enneagram Three: Jay Gatsby
Gatsby is the quintessential three. The fundamental need of the three is to succeed, and this is certainly true of Gatsby, in a specifically American/capitalist fashion. He is the poor boy who became rich in a very short time, and apparently on his own pluck or efforts, unlike the Buchanans (and to a lesser extent, Nick) who are born into prosperity. Of course, Gatsby has also used illegal and likely unethical methods.
Gatsby’s dream girl may be Daisy, but his dream, his needs and energy predate his meeting of her. For it needs to be remembered of course that the enneagram is not about personality “types” or characteristics, but about needs or energies. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of threes that they are efficient and good at getting what they aim at, and Gatsby is certainly that: until the end, of course.
It is also characteristic of the three to lose him or herself. Threes characteristically do not know who they are. It is rumoured in the book that Gatsby “killed a man once” (44) and I do recall one critic at least (I do not remember who) suggesting that man is Gatsby himself. Tom, stupid as he is in a number of ways, hits upon a truth he only dimly understands (if at all) when he calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (130).
Gatsby springs from a “Platonic conception of himself” (98) as if he is not a specific person, but a disembodied, impersonal Platonic ideal. His connection to his parents is very weak, as if he is denying his own past (as he does in changing his name from “Gatz” to “Gatsby,” an act of self-erasure). His mansion is party central to countless people, yet none of them seem to know him. Even Nick, who knows and loves him best, is at a bit of a distance from him, perhaps more like an admiring sidekick than a close friend. But like a true three Gatsby needs to be liked. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody” (43) says a woman at one of his parties. Gatsby is the chameleon three who can be whatever he needs to be to get people to like him. When Nick and Gatsby first meet (significantly, Nick has been talking to Gatsby at one of the latter’s own parties without even knowing yet this is Gatsby) Gatsby smiles at Nick with an “irresistible prejudice” (48) in Nick’s favour. This does so much to win Nick over.
Various hints in the text show that Gatsby has been patterning himself off other people: mostly conventional heroes of American history, literature, or folklore, such as Ben Franklin, Tom Sawyer, Buffalo Bill, and Daniel Boone. In other words, Gatsby is not in touch with who he is. Nor is anyone else. Thus, the wild rumours about him, that he may have been a German spy in the war, and so on. There may be more than one reason why rumours constantly fly about who Gatsby is, but one reason is that nobody, not even Gatsby, knows.
Enneagram Six: Nick Carraway
Nick is definitely a six. As such, his fundamental need is for security. While Gatsby will take any risk, and usually succeed, Nick moves to West Egg to start trading in “securities.” Both men participate in the wild world of speculative finance of the 1920s, but Nick in a much more staid and conservative manner. “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities” (4). Nick intends to make money according to the rules, literally by the book.
While Nick and Jordan are having dinner at Tom and Daisy’s (chapter one) Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s lover, keeps telephoning, creating tension between Tom and Daisy and weaving an unspoken air of scandal about the table. Nick says, “[t]o a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police” (16). This is the instinct of the six.
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever” (2). Responsibility, doing the right thing, making the trains run on time is Nick’s mindset. He is self-aware enough, however, to mildly satirize himself in how he phrases this, as when he refers to the “very solemn and obvious editorials” (4) he wrote at Yale.
The big reason Nick is so attracted to Gatsby is because Gatsby dares to dream big and acts accordingly. On the other hand, in describing his own relationship with Jordan, Nick says, “[h]er gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires” (58). For Nick, though he does not say so explicitly, and may not even be conscious of the fact, Gatsby is a hero because he succeeds where Nick has failed. Nick puts safety and mistrust first, and that is his undoing.
But the six’s obsession with law and order is not quite as straightforward as I have been implying. Rohr and Ebert say of immature sixes, “[t]he law, and everything connected with it, fascinates them. Many of them seek occupations where they deal with the law—whether by protecting it or breaking it. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, inspectors, police, writers of whodunits, and criminals take part in one way or another in the SIX game” (134 my emphasis). Thus, we see Nick’s three nature is not simply a kind of moral conservatism. He is fascinated with and attracted to the criminal Gatsby, and is aware of the superiority of the East, as opposed to the Midwest with its “interminable inquisitions” (176). Tragically, it is back to the Midwest and its stifling security where Nick retreats by the end of the book.
Sixes, therefore, are obsessed with rules, not just keeping but also breaking them, and Gatsby does very much of the latter: crime, adultery, and getting rich without old money respectability. But however much Gatsby stands for everything Nick has an “unaffected scorn” (2) for, Nick is also there to help him on in his illicit endeavours. Though Nick turns down Gatsby’s offer of getting in on some probably illegal speculation, Nick does act as go-between for Gatsby and Daisy’s great first post-war meeting at Nick’s place.
And Nick is also present, disapproving but drinking everything in (including literal drinking, and quite a bit of it) that afternoon when Tom Buchanan compels him to meet his mistress and takes them both downtown to Tom and Myrtle’s love nest. It is shortly thereafter that Nick has his drunken and likely homosexual encounter with Chester McKee (see the end of chapter two, including some double entendre with the elevator boy). Nick, it seems, is breaking the rules himself.
Enneagram Nine: Daisy Buchanan
Daisy is a nine. The root need of the nine is to avoid things. The characteristic root sin is laziness. Nines tend to be unfocussed. At the same dinner party where Nick wanted to call the police, Jordan suggests they all plan something. “’All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to [Nick] helplessly: ‘What do people plan?’” (11).
Nick eventually dismisses Daisy and Tom as “careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (179).
Many have agreed with Nick’s opinion of his cousin, and there is a great deal of truth in what he says. But it is not the whole story by a long shot. Daisy’s story is as tragic as Gatsby’s is in its own way. The evening of the same dinner party mentioned above, Daisy tries tentatively (nines have anything but an insistent presence) to draw attention to her troubles with Tom. Because of her evasive way of expressing herself, and because Nick simply is not perceptive of her needs, he misinterprets her as having “asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged” (17). Nick has gotten it exactly backwards. Daisy has in fact been expressing sarcasm towards Tom and everything (such as white supremacy) that he stands for. Nick also shows no sign of picking up on Daisy’s serious marital situation when she makes light of a bruised finger she blames Tom for. As the unassertive nine she can bring herself only to hint at Tom’s violence in the context of a joke. But Nick does not perceive the gravity of the situation.
What nines and threes have in common is a tendency to lose a sense of who they are. In the case of the three, this is performative: the self is lost amid the roles the three plays in order to be liked and to get along in the world. The loss of self in the nine, however, seems to have to do more with being overwhelmed by other people’s personalities or points of view. As in so many things in the enneagram, a person’s strength is also potentially his or her weakness. Nines are very good at seeing things from others’ eyes and are known to be peacemakers, but also tend to lose a sense of what their own position is. At a climactic scene one hot day in the Plaza Hotel, Daisy is torn between Gatsby and Tom until she becomes simply a “lost voice” (134) with no remaining power of her own.
“Precisely because NINES themselves often have no clear standpoint, they are capable of shifting to, and accepting, any standpoint whatsoever. . . . Many people report that in the presence of a NINE they come to rest in some inexplicable manner and can relax. . . . Their peaceful radiance is disarming” (187-88). Rohr and Ebert also say, “[i]n the presence of a NINE many people find it easy to come to rest themselves. In radical contrast to this, NINES often feel inwardly lashed by fears and restlessness, even when no one notices” (178). Therefor, Daisy’s being overpowered by others is symbolized by her voice, but on the other hand, it is that very voice which expresses the “peaceful radiance [which] is disarming.” Gatsby says famously that her voice “is full of money,” (120) and Nick agrees, but this is not simply a socio-political statement about how important money is in American culture or how it is thought to be able to buy anything. Money comes between the individual and the mystical dimension of life represented by the nine. In this way, what Daisy has to communicate is again thwarted, highjacked by something other than itself.
In chapter eight we get Nick’s interpretation of Gatsby’s version of why Daisy married Tom.
After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now—there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all. . . . And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.
That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. (150-51)
Then (as Nick relates Jordan’s tale to us) there is the tragedy of Gatsby’s letter, apparently arriving the day before Daisy is to marry Tom. Jordan finds Daisy drunk and inarticulate. Daisy does not explain what the letter is about, and it is dissolved in the bath. For all the beauty of her voice, Daisy is not able to communicate well—especially about her problems and needs.
Therefor, Daisy is not just a careless, irresponsible airhead. She has the difficulties characteristic of the nine.
Counterphobic Six: Tom
If Gatsby is Nick’s dream self, Tom is Nick’s dark shadow.
If most sixes deal with their fear by attempting to acquire some sort of security, the counterphobic six is prone to dealing with that fear more directly, by attacking the thing feared. Certainly, Tom is the most aggressive character in the book: he injures Daisy physically and seems to have her under control by the end of the novel, belts Myrtle in the nose, and uses Wilson to kill Gatsby. Not long after experiencing “the hot whips of panic” (125) when he realizes he might lose both Daisy and Myrtle, he goes on the offensive at the Plaza Hotel. It is from this point on that most of the violence begins. It is not that Tom is a genius at manipulating people and situations (or a genius at anything for that matter) but somehow all the bodies fall: Myrtle, George, Gatsby, such that only Tom is left with what he wants, and there is nothing for anybody else. Daisy does not get what she wants. Daisy, as we have seen, is not just the “careless” person who walks away from messes she creates. She is now trapped with an unfaithful, unloving man and has lost what may well have been the true love of her life.
Nick and Jordan are not objects of Tom’s wrath, but in the fallout from that fateful evening their relationship collapses. Neither character is a threat to Tom, and Nick may also be a special case: “[w]e were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own” (7). It is as if Tom senses Nick is a better version of himself. However, it is not Nick who wins in the end. The only winner is his dark shadow.
One of the characteristics of the six is loyalty. In Nick, this takes the form of his loyalty to Gatsby. Though this allegiance may be a manifestation of Nick’s false consolation (see below) it is also quite moving, and in some ways a positive thing. We should not forget that a man like Nick might well have resented Gatsby, seeing in the latter a reproach to the former’s own weaknesses. Instead, Nick is willingly generous. It is, of course, Nick’s shadow, Tom, who manifests open enmity with Gatsby. In Tom the loyalty of the counterphobic six takes the form of racism. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (13).
True and False Consolations
For each of the numbers of the enneagram, there is a true consolation number, and a false consolation number. See again the diagram above. In times of stress or temptation, a number may go with the arrow, moving towards false consolation and disintegration, taking on the more negative characteristics of the number it is moving to. In the case of the 3-6-9 triangle this means a movement counter clockwise. What each number needs to do to become more fully integrated or “redeemed” (as Rohr and Ebert put it) is to go against the direction of the arrow.
Therefor, you might say Nick loses himself in going to Gatsby’s three: by the end of the book, Nick seems like he will never realize his own dreams; in fact, he probably will never even find out what they are because like a three he does not know who he is. He has broken up with Jordan, just as he broke up with a girl in the accounting department simply because her brother did not like him, just as he has or may have had something resembling an engagement with another woman out West. Nick goes half way with women, and might be gay or bisexual, without apparently realizing it.
Gatsby takes on the negative characteristics of the nine Daisy in that once his love is finally rejected he takes to his swimming pool (for the first time that summer) where he is shot dead on his air mattress by the ghostly George Wilson. We never see directly what must have happened there, but it is symbolically a very passive fate (reminiscent of Daisy and Jordan when we first see them on the “enormous couch . . . buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon” (8)) very much unlike Gatsby at his best. Nick tries to imagine Gatsby’s last moments:
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. (161)
This is a peculiar passage. Is this world Gatsby is awakening into too real or not real enough? Is he finding out his old Platonic dream world was only ever a dream, or was it more real than reality itself as it would be in Platonic philosophy? This ambiguous state Gatsby seems to be in is very much the nine’s situation. At no point is Gatsby, or indeed anyone, more like Daisy than Gatsby is here. It is in this state of passive vulnerability that he is murdered by the “fantastic figure” of George Wilson, whose gun is very real indeed.
In turn, Daisy moves to enneagram six in the form of Tom, driven by fear. Fear is the thing sixes are always struggling with.
So Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy each move counter clockwise on the triangle, each to his or her false consolation, and with disastrous results. What of Tom? He gets to keep Daisy, which for him is a clockwise move on the enneagram, and therefor one might think it would signify a true consolation. Again, the enneagrammatic idea of true and false consolation does not have to do with who should marry whom. If it did, it would mean sixes should marry nines, but nines should not marry sixes, which is clearly absurd. Tom, as a six, should move to nine, take on the nine’s better characteristics such as peacefulness. Since Tom is a restless, violent character, this makes sense. But Tom does not change, nor does he try to. He does not effect any changes; he simply manages to hang on to what he already had. Daisy tried to make a change and failed. Gatsby pursued his dream and failed, with disastrous results. Nick falls in love with Gatsby, in a sense, and while Nick’s failure is symbolized by his return to the Midwest, at least the dream of Gatsby stays alive. Tom, therefor, though he is the only winner of the four characters, is the most static. Each of the nine numbers of the enneagram is a limited way of perceiving and living life. Each way has its truth, but also its limitations. Tom does not even rattle the bars of his cage or suspect that he is in one. He has only brought the nine, Daisy, who represents his true consolation and an invitation to change, into the cage with him.
This brings us, finally, to Nick’s dream of West Egg.
In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (176)
Who is this woman? Well, it may actually be Gatsby. The four men carrying the stretcher suggest Nick, the chauffeur, butler, and gardener who carry the dead Gatsby to his house. Or the woman could be Daisy, who is frequently associated with the colour white. The jewels suggest her wealth, and the drunkenness her helplessness.
But there is one more candidate here. What is meant by “the wrong house?” Surely, when Gatsby’s body is taken from the pool to his house it is not the wrong house. “The wrong house” could suggest that Daisy is going to the wrong house–Tom’s–instead of Gatsby’s. So if the procession should be going to Gatsby’s house (the right house for Gatsby or Daisy) the most natural house to go to by mistake would be the one next door: Nick’s.
This would mean Gatsby or Daisy on the stretcher going to Nick’s house as “the wrong house.” Or is it, in the self-contradictory nature of dreams, the right house, if Nick is the one on the stretcher? Nick acts as his own carrier in this instance, or pallbearer in this funeral like procession, carrying his secret, gay self, not recognizing this self, but in denial about who is on the stretcher, and therefor thinking the house is “wrong.” The drunken, glamourous woman on the stretcher is the nine Nick needs to go to, but instead buries.
Another way of looking at it is this: if it is Gatsby’s house in the dream, as implied by the fact that four people actually did carry Gatsby to his house, then it can be “the wrong house” only for Nick.
SOURCES
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Scribner, 2004.
Rohr, Richard, and Andreas Ebert. The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. Translated by Peter Heinegg, Crossroad, 2001.