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That Nick Carraway supersedes his own creation, Jay Gatsby, as hero of The Great Gatsby is no starting revelation.2 Yet despite their imaginative bond, they are very different sorts of hero. For Nick’s achievement is subtle and complex, accomplishing what Gatsby cannot — sustaining a dream — while both recognizing the limitations of that dream and judging the social world that has destroyed it. A synthesis of disparate impulses whose roots lie in nineteenth-century romanticism and realism, Nick’s heroism is borne out in his assuming responsibility for Gatsby and in the act of narration.

Aboard the Nellie, dusk settling as the tide ebbs on the Thames estuary, Marlow sits apart from the small group of men with whom he shares ‘the bond of the sea’ (p. 52). To them he recounts the story of his adventures in the Congo and his meeting with the extraordinary Mr Kurtz. The journey has been long and Marlow has himself been changed; the man who speaks is not the same as when he first joined the colonial enterprise. Marlow treats this earlier self as a distinct character, one not at all privileged, but subjected to varied ironies, great and small, throughout the narrative. This Marlow of the central tale is no fool, however; when recognition becomes possible, the ironies of situation, event, character, and so on, do not escape him. What distinguishes him later as narrator is an ironic vision larger than any particular situation or mode, a sense of general irony2 which acknowledges the fundamental paradoxes of the story, of his efforts on the Nellie to recount it, and of man’s desire to act meaningfully in the ‘flash of lightening’ (p. 49) that is the duration of civilization.

John Dowell is an unlikely hero — the least likely, perhaps, of any of the narrators of this study. A cuckold of extraordinary blindness, by all indications a virgin though twelve years married, his personal history begins and ends with the role of nursemaid for women unwilling or unable to return his affection. A catalogue of critics decrying his supposed spiritual as well as physical impotence would be substantial; Mark Schorer, for example, claims that in The Good Soldier ‘passionate situations are related by a narrator who is himself incapable of passion, sexual and moral alike.’2 And John G. Hessler in a more recent article dismisses the possibility of Dowell’s moral growth: ‘His narrative does not represent any progress of the heart, any coming to insight.’3 Yet albeit lame and isolated, Dowell is very much what my first sentence posits — a hero — both in the context of Ford Madox Ford’s other novels and as a narrator who undergoes a moral education, tells his tale as a means of imposing order on chaos, and makes a final heroic gesture of human responsibility and love.

Ernest Hemingway read The Great Gatsby with admiration shortly after meeting Scott Fitzgerald in the spring of 1925. By the summer of that year, after a disastrous return to the fiesta in Pamplona, he had begun work on a novel that, whatever its characteristics as a roman-a-clef, bore a striking resemblance to Gatsby. Hemingway had already worked with Ford Madox Ford on The Transatlantic Review. In a special supplement to that quarterly on the death of Joseph Conrad he had printed the famous tribute that, could he bring Conrad back to life ‘by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine, dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Conrad’s grave’, he would ‘leave for London … with a sausage grinder’.2 The spiritual as well as structural kinship between The Sun Also Rises and Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and The Good Soldier, is hardly accidental. Yet when Hemingway refashions the familiar pattern to suit his own design, he transforms it as well. As with our other narrators, Jake Barnes is lame and passive. Yet his disillusionment with traditional social values is not a discovery made during the tale: it is the ground for that tale, shared with a generation wounded by the war and alienated from the past.

Lord Jim, begun before Heart of Darkness and finished afterwards, in 1900, more daringly evolves its narrative structure on the pattern of Marlow’s ironic sensibility. The bold temporal displacement of events, the juxtaposition of widely divergent yet thematically related characters, the portrait of Jim spied through ‘rents in a fog’, all are responses to the collapse dramatised within Lord Jim of the moral foundations of the nineteenth-century realistic novel and, indeed, of Marlow’s character. For Jim, heinously guilty and nonetheless ‘one of us’, tears Marlow from the cradle of self-satisfied complacency, and into a realm of half-light and moral uncertainty.

The surgical significance of the anatomic structure and the physiologic function of the various divisions of the stomach are presented, together with a discussion of the relative merits of the most commonly employed surgical operations for duodenal, gastric and anastomotic ulcer.