Gatsby's Party

Patti White presents the guest list in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a paradigm for her study of systems theory and narrative structure. White alternates chapters of theoretical explication of the systemic nature of narrative structure and of the process of structuration as a whole.
Focusing on Don DeLillo's White Noise, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, White discusses the role of systemic operations, pattern recognition, list construction, and discourse formation within a context of literary interpretation. Gatsby's Party concludes with a return to Fitzgerald's novel, which provides a final commentary on null sets; the Gatsby list appears throughout the theoretical chapters, helping the reader transfer from one point to another.
Gatsby's Party contributes to the ongoing research on systems theory and information theory and their application to literary texts. White applies current research toward an architectural understanding of narrative structure, moving beyond interpretations (and applications) of systems theory that have been largely thematic or author-centered. It uses the list as a device for unlocking or revealing narrative systematization and contributes to the debate on the order/disorder apposition and to an understanding of the functioning of the list itself. Finally, it synthesizes a number of information-based theories and sets up a theory of relations as a critical methodology to widen the field of approaches to narrative dynamics.