Understanding in a Car Crash 

(for song lyrics, click here.)

This song examines several of the same images and themes as The Great Gatsby: 

-Each uses a car crash to embody a major loss.   

-Time is a major theme in each.  In “Understanding in a Car Crash” the chorus deals with the  fact that, although time is intertwined in every part of our lives, it can be our greatest enemy (“Time runs through our veins / (it starts and stops and starts and stops again) / We don’t stand a chance in this threadbare time”). In the novel, time is an ever-present entity, from the fact that the list of people at Gatsby’s parties is written on a timetable to the fact that Nick turns thirty on the day of the argument at the hotel.  Nick’s meditation on his birthday also has an interesting parallel to the song.  He says, “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight,” an image echoed in the lines of the song, “We followed white lines to the sunset / I crash my car every day the same way.”  (The line “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight” is paralleled in structure by the novel’s closing line, which also deals with people’s relationship with time: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”)   

-The color white is used several times in each as a motif.  In the song, it appears in the lines “We followed white lines to the sunset” and “The twilight world in blue and white.”  In the book, the color white is everywhere.  Daisy’s first car was white; in the kiss scene on page 117, Daisy’s face, the moon, and the sidewalk are all white; the Buchanans’ ceiling is a “white wedding cake”; Daisy talks about her and Jordan’s “white girlhood.”   

-The image of a compass is present in the song and in Gatsby’s death scene.  The song lyrics read, “The broken watch you gave me turns into a compass.”  In the death scene,  “The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.”  

-The broken watch in the song, like the dropped clock in Daisy and Gatsby’s reunion scene, could represent a desire to stop time. 

-The color blue shows up in interesting ways in both.  In the song, there is “the twilight world in blue and white.”  In the novel, Gatsby has blue lawns, blue gardens, and his trees have blue leaves.  (pp. 189, 43, 159)

 -Both the novel and the song contain references to songs that parallel storyline events.  In The Great Gatsby, the romantic songs of the time period, such as “The Sheik of Araby” (p. 83), “In the Meantime” (p.101), and “Ain’t We Got Fun” (p. 100) serve as a foil to the mixed-up and traumatic events in the characters’ romantic lives.  “Understanding in a Car Crash” contains the title of a Neil Young song, “The Needle and the Damage Done.”  The Neil Young song talks about the consequences of heroin use, and the losses that junkies face, just as the Thursday song deals with the losses involved in a bad relationship.  Interestingly, both songs use the image of a sunset.  The Neil Young song’s final verse goes: 

But every junkie’s like a setting sun

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