Four Ways of Not Doing the Thing — Procrastination in Four American Novels
Four Ways of Not Doing the Thing — Procrastination in Three American Novels
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Procrastination looks like one failure — the appropriate act, undone. Beneath the surface it is many failures, because the reason the act goes undone differs from person to person, and the reason is always a value judgment about something outside the will. Four American literary figures, read together, display four distinct such judgments so cleanly that they can stand as portraits of four types — and each maps to one of the three interpersonal solutions Karen Horney identified, with a fourth figure carrying the resignation solution past procrastination into something graver.
Two of them share an author, and that is not accidental. Arthur Mizener observed that Fitzgerald’s use of a narrator let him keep separate, for the first time, “the two sides of his nature, the middle-western Trimalchio and the spoiled priest who disapproved of but grudgingly admired him.” Fitzgerald split himself across Gatsby and Nick — and the split falls along a line the corpus recognizes. A third figure, Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, was likewise his author’s self-portrait, cast as satellite to another man’s energy. And Cather’s Godfrey St. Peter completes the set.
Jay Gatsby — The Will Misdirected Outward (Expansive Solution)
Gatsby is the least idle man in his novel. He builds a fortune, a mansion, a persona, a machinery of parties — enormous, sustained, genuine activity. Yet the appropriate acts of his actual life go undone, because the whole apparatus is aimed at a projected good: Daisy as she was five years ago, the past made recoverable, the ideal self confirmed by a world bending to match it. His conviction is stated nakedly — that of course one can repeat the past. The error is not weakness of will but misdirection of it: Gatsby holds one of the most powerful capacities for genuine origination in American fiction and points it entirely at an external not in his control and, as the novel proves, not recoverable.
His is the expansive solution — the good not merely imagined but performed outward into brick and light and display, the self magnified until the world must confirm it. What he defers is reality: Daisy as she is, the present as it stands, the self as it actually is rather than as the ideal demands. Nick’s verdict is the corpus verdict in Fitzgerald’s cadence — borne back ceaselessly into the past, beating against the current.
Sal Paradise — The Will Lent Out (Self-Effacing Solution)
Sal, too, is constantly in motion — thousands of miles, coast to coast and back — which is exactly why his procrastination hides so well. But the motion is not the appropriate act; it is a daydream given a steering wheel. Sal has located the good in another man: Dean Moriarty, the figure of apparently self-generating vitality, the intensity Sal feels he lacks and hopes to reach by proximity. His governing judgment is that the good lives in Dean and down the road — in the unnameable aliveness always one city further on — and his task is to stay in orbit.
This is the self-effacing solution: the good outsourced to a living external, the agent’s own standing point projected into a companion he can witness but never become. Every arrival disappoints because the good was never in any actual place; it was in the anticipation, and in Dean, who cannot supply it. Sal’s undone acts — the writing, the settling, the relationships he abandons to follow the anchor — are displaced not by his own imagined success but by the standing decision that success is someone else’s and his role is to accompany it. Where Gatsby performs the vitality he has manufactured, Sal orbits the vitality he believes another man possesses — the same projected good, the opposite relation to it.
Nick Carraway — The Will Withheld (Resignation Solution)
Nick presents himself as the one steady, judicious man in a novel of impulsives — inclined to reserve judgment, to watch from the edge, to stay above the moral disorder around him. This is the spoiled priest: the vocation for judgment and witness intact, the willingness to commit it withheld. His procrastination is on the appropriate acts of engagement and position-taking, and its distinguishing mark is that he has reframed the delay as a virtue — as breeding, as discernment, as being above the fray. This is the subtlest of the four, because the reframe conceals the failure even from the man committing it.
Here the corpus sees what ordinary reading cannot. Nick’s detachment is the resignation solution’s pride wearing the language of philosophical virtue. Horney named “stoicism” itself as a component of the resignation type’s idealized image — the man proud of his detachment, his self-sufficiency, his being above competition. Nick’s reserve is indistinguishable from genuine philosophical detachment and structurally its opposite: real detachment flows from seeing externals as indifferent; his flows from holding involvement as a thing that would compromise him and his aboveness as a thing worth keeping. He has taken the legitimate examining pause and made it a permanent residence, calling the arrested act wisdom. Mizener’s “grudgingly admired” catches the friction exactly: the pull toward Gatsby is real, but the priestly reserve will not act on it, and the unspent admiration is the tension between a vocation and its non-performance.
Godfrey St. Peter — The Will Discharged (Resignation Solution, Past Procrastination)
Cather’s professor has finished his life’s work and cannot take up his continuing life — the new house he will not inhabit, the family grown remote, the future he will not enter. On the surface this resembles depletion, but St. Peter has crossed a line the other three have not. A procrastinator still means to do the deferred act; the delay is a gap between intention and execution. St. Peter has withdrawn the intention. He has assented that there is no appropriate act remaining for him, retreating into the “original self,” the boy before ambition and family accreted — a self prior to all roles and therefore, he concludes, owing none.
His will is not misdirected like Gatsby’s, lent out like Sal’s, or withheld like Nick’s; it is discharged. He shares Nick’s resignation solution but has carried it past the withheld act into the abandoned one. He has even reached the first half of the Stoic insight — he correctly holds his achievements and reputation to be externals, not genuine goods. His error is downstream: from “these are not the good” he infers “therefore nothing is worth aiming at,” which does not follow, since externals lose genuine value yet remain appropriate objects of aim. St. Peter has collapsed that distinction, and his near-suffocation in the study shows where a discharged will drifts when nothing recharges it. He is not a procrastinator. He is the terminal case the whole category shades into.
The Pattern
Four men, four placements of the standing point from which a person acts, the three Horney’ solutions made visible in fiction. Gatsby, expansive, projects the standing point outward into a recoverable past and spends his will on an external that cannot be had. Sal, self-effacing, lends it to another man and orbits the vitality he thinks he lacks. Nick, resigned, holds it in permanent reserve and calls the hoarding virtue. St. Peter, resigned to the end, withdraws it into a self that generates nothing and stops willing altogether. Misdirected, lent out, withheld, discharged — the same rational faculty, aimed wrongly, outsourced, kept unspent, or abandoned.
And the corrective is one corrective in four fittings: the good was never in the recoverable past, never in another man’s aliveness, never in the clean distance of non-commitment, never absent because the work was finished — it was, in every case, in the right use of the will each man already had, and that no external past, no idealized companion, no protective reserve, and no completed achievement could ever have taken from him.
Source: Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 185.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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