My favorite ellipsis
Last night in the essays class I teach at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the subject of ellipses came up. In a story, an ellipsis consists of leaving something out. The “something” can be anything from a few words to entire events. Unless we are reading quite technically, we usually only notice an ellipsis when it goes wrong - when the gap seems awkward or omits information we’re looking for. But when an ellipsis goes right, especially at the level of a sentence or a phrase, it can produce prose that is wonderfully economical and far more enjoyable than if the writer had included what has been omitted.
Here is perhaps my favorite ellipsis of all, in a passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration - even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them - with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi de Danilo,” ran the circular legend. “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
Fitzgerald here is like a magician on his day off, absent-mindedly pulling a pigeon from behind his ear in such a way we are convinced we merely overlooked the bird: a sleight of hand so quick and deft as to seem natural and not a trick at all.
What do you think?