ENGL1001 – American LiteratureF. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great

Gatsby (1925)

Dr. John Masterson2nd Lecture

July-August 2010

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur – The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981)

• “Like Fitzgerald, during the war Jay Gatsby falls in love with a girl who is incapable of matching his commitment. Daisy marries the wealthy Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby convinces himself that he lost her ONLY because he was poor. He makes a fortune through mysterious and extralegal means, and sets himself up as a giver of lavish parties on Long Island, near Daisy’s house. His parties are intended to attract Daisy, for he anticipates that some night she will appear at a party and his conspicuous show of affluence will win her back. The plan fails, and Gatsby arranges to meet Daisy through Nick Carraway, the narrator. Moved by Gatsby’s fidelity, Daisy agrees to leave her adulterous husband. In a confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, Buchanan breaks Daisy’s resolve by revealing that Gatsby is engaged in criminal activities. On the drive back to Long Island, Daisy kills her husband’s mistress, Myrtle, in a hit-and-run accident. Gatsby takes the blame, and Buchanan sends Myrtle’s husband to murder him. Jay Gatsby, the great believer, dies bereft of his illusions.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Image of the kind of outfit that would have been worn by a 1920s’ ‘Flapper’

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur – The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981)

• “Like Fitzgerald, during the war Jay Gatsby falls in love with a girl who is incapable of matching his commitment. Daisy marries the wealthy Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby convinces himself that he lost her ONLY because he was poor. He makes a fortune through mysterious and extralegal means, and sets himself up as a giver of lavish parties on Long Island, near Daisy’s house. His parties are intended to attract Daisy, for he anticipates that some night she will appear at a party and his conspicuous show of affluence will win her back. The plan fails, and Gatsby arranges to meet Daisy through Nick Carraway, the narrator. Moved by Gatsby’s fidelity, Daisy agrees to leave her adulterous husband. In a confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, Buchanan breaks Daisy’s resolve by revealing that Gatsby is engaged in criminal activities. On the drive back to Long Island, Daisy kills her husband’s mistress, Myrtle, in a hit-and-run accident. Gatsby takes the blame, and Buchanan sends Myrtle’s husband to murder him. Jay Gatsby, the great believer, dies bereft of his illusions.”

Richard Gray, A History of American Literature (2004), p.435

• “In writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald set out, as he put it, to ‘make something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned … the first and most important choice he made was to drop the third-person narrator of his two previous novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). Instead of an omniscient viewpoint, there is a fictional narrator, Nick Carraway, a man who is only slightly involved in the action but who is profoundly affected by it.”

The Great Gatsby, p.8.• “No – Gatsby turned out all right at

the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

The Great Gatsby, p.8.• “No – Gatsby turned out all right at

the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

From The Great Gatsby - Daisy

• P.14 “she had an absurd, charming little laugh.”

• p.14 “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it …”

• p.20 – “ ‘It couldn’t be helped!’ cried Daisy with tense gaiety.”

The Great Gatsby

• P.32 - “so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.”

• P.37 – “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

A.E. Dyson, ‘The Great Gatsby – 36 Years After’

• “Carraway is the one middle-class character in the novel – vaguely at home in the worlds both of Daisy and Myrtle, but belonging to neither, and so able to see and judge both very clearly. He is conscious of “advantages” of moral education that enable him to see through false romanticisms to their underlying insincerity, and savour their bitter ironies.”

George W. Bush

The Great Gatsby, p.26• “About half way between West Egg and New York the

motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

Edwin Fussell, ‘Fitzgerald’s Brave New World’

• “the two dreams are … so intimately related as to be for all practical purposes one: the appearance of eternal youth and beauty centers in a particular social class whose glamour is made possible by social inequality and inequity. Beauty, the presumed object of aesthetic contemplation, is commercialized, love is bought and sold. Money is the means to the violent recovery or specious arrest of an enchanting youth.”

Edwin Fussell, ‘Fitzgerald’s Brave New World’• “Fitzgerald repeatedly affirms his faith in an older, simpler

America, generally identified as pre-Civil War; the emotion is that of pastoral, the social connotations agrarian and democratic. In such areas he continues to find fragments of basic human value, social, moral and religious. But these affirmations are for the most part subordinate and indirect; Fitzgerald’s attention was chiefly directed upon the merchandise of romantic wonder proffered by his own time and place. Like the narrator in Gatsby, he was always “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Through a delicate and exact imagery, he was able to extend this attitude of simultaneous enchantment and repulsion over the whole of the American civilization he knew.”

An Archetypal Scene of the American Mid-West

The New York Skyline in the 1920s