 |
| The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) |
Began to whirr and chime;
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.'
(As I Walked Out One Evening - W.H. Auden)
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book is narrated by Nick Carraway who recounts his experience of living in the fictional town of West Egg in the nerve centre of the Jazz Age. Despite its' initially cold reception, The Great Gatsby has come to be considered a seminal text of the roaring twenties.
The American Dream is the only virtue in The Great Gatsby. The eponymous Gatsby embodies this dream, and from the first description of his character - trembling as he "stretched out his arms toward to dark water" to the green light across the bay - his character is set apart. The purity of Gatsby's dream allows him to transcend the vulgarity and frivolity of gossiping capitalist society he inhabits. In reality, Gatsby is a bootlegger with an ambition to be as ostentatious as the rest, but through Carraway's narration we see that what Gatsby represents is infinitely more important than the man himself; and the fact that Gatsby hides his past behind an excessive present only fuels Nick's fantasy. But Gatsby's dream of social mobility, of material gain, of freedom and happiness is his fatal flaw. His obsession with realising his perfect dream without the slightest diversion, when all external signs indicate that achieving said dream is impossible, in the end meant that Gatsby had to die.
Themes and Relevant Quotes
Gender
|
Illusions and Gossip
|
Class
|
Time
|
"I'm glad that it's a girl. And I hope
she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a
beautiful little fool."
"'She's
a nice girl,' said Tom after a moment. 'They
oughtn't to let her run around the country this way.'"
|
"We heard it from three people, so it must
be true."
"I
had no intention of being rumoured into marriage."
"In
his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings
and the champagne and the stars."
"It
was a testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there was
whispers about him..."
"Anything
can happen now... Even Gatsby could happen,"
"as
lovely as the June night in her flowered dress - and as drunk as a
monkey."
"His
count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."
"So
he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would
be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."
"he
was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of
Gatsby's liquor."
"Angry,
and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."
|
"We
backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D.
Rockefeller."
"the
despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a
copy of Town Tattle over the
tapestry scenes of Versailles."
"...
whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd."
"he
gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars."
"'They're such beautiful shirts' she
sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds."
"'Her voice is full of money,'"
"In
various unrevealed capacities he had come into contact with such people, but
always with indiscernible barbed wire between."
"For
Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and
pleasant, cheerful snobbery..."
|
"'I'm sorry about the clock' he
said."
"'Can't repeat the past?' he cried
incredulously. 'Why of course you can!"
"Gatsby
believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes
before us."
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." |
Critical Responses
- "it's become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the American dream." - The Guardian: Why Gatsby is so Great (Jay McInerney)
- "Telling the story from Carraway's point of view was the key to the delicate balancing act Fitzgerald performed in narrating his improbable love story. Nick is an outside observer who becomes emotionally involved in the story he is telling." - The Guardian: Why Gatsby is so Great (Jay McInerney)
- "The pioneer in The Great Gatsby, Dan Cody, "a token of forgotten violence", bears the names of two of the legendary heroes of frontier life [Daniel Boone and 'Buffalo Bill' Cody]... Fitzgerald makes no attempt to romanticise his portrait of Dan Cody: "a grey, florid man with a hard empty face - the pioneer debauchee, who during on phase of American life bought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon". Cody would seen to be the antithesis of the American Dream, yet in fact her represents the hard reality." - AS/A-Level English Literature Resource Pack (Anne Crow)
- "In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald emulates Keats's ability to write about memory with all the freshness and spontaneity of the moment he experienced it." - AS/A-Level English Literature Resource Pack (Anne Crow)
