The Great Gatsby

Date: 1925 Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald From: Facts On File Companion to the American Novel.

Considered by many critics and readers to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby analyzes and exposes the shallow foundations of the American dream, 1920s style. Peopling his novel with New York charactersall, significantly, reared in the heartland of the United States but currently living in the fictitious Long Island villages of East Egg or West EggFitzgerald demonstrates that each has lost his or her innocence and perverted the original vision of an Edenic America. Brooding shadowlike over the early part of the novel, the mysterious and fabulously wealthy host of numerous West Egg parties, is Jay Gatsbyborn James Gatzwho gradually comes into focus through the words of Nick Carroway, the novel's narrator. Nick's emphasis on Gatsby's "innocence" derives from his love for Daisy Buchanan and corresponding optimistic belief in the possibilities of love and success. Gatsby's death, therefore, suggests the end of any sort of American innocence, real or imagined. The major characters in the novelwith the exception of Nick Carrowayare wealthy, privileged, self-centered, and supremely "careless" or heedless of the rights and needs of others. Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, arrogantly embraces a double standard as he openly carries on an affair with the pathetic and vulgar Myrtle Wilson, wife of a garage mechanic: Tom insists that Nick accompany him to the New York apartment that he rents for Myrtle, then violently slaps her across the face when she taunts him about his wife. In a parallel scene, Tom sees neither double standard nor irony as he angrily orders Daisy to walk away from her love for Gatsby when they are all together at the Plaza Hotel. Just as these characters wilfully deceive their spouses, the Buchanans' friend, the talented golf player Jordan Baker, has been caught in professional deceptions and falsehoods. Gatsby himself, although innocent in his love for Daisy, lies about his education and cannot tell the truth about the shady sources of his wealth. Among the many bits of gossip about Gatsby is the rumor that he is involved in both bootlegging and fixing the outcome of the World Series. Even Nick Carroway, frequently viewed as the voice of reason who helps connect his cousin Daisy to his landlord Gatsby, is open to charges of evasion, if not outright lies. One can credibly argue that he is one of modernism's "unreliable narrators": Fitzgerald learned to use the outsider observer from such predecessors as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and he also admired Edith Wharton, who not only used the "unreliable narrator" (in Ethan Frome, for instance) but also wrote about her technique. The setting, imagery, and symbolism of the novel have been the subject of much critical commentary, for, in a post-World War I world usually dominated by the emotionally exhausted Waste Land personae of T. S. Eliot, Fitzgerald successfully creates the often hedonistic and careless characters who have come to typify the very different Jazz Age and who could take their places in the Eliot poem. Numerous

scholarly articles address the most central symbols in the novel: the bleak and desiccated valley of ashes near which Tom's mistress Myrtle lives, and through which all the characters eventually pass; the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, beguiling Gatsby while reminding the reader of the color of money (Gatsby is in love with Daisy, a woman whose voice is famously described as "full of money"). Indeed, as John Lukacs points out, it is only very recently that younger readers have come to associate The Great Gatsby with the social life of Americans (Lukacs, 235); the proliferation of "Gatsby" bars and restaurants named Gatsby's, for instance, supports this idea. Yet the novel that so memorably describes these people at Gatsby's extravagant parties also clearly condemns the preoccupation with money and social position, demonstrating in Gatsby's death the essential hollowness in this perversion of America's promise. Gatsby's murder by George Wilson, Myrtle's husband, provides us with another lesson in social class. Because George saw Gatsby in a car with Daisy, one of the socially elite, he assumes that he is guilty. George's inability to distinguish between an essentially "innocent" Gatsby and the likes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan demonstrates the distance between the haves and have nots: George, who kills himself after shooting Gatsby, will never understand the vapid Daisy Buchanan, for whom Gatsby died in vain. The novel, which takes place in 1922, uses the symbol of a broken clock to demonstrate the folly of believing that one can return to the innocence of the past. Nick, thoroughly disillusioned by novel's endand the only guest at Gatsby's funeral other than his father, Mr. Henry C. Gatzreturns to the Midwest. When these characters moved east, much like Henry James's characters when they traveled to Europe, their standards became warped and perverted, but at the end, only Nick Carroway returns home before, as with Gatsby, his own time runs out. For the Easterners, suggests Fitzgerald, it is too late. The end of the novel suggests that our only refuge is in hope.

Further Information
Sources Bloom, Harold. F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925. Reprint, New York: Scribner Classic/Collier Edition, 1986. Lukacs, John. Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Citation Information
Text Citation: Werlock, Abby H. P., ed. "The Great Gatsby." Facts On File Companion to the American Novel. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. Facts On File, Inc. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. <www.fofweb.com>.