F. SCOTT FITZGERALD worked on The Great Gatsby at Villa Marie, Valescure, St.

Raphaël, in France during the summer and fall of 1924. He rewrote the proofs at the
Hôtel des Princesin Rome in the winter of 1924–1925. The book was published on April
10, 1925.

Several short stories, such as [Winter Dreams,] [Absolution,] [The Sensible Thing,] [The
Diamond as Big as the Ritz,] [Dice, Brass Knuckles & Guitar], and [The Rich Boy] contain
glimpses of characters and themes found in The Great Gatsby.

It is clear from letters Fitzgerald wrote while working on The Great Gatsby that he was
aware that the novel represented a step forward for him as an author. In April of 1924,
he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and said:

[I]n my new novel I'm thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as
in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world. So I tread
slowly and carefully and at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously
artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not. (Turnbull 1963, 163)

The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald at his best. He labored over the manuscript. He
struggled with its title.

The consistent use of Nick Carraway as an internal narrator imposes a new kind of
narrative discipline on The Great Gatsby: the result is a satisfying sense of formal unity
and coherence. Although he chronicles Jay Gatsby's story, Nick's life resonates
throughout the novel. Like Gatsby, Nick is full of hope. Like Gatsby, Nick sees those
hopes dashed by the harsh reality of the world.

Daisy is emblematic of the social upper classes. As a full-fledged member of the wealthy
upper class, Daisy, like her husband Tom, is careless with the hearts and lives of others.
Fitzgerald leads readers to question whether or not it was her wealth and social standing that
resulted in her careless, childlike nature.

Fitzgerald's portrait of Tom is of a cruel and insensitive man full of lost potential. His
great wealth cushions him against the world.

Tom and Daisy are of the same world, the world the narrator, Nick Carraway,
ultimately turns his back on. Tom is considered by many (including Fitzgerald) to be
Fitzgerald's most fully realized character.

Jordan parallels Daisy. On the surface, Nick finds her appealing, yet beneath her
exterior lies the same trivial, careless nature we find in Tom and Daisy. Nick's rejection
of her at the end of the novel parallels his rejection of the East and is part of his decision
to head home to the Midwest.

George Wilson is Tom Buchanan's opposite, a man with little education, little money,
no social standing, and little hope for the future. Wilson's life symbolizes the futility of
the working class, who live in the wastelands created by industry.
 Myrtle is a vulgar, sensuous woman in her midthirties. She mistakenly views her affair
with Tom Buchanan, a man who is wealthy beyond her imaginings, as a way to change her lot
in life. Myrtle's longing for Tom is based on his ability to buy things and represents the
desire for possessions and misplaced values of the 1920s in America. Her hopes, like her
husband's, rest on Tom Buchanan who remains indifferent to George and casually
amused by Myrtle.

Wolfshiem symbolizes the erosion of ethics in America during the first part of the
twentieth century.

The Decay of the American Dream?

distinctions between new money and old money are outlined symbolically in the
differences between East and West Egg. These two communities symbolize American
distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast. The East Coast, being the older,
more established region of the country, is represented by East Egg, the more fashionable
community.

The West Coast, which has long symbolized the American frontier, is represented by
West Egg, the home of the nouveau riche. But class in the novel is even more fully
expressed as each character is firmly rooted in his or her social standing.

much of The Great Gatsby exposes the reduced morality of the period in American
history during which it takes place. This is evident from the dinner party in the first chapter
where Nick learns that Tom is having an affair. Despite Tom and Daisy's wealth and
superficial gaiety, it is obvious to Nick that there are problems below the glimmering surface
of their lives.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice
compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting
her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The Great Gatsby (20)

Fitzgerald's world view in The Great Gatsby is, in part at least, of a piece with the spirit
of the United States in the 1920s--a strange mixture of cynicism and outraged idealism,
of despair and hysterical vitality. The primary reason was that the United States had
just emerged from World War I. For the preceding two generations there had been a
feeling that civilization was at last outgrowing war. Soon there would be no more wars.
At the same time poets and philosophers yearned for the nobility and self-sacrifice that
they believed war produced.

this war caused staggering loss of life throughout Europe as the first major war to be fought
with poison gas and machine guns, and the losses seemed to lead to no conclusions but further
losses. It was a grisly, pointless carnage that had no relation to the romantic conceptions of
war common before the war began.

the reaction of most Americans to this situation was understandably cynical. Many
intellectuals held the conviction that the hypocritical false idealism and loose thinking of an
older generation had caused the war. But with the cynicism came great arrogance and great
energy. The United States for the first time had settled a conflict among the major powers of
the world. The country had lost many young men, but unlike European nations it had not
depleted the manpower of a whole generation. European economies were in ruins. The United
States had grown wealthier during the war and after a brief depression was off on the greatest
economic expansion in its history.

average Americans at this time were opposed to war and to any further involvement
with Europe. They were willing to experiment with new sexual freedom and to drink
bootleg liquor, but politically they opposed any sort of governmental activity that might
limit business freedom. When President Coolidge told them that the business of the
country was business, they agreed wholeheartedly. For most Americans at this time
getting rich seemed the natural purpose of life.

yet, in the excitement of all this business-oriented vitality, many Americans, especially
the young and the educated, shared with many Europeans a belief that Western
civilization was at an end. The war had shattered the smug (self-satisfied) Victorian
belief that civilization was constantly progressing.

on the right, the German thinker Oswald Spengler argued in The Decline of the West
(1918-1922) that cultures had an approximate life span of one thousand years and that
Western culture, which began in the tenth century A.D., was now dying. Spengler
believed that while the forms of government and social structure might survive this
death, the values of the culture ceased to provide meaning for the lives of the people. The
decadent West was concerned primarily with money and was falling under the control
of the financially successful.

another thinker of the 1920s was T. S. Eliot, whose The Wasteland (1922) became the most
influential poem in English of the decade. The theme of The Wasteland is the spiritual
sterility of modern life, symbolized by images of desert, dust, rock, and decay, in a world
waiting for rain that may or may not come. The rain is a deliberately ambiguous symbol
that seems to stand for life, fertility, spiritual fulfillment, and salvation, but may also at
the same time somehow be menacing, since it is sometimes associated with death.

Both Eliot and Spengler had a profound influence on Fitzgerald.

Spengler's influence was perhaps as strong as Eliot's. In 1940 Fitzgerald claimed to have
read Spengler while writing The Great Gatsby and to have been permanently affected by
him. Undoubtedly Fitzgerald became a believer in Spengler's theories. Fitzgerald
thought Spengler accurately explained the international situation at the beginning of
World War II. Spengler believed that German militarism would play a dominant role in
the last stages of Western civilization. Fitzgerald died expecting that the Nazis would
easily conquer a decadent England and France and that the United States would fight
the Germans in South America.

If The Great Gatsby is filled with symbols and images from The Wasteland, it also has
symbols and images that are deeply compatible with The Decline of the West. What these
works have in common is the belief that life in modern Western civilization has become
meaningless. There are no genuine spiritual values remaining. In The Great Gatsby one
of the finest values of Western culture, the American Dream, has lost its meaning.
The American Dream promised the deepest and richest self-fulfillment for those who
would make the most of their natural abilities. It was, of course, partly about money and
comfort, but it was also about achievement and dignity. All that is left of it in
Fitzgerald's novel is a crude pursuit of wealth and the superficial glamor that wealth
provides.
Those who have wealth, like the Buchanans, are shallow, empty, bored, unhappy people.
Gatsby's tragedy is that his vague yearning for greatness has taken the only form
available to him-- a passion for the world of Daisy Buchanan.

Fitzgerald repeatedly draws analogies between Gatsby's world and the world of The
Wasteland. The novel is pervaded by Eliot's principal images of spiritual sterility--a land
which has become a desert through lack of rain, and a rain which may bring fertility
and spiritual salvation, but may also, as a deluge of sensuality, bring death.

The Great Gatsby, a commentary on that elusive phrase, the American dream.

It can be shown that The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the
American dream that our literature affords. Read in this way, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece ceases
to be a pastoral documentary of the Jazz Age and takes its distinguished place among great
national novels whose profound corrective insights into the nature of American experience arc
not separable from the artistic form of the novel itself.
The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience—not of manners, but of a
basic historic attitude to life. The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American
dream.
Essentially, this phrase represents the romantic enlargement of the possibilities of life on
a level at which the material and the spiritual have become inextricably confused. As
such, it led inevitably toward the problem that has always confronted American artists
dealing with American experience—the problem of determining the hidden boundary in
the American vision of life at which the reality ends and the illusion begins.
Historically, the American dream is anti-Calvinistic, and believes in the goodness of
nature and man. It is accordingly a product of the frontier and the West rather than of the
Puritan Tradition. The simultaneous operation of two such attitudes in American life
created a tension out of which much of American greatest art has sprung. Youth of the
spirit—perhaps of the body as well—is a requirement of its existence; limit and
deprivation are its blackest devils.
The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period,
and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the
illusions. The illusions seem more real than the reality itself.
Embodied in the subordinate characters in the novel, they threaten to invade the whole of
the picture. On the other hand, the reality is embodied in Gatsby; and as opposed to the
hard, tangible illusions, the reality is a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the
possession of a vision, a faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood, possibilities of
life.
In Gatsby’s America, the reality is undefined to itself. It is inarticulate and frustrated.
Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s friend and Fitzgerald’s narrator, says of Gatsby:
 Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was
reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words,
that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried
to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as
though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.
But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was
incommunicable forever.
Fitzgerald perfectly understood the inadequacy of Gatsby’s romantic view of wealth. But
that is not the point. He presents it in Gatsby as a romantic baptism of desire for a reality
that stubbornly remains out of his sight. The scene in which Gatsby shows his piles of
beautiful imported shirts to Daisy and Nick has been mentioned as a failure of Gatsby’s,
and so of Fitzgerald’s, critical control of values. Actually, the shirts are sacramentals, and
it is clear that Gatsby shows them, neither in vanity nor in pride, but with a reverential
humility in the presence of some inner vision he cannot consciously grasp, but toward
which he desperately struggles in the only way he knows.
This beautiful control of conventions can be studied more closely in the description of
Gatsby’s party at which we encounter him for the first time. We are told later that Gatsby
was gifted with a “hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was
founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” Fitzgerald does not actually let us meet Gatsby face
to face until he has concretely created this fantastic world of Gatsby’s vision.
Gatsby is a “mythic” character in this sense—he has no private life, no meaning or
significance that depends on the fulfillment of his merely private destiny, his happiness as
an individual in a society of individuals.
Daisy Buchanan exists at two well-defined levels in the novel. She is what she is—but
she exists also at the level of Gatsby’s vision of her.
The green light that is visible at night across the bay from the windows and lawn of
Gatsby’s house is the central symbol in the book. Significantly, our first glimpse of
Gatsby at the end of Chapter I is related to it. Nick Carraway, whose modest bungalow in
West Egg stands next to Gatsby’s mansion, returning from an evening at the Buchanans’,
while lingering on the lawn for a final moment under the stars, becomes aware that he is
not alone:
… fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my
neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets
regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely
movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested
that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his
of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him… But I didn’t … for he gave a sudden intimation
that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the
dark water in a curious way, and, as far as I was from him, I could have
sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and
distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away,
that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for
Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
It is hardly too much to say that the whole being of Gatsby exists only in relation to what
the green light symbolizes. We have a fuller definition of what the green light means in its
particular, as opposed to its universal, signification in Chapter V. Gatsby is speaking to
Daisy as they stand at one of the windows of his mansion:
“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said
Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of
your dock.”
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what
he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal
significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the
great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near
to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.
Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects
had diminished by one.
The tone or pitch of the symbol is exactly adequate to the problem it dramatizes. Its
immediate function is that it signals Gatsby into his future, away from the cheapness of
his affair with Daisy which he has vainly tried (and desperately continues trying) to create
in the image of his vision.
The green light is successful because, apart from its visual effectiveness as it gleams
across the bay, it embodies the profound naivete of Gatsby’s sense of the future, while
simultaneously suggesting the historicity of his hope.
The symbol occurs several times, and most notably at the end:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we
will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past.
Thus the American dream, whose superstitious valuation of the future began in the past,
gives the green light through which alone the American returns to his traditional roots,
paradoxically retreating into the pattern of history while endeavoring to exploit the
possibilities of the future.
Gatsby’s opposite number in the story is Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan. In the
description of Tom we are left physically face to face with a scion of those ruthless
generations who raised up the great American fortunes, and who now live in uneasy
arrogant leisure on their brutal acquisitions.
Tom Buchanan and Gatsby represent antagonistic but historically related aspects of
America.