The Great Gatsby

Why did you choose this particular book? Typical reasons might be:

First, I have heard about the author Fitzgerald before, “angel of the twenties”. He succeeded then because his first novel caught the tone of the age----how the American idealistic outlook, the “American dream” contradicted with the contemporary reality. And he was once praised “the poet laureate of the Jazz Age” because he devoted most of his writings to that age until his death. So I am curious about his masterpiece.

    Second, before I decided to choose this book, I had researched for some information about it. I know the success of The Great Gatsby lies partly in the fact that it can be read in different ways. On the one hand, it is possible to be read simply as a love story. On the other hand, the novel may be taken as a piece of social satire. In addition, the book can also be read as an investigation about how American lost their spiritual purpose as material success wiped out spiritual goals. I think such kind of book can be quite worth reading.

    Third, a friend of mine has read this book before and she recommends it.

    Fourth, The Great Gatsby is on the required reading list provided by my teacher.

The Great Gatsby

Abstract：

    The Great Gatsby is a novel set in 1920s, which is about the “American Dream”. The failure of the “American Dream” is inevitable. In the book, Gatsby is not great; his nick name “Great Gatsby” is just an irony. Indeed, he is just a materially wealthy man who is indulged in pursing his own beautiful “dream” every day. Also, the means of artistic expressions are very superb and exquisite, such as symbolization which is well explained in the book review.

Key word:

    The “American Dream”, “Great Gatsby”, purse, love, illusion, symbolization

The Great Gatsby

1. Brief Introduction of F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Fitzgerald was the most representative novelist of the 1920s. He was both a leading participant in the typically frivolous, carefree, moneymaking life of the decade and, at the same time, a detached observer of it. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was the only son of a socially prominent and genteelly poor family. With the financial aid of relatives he entered Prince University in 1913. In 1917 he left before graduating to serve in the U.S. Army in Alabama, where he became engaged to Zelda Sayre an embodiment of all his romantic notions of a southern Belle. After his discharge from the army in 1919, he took a job with an advertising agency and worked on short stories and a novel at night. Eventually his first novel, This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication and appeared in March 1920. It was an instant success and brought Fitzgerald fame and wealth. In the same year Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre were married. The couple plunged into the gaudy, wealthy society of their generation. They lived so extravagantly that they frequently spent more money than Fitzgerald earned. In order to earn more money, Fitzgerald continued to write. In 1922 he published his second novel. The Beautiful and Damned, and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. In 1925, Fitzgerald managed to complete The Great Gatsby. It was a critical success but a commercial failure. His next novel, Tender Is the Night was received coldly mainly because America was deep in the Great Depression and nobody wanted to read about expatriate in France. Battered by the failure of the book and Zelda’s mental breakdown, he drank to excess and grew seriously ill. He died in 1940, with his last novel, The Last Tycoon, unfinished.

2. Plot

    The Great Gatsby recounts the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, who was a poor youth from the Midwest. He falls in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but is too poor to marry her. The girl is then married to a rich young man, Tom Buchanan. Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in bootlegging and other “shabby” activities, thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent imitation French villa. There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of alluring the Buchanans to come. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams. A sense of loss and disillusionment comes over him. Then Daisy kills a woman who is her husband’s mistress in an accident, and Tom misleads Myrtle’s heartbroken husband George, implying that the accident was Gatsby’s fault, though it is not clear if Tom did so intentionally. In a fit of blinding vengeance, Gatsby is consequently shot by George Wilson; Wilson commits suicide immediately afterwards.

3. Character Analysis

Nick Carraway: Nick provides the voice of the novel, documenting his companions exploits in the summer of 1922. Being raised in a wealthy middle-western family, Nick graduates from New Haven, the college he attended with Tom Buchanan. After serving in World War I, Nick---at the age of 29---moves east to learn the bond business, and becomes involved with the affairs comprising The Great Gatsby. Eventually, Nick acts as a liaison between Gatsby and Daisy, setting up the infamous first reunion at his house. Despite repeatedly insisting that he prides himself on his own honesty, Nick continually aligns himself with next-door-neighbor Gatsby---whose entire existence is a fabrication---remaining loyal to his friend throughout the second half of the novel.

Jay Gatsby: The invented identity of James Gats, born the son of poor middle-western farmers, Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”. Gatsby’s beginnings occurred when the 17-year-old Gats---a clam digger and salmon fisher---sees millionaire Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor on a dangerous stretch of Lake Superior. After rowing out to Cody on a borrowed row-boat and warning him that a coming wind might wreck his yacht, Cody employs Jay Gatsby in a “vague personal capacity” for several years. Later, Gatsby says he worked in the drugstore and oil businesses, omitting the fact that he was involved in illegal bootlegging. Gatsby keeps his criminal activities mysterious throughout the novel, preferring to play the role of perpetually gracious host. Gatsby buys his West Egg mansion with the sole intention of being across the bay from Daisy Buchanan’s green light at the end of her dock, a fantasy which becomes Gatsby’s personal version of the American Dream. With an Oxford education as part of his invented persona, Gatsby ceaselessly uses his favorite phrase, “Old sport,” throughout the novel.

Gatsby is naïve, impractical and over sentimental. He is a representative of American young people before the war---ambitious, high spirited and filled with fantastic dreams. He succeeds in getting money. He does become rich, extremely rich, but he fails in realizing the “American Dream”. He is too persistent, too simple-minded, so at last he loses everything. He is ridiculously rich, but he can never live up to the magnificent role he has created for himself---He is “Mr. nobody from nowhere”. His suit is cheap-looking, but his manners are nervous and overly elaborated. He is the last of the great romantics. He is extremely idealistic. On the one hand, he is charmingly innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered; on the other hand, Gatsby is sinister because of his criminal activities, because he is tragically convinced of the power of money and has depended too much on the power of money. Gatsby’s fate is sealed by his innocence. Thus, despite all his wealth, just as his car sweep Myrtle down without notice, the carelessness, the hardness of Daisy and Tom can easily destroy him. This is strongly implied by the simultaneous death of Gatsby and Wilson---fellow victims of the same tragedy. Gatsby is not great; his nick-name “Great Gatsby” is just an irony. Actually, Gatsby, as the author himself had realized, never truly belonged in the life of American’s wealthy class, which he both longed for and mistrusted. He wanted to have the appearance of belonging to the upper class, believing that the appearance would give him the freedom to rebuild his life as he wished. However, he found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and destructive. Money brought only tragedy and remorse.

Tom Buchanan: An ex-football star from the same college Nick Carraway attended, Tom is described as “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax”. Now thirty, Tom has become enormously wealthy, yet remains physically powerful with his “cruel body” and “arrogant eyes”. Tom has a string of affairs despite being married to Daisy, and is involved with Myrtle Wilson throughout Nick’s summer-long friendship with the Buchanans. As an aggressive, short-tempered man, Tom wreaks continual havoc by abusing---physically or emotionally--- Daisy, Myrtle, George Wilson, and Gatsby throughout the novel.

Daisy Buchanan: Daisy is Tom’s 23-year-old wife, Nick’s second cousin once removed, and Gatsby’s version of the Holy Grail. Nick comments repeatedly on Daisy’s voice, first describing it as “the kind of voice that ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again,” and later calling it “a deathless song”. Yet, her voice becomes silenced as Gatsby and Tom’s battle for her preference---rather than choosing one or the other outright she acts helpless, seeming to ultimately remain with Tom because it is the easiest thing to do. In addition, she never acknowledges that she, not Gatsby, was driving when Myrtle was killed. As Nick characterizes both Buchanans, “The were careless people, Tom and Daisy---they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.

For Gatsby, who is from a lower social class, Daisy’s character contains a darker, less attractive side. She is selfish. She is careless about others. In her world, she herself is always the center. Indeed she is morally destructive because she is irresponsible and acts without conscience. Therefore, her physical attractiveness, with its empty promise, is merely a trick. And Gatsby is caught, or trapped in her spell. Daisy indeed is more of a witch than a fairy. Her magic has an evil influence. It destroys and kills.

Jordan Baker: Jordan, a 23-year-old woman’s golf champion, becomes involved with Nick during the course of the summer of 1922. Jordan seems “incurably dishonest,” a trait enhanced by Nick’s remembrance of a rumor that she cheated at her first big golf tournament. Although Nick finds Jordan haughty and careless, he finds himself attracted to her anyway. At the end of the novel, Jordan gets engaged to another man after not seeing Nick for a short time, leaving Nick angry, yet still “half in love with her, and tremendously sorry”. Jordan’s action seems to intentionally echo Daisy’s leaving Gatsby to marry Tom five years earlier.

George Wilson: Wilson owns the car repair garage in the valley of ashes, where he and his wife, Myrtle, live. For most of the novel Wilson is unaware that his wife has been cheating on him, prompting Tom Buchanan to remark, “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive”. After finding out Myrtle’s infidelities, Wilson becomes physically ill and determines to move her out west; his illness turns mental, however, once she gets run over by Gatsby’s car. The formerly reserved Wilson seeks crazed vengeance for her death and his own pride, ultimately killing Gatsby and himself.

Myrtle Wilson: Myrtle is George Wilson’s wife, and Tom Buchanan’s secret lover. A woman in her mid-thirties, Myrtle is “faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can”. Although she apparently detests her husband, her lover, Tom, abuses her, breaking her nose during their drunken escapade in New York City. Locked in her room by George after her infidelities are found out, she escapes into the night, only to be run over by Daisy driving Gatsby’s car. Her death prompts George Wilson to undertake his bloody “holocaust”.

Meyer Wolfshiem: A fifty-year-old gambler, with a history of having fixed the 1919 World Series, Wolfshiem is one of Jay Gatsby’s shadiest associates. Nick leaves the relationship between the two men vague, although when he goes to see Wolfshiem the morning of Gatsby’s funeral, the old man tells Nick he raised Gatsby “up out of nothing, right out of the gutter”. Despite their former partnership---most likely in the business of stolen bonds---Wolfshiem twice declines Nick’s invitation to attend Gatsby’s funeral, stating he “can’t get mixed up in it”.

Owl Eyes: This is a minor character who only makes three brief appearances in The Great Gatsby: at the first Gatsby party which Nick attends; second, as a passenger in the car missing one wheel outside Gatsby’s that same night; and finally, as the only person---aside from Nick and Gatsby’s father---in attendance during Gatsby’s burial.

4. Comment:

The Great Gatsby tells a story about a millionaire Gatsby who pursues an “American Dream” which turns out to be disillusioned, and discloses the tragedy of American society in that era.

The love story between Gatsby and Daisy originally can be very ordinary, but the author F. Scott Fitzgerald is intelligent enough to compare the girl Gatsby loves to the symbol of youth, money, and status, to compares her as an impulse of pursuing rich, material life which can be called the “American Dream”. In order to get Daisy back to his arm, Gatsby exhausts all his emotion, intelligence, finally even his life. He naively believes that he can get his love back and live a life as before with Daisy as long as he owns a lot of money. Regrettably, Gatsby is totally wrong. He misreads Daisy who is actually a vulgar and superficial woman, misreads the society which seems extravagant and full of happiness, but indeed void and boring. He lives in his illusion all day until he is eventually abandoned by Daisy, his so-called friends and the society, which is an irredeemable tragedy.

Gatsby is a typical American youth in 1920s, whose experiences are exactly a portrayal of “The Jazz Age”. The author designs a “second protagonist” Nick Carraway in the novel. His importance is not inferior to the protagonist Gatsby in many ways, because Carraway is not only a narrator and commenter in the story, but also an important character. He has countless ties with both sides in the fiction. He is Gatsby’s neighbor and friend, Daisy’s cousin, Tom’s classmate, Jordan’s boyfriend. He helps Gatsby and Daisy have a date with each other, criticizes about Gatsby’s reviving old dream and has sympathy for Gatsby’s death. Although Carraway lives in luxurious residential district, he is neither one of the citizens whom Tom stands for nor people living in fanciful world which Gatsby represents for. He has just criticism both for illusioned Gatsby and vulgar Tom and Daisy, defending traditional concepts and moral standards in Midwest in U.S. After Gatsby’s death, guests in former days never emerge, even Daisy goes far away with her husband, so Nick points out straight from the shoulder that the society is so hypocritical and heartless, making readers have a deep impression about the inevitable cracking of Gatsby’s “American Dream”.

Fitzgerald uses the first person to tell story as if all the things happens in the book is what Nick sees and hears himself, without any decoration. It makes the story much more believable. Gatsby and Nick’s relationship is from strangers to acquaintances. They are emotionally distant as well as close, having both similarities and differences. It is the author’s unique artistic achievement to unify different views perfectly in one novel, endowing the work with profound connotations Jogos Dora and rigorous structure. Also, there are abundant, vivid metaphors in the book, which adds lyric element to the characters’ emotional ups and downs and the changes of scenes. Good metaphors are often used for creating fantastic atmosphere or express spiritual inanity. For example, Nick visits Tom’s for the first time, sees Daisy and her friend Baker lying in couch “two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon”, latter “ballooned slowly to the floor”.

Symbolization is well applied in the book to reveal characters’ inner minds and deepen the themes of the novel. Take “green light” for example. Located at the end of the Buchanans’ dock, this green light represents Gatsby’s ultimate aspiration: to win Daisy’s love. Nick’s first vision of Gatsby is of his neighbor’s trembling arms stretched out toward the green light. Later, after Daisy and Gatsby’s successful reunion, a mist conceals the green light, visibly affecting Gatsby. Nick observes, “Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever…Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one”. This image suggests Gatsby realizes he must face the reality of Daisy rather than the ideal he created for her. Another example is eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. These gigantic blue eyes without a face look out at the valley of ashes from behind a pair of yellow eyeglasses. This billboard advertisement---which provides its eternal presence looming above the ash-heaps---takes on added significance in Chapter 8, as a grief stricken George Wilson refers to it as God. While looking at the giant eyes after Myrtle’s death Wilson reveals he had taken his wife to the window just before she died and told her, “God knows what you’ve been doing. dora You may fool me but you can’t fool God! ...God sees everything”. Thus, the desolation of the valley of ashes may be seen in Fitzgerald’s image of an abandoned billboard serving as Wilson’s provider of solace and ultimate judge of morality. Following a central theme of modernism, this new God watches over his paradise which has been reduced to ash-heaps by modern man.

The name of this book is “The Great Gatsby”, but I don’t think Gatsby is great. I would rather call Gatsby an illusion catcher rather than regard him as a dream pursuer. First of all, Daisy isn’t worthy of being a dream to pursue. She is a vulgar and wordy girl who devoted only to money and wealth. She shifts her heart to money as flexibly as a sunflower adjusts its direction to the sun. As to Gatsby, he knows who Daisy is but he sticks to his fantasy that Daisy is definitely his dream.Juegos Dora Yet what Gatsby pursues is the pure daisy while what he actually catches is the incarnation of materialism. Consequently, Gatsby’s tragedy is inevitable. From my point of view, Gatsby makes a mistake in the identification of dream. Moreover, when Gatsby finds out that it’s the illusion that he’s catching not the dream that he’s pursuing, he makes up his mind to go on rather than to stop for contemplation over his life direction. Just as he says in the book: “She married you because I was poor.” “Her voice was full of money.” Upon common sense, when we unveiled the bad essence of a person, we are likely to turn our back against him. But as to Gatsby, when he found the materialism and hypocrisy in Daisy, he even sacrificed himself in the protection of this ungrateful woman. In my perspective, devastating oneself for an unworthy person can never prove its greatness but unworthiness. In conclusion, I don’t think Gatsby is great because he makes an inappropriate identification of dream and sacrifices himself for an illusion.

Conclusion:

The Great Gatsby, subtle in its artist design and rich in feeling, is still one of the classics of modern American literature. In the book, the author Fitzgerald states the failure of hopes and dreams, the failure of the “American Dream” in “The Jazz Age” is unavoidable, not only because reality cannot keep up with ideals, but also because the ideals are in any cases too fantastic to be realized.