ENGL1001 – American Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great
Gatsby (1925)
Dr. John Masterson
5th Lecture
July 2012
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The American Frontiersman
Whose American Dream?
Description of Dan Cody in The Great
Gatsby, Chapter 6
• “[He was] a product of the
Nevada silver fields, of the
Yukon, of every rush for
metal since seventy-five.”
Images of American Silver Mining, approx.
1890
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6
• “I remember the portrait of [Dan
Cody] up in Gatsby's bedroom, a
grey, florid man with a hard, empty
face – the pioneer debauchee, who
during one phase of American life
brought back to the Eastern
seaboard the savage violence of the
frontier brothel and saloon.”
The All-American Cowboy?
Image of a Native American Reservation
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9
• “there was nothing – only
the picture of Dan Cody, a
token of forgotten
violence, staring down
from the wall.”
The Great Gatsby and Its Portrayal of
Violence, Chapter 2
•“making a short deft
movement, Tom
Buchanan broke her
nose with his open
hand.”
Whose All-American Hero?
The Hollywood Gangster
Exchange between Nick and Jordan, The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 3
• Nick - “Either you ought to be more careful, or
you oughtn't to drive at all.'
Jordan - 'I am careful.'
'No, you're not.'
'Well, other people are,' she said lightly.
'What's that got to do with it?'
'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes
two to make an accident.'
'Suppose you meet somebody just as careless as
yourself.'
'I hope I never will,' she answered. 'I hate careless
people. That's why I like you.'
Jordan talking to Nick, The Great
Gatsby, Chapter 9
• “ 'You said a bad driver was only
safe until she met another bad
driver? Well, I met another bad
driver, didn't I? I mean it was
careless of me to make such a
wrong guess.’”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• “[Myrtle's] left breast was swinging loose
like a flap, and there was no need to
listen for the heart beneath. The mouth
was wide open and ripped a little at the
corners, as though she had choked a little
in giving up the tremendous vitality she
had stored so long.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• Daisy – ‘Why – how could I
love [Tom] – possibly?’
• Gatsby - ‘You never loved
him.’
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• ‘Oh, you want too much,’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I
love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help
what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did
love him once – but I loved you too.’
Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.
‘You loved me too?’ he repeated.
‘Even that’s a lie,’ said Tom savagely. ‘She didn’t
know you were alive. Why – there’s things between
Daisy and me that you’ll never know, things that
neither of us can ever forget.’
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• ‘Oh, you want too much,’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I
love you now – isn’t that enough? I can’t help
what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did
love him once – but I loved you too.’
• Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.
• ‘You loved me too?’ he repeated.
• ‘Even that’s a lie,’ said Tom savagely. ‘She didn’t
know you were alive. Why – there’s things
between Daisy and me that you’ll never know,
things that neither of us can ever forget.’
• The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6
• “I’m going to fix everything
just the way it was before,”
[Gatsby] said, nodding
determinedly. “She’ll see.”’
Daisy, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
•‘Even alone I can’t say I
never loved Tom,’ she
admitted in a pitiful
voice. ‘It wouldn’t be
true.’
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6
• “They were a satisfactory hint
of the unreality of reality, a
promise that the rock of the
world was founded securely
on a fairy's wing.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8
• “I couldn’t sleep all night; a
fog-horn was groaning
incessantly on the Sound, and I
tossed half-sick between
grotesque reality and savage,
frightening dreams.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3
• “I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of
it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker
of men and women and machines gives to the restless
eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out
romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a
few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and
no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in
my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the
corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled
back at me before they faded through a door into
warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan
twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt
it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of
windows waiting until it was time for a solitary
restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting
the most poignant moments of night and life.”
New York City