Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Overview
Author(s): M. Thomas Inge and Eric Solomon
Source: Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St.
James Press, 1994. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
St. James Press Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale,
Cengage Learning
Like so many modern American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald created a public image of
himself as a representative figure of his times, which may have been a part of the
promotional campaign to sell his fiction. It worked for a while, with such success that any
effort to evoke the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties is inevitably accompanied by a
reference to or a photograph of Fitzgerald. But the public memory is fickle, and after he
and Zelda had left the big stage and the gossip columnists no longer had their reckless
antics to report, people forgot that he was once considered a writer of great promise and
talent, and few realized that he had produced a body of work that bids well to bring him
status as a writer for all times.
When Fitzgerald appeared on the literary scene in 1920 with This Side of Paradise, a
semi-autobiographical guide to life at Princeton and the story of a sensitive young man
who is trying to find his place in society, the critics were taken with its sophisticated
style, its use of the social milieu, its honest treatment of emotional experience, and its
somewhat bold portrayal of the younger generation. His readers, then, looked for even
better writing in the following five years, but few would agree that he fulfilled his
promise. Neither the two collections of intriguing, skillful, but often uneven short stories,
Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, nor the weak play The Vegetable
seemed to satisfy their expectations. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was
looked to more eagerly and was more widely reviewed than any other work by the author.
The hero, Fitzgerald said in a letter to his publisher, was intended as "one of those many
with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration," and
the novel related how he and his beautiful young wife were "wrecked on the shoals of
dissipation." The use of autobiographical details again occasioned some speculation and
caused the book to sell well, but many critics found it an unsuccessful effort at a somber
tragedy of a typical American sensibility and thought that it lacked organization or focus.
Some recent critics, however, have felt it to be a better novel than contemporary readers
realized.
Whatever faults one may find in Fitzgerald's early work, with the publication of The
Great Gatsby he fulfilled his highest promise and gave to American literature one of its
masterworks. On the surface, of course, The Great Gatsby is much a part of its age as a
brilliant dramatization of the social and economic corruptions of the jazz age, marked by
Prohibition, gangsterism, blase flappers, and uprootedness. American morality was
marked by questionable business ethics, commercial criteria for success, and
ultraconservatism in social and political thinking. Historians like Charles Beard were
insisting that materialistic and economic factors rather than idealistic motives had
determined the course of American history. Through character and theme, Fitzgerald
dealt in one way or another with all of these historic factors with such a sensitivity that
one can even intuit in the text slight prophetic reverberations of the stock market crash of
1929 and the Great Depression in the offing.
Beyond these surface concerns, the novel deals symbolically with the failure of the
American dream of success, which in Fitzgerald's time was still best known through the
Horatio Alger novels. Like Benjamin Franklin before him, Horatio Alger expounded, by
way of his dime novels, the possibility of rising from rags to riches through industry,
ambition, self-reliance, honesty, and temperance. In this myth, and the frontier tradition
of self-reliance, lies the genesis of what impels Gatsby. Behind his simple and touching
study and work schedule in the copy of Hopalong Cassidy cherished by his father lies the
childhood dreams of a Franklin or a Thomas Edison, the lectures on self-improvement of
a Russell Conwell or a Dale Carnegie, the lessons on bodily development of a Charles
Atlas, and the tradition that every American boy could make a million dollars or become
President. But what an ironic reversal! By imitating the great American moralists, Gatsby
rises to be a rich and powerful criminal.
A second significant thematic concern of the novel relates to its symbolic use of the
midwest as a contrast with the east. In his nostalgic reverie on the midwest near the end
of the novel, Nick Carraway concludes, "I see now that this has been a story of the West,
after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we
possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern
life." This last line is ironic, because Nick left his Minnesota home originally because it
"seemed like the ragged edge of the universe," but by the end of the novel it is the place
to which he returns to regain a sense of balance and moral equilibrium. Fitzgerald is
playing with the traditional American dichotomy between the east as a model of
European sophistication and corruption and the west as a repository of the fundamental
decencies and virtues derived from contact with the American soil, the new Garden of
Eden.
A figure who lurks in the background of the novel is Dan Cody, whose name suggests the
mythic traditions surrounding Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody had helped
settle the nation and made a fortune besides, and therefore he represents the energies that
sparked the western frontier movement. But as Frederick Jackson Turner had reminded
everyone in 1893, the frontier had been closed and no longer carried the significance it
once had as the source of sudden wealth and the place of refuge for those seeking a
second chance. By the time Gatsby met him, Dan Cody had degenerated into a senile old
man subject to the advances of opportunists and gold-diggers. Gatsby takes him as his
ideal, nevertheless, and, like the romantic that he is, he refuses to let historic
circumstance stand in his way. Rather than wrest his fortune from the raw earth, he
pioneers eastward and conquers the urban wilderness through adapting its devious means
to the romantic end of recapturing the past. But history cannot be repeated, and the
historic promise that Gatsby learned from Cody was, Nick notes, "already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the
republic rolled on under the night."
Jay Gatsby, then, is the ultimate American arch-romantic. Because he lacked the wealth
and timing, he missed the girl on whom he had focused what Nick calls his "heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life." After obtaining the wealth through corrupt means, he
returns five years later to fulfill his "incorruptible dream" by attempting to repeat the one
golden moment of his life when he possessed that "elusive rhythm," that "fragment of lost
words" which we all seek to recall in this mundane existence from a former life, time or
world. Not since Don Quixote's pursuit of Dulcinea has literature seen such a noble,
heartbreaking, and impossible quest.
Adopting a modified first-person narrative form from Conrad, Fitzgerald unfolds
Gatsby's tragedy for us through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway. What we learn
through Nick is that pure willpower divorced from rationality and decency leads to
destruction, and that a merely selfish dream or notion is insufficient to justify the
enormous amount of energy and life expended by Gatsby. It is a lesson that this nation
would not learn for almost another fifty years, and a suggestion that Fitzgerald's
prophetic vision saw farther into the future than the Depression years. When Gatsby is
viewed against the moral decadence and cowardly conduct of the Buchanans—"You're
worth the whole damn bunch put together," Nick tells him—his unassailable romanticism
makes him appear heroic. As an individual, then, who dreams higher than he can achieve,
whose reach exceeds his grasp, Gatsby is at the heart of the tragic condition and thus
shares certain characteristics with Oedipus, Hamlet, and other tragic heroes of Western
literature. Unlike Arthur Miller's modern tragic figure, Willy Loman, Gatsby doesn't
evoke mere pity and disgust at the end, as he faithfully waits for a phone call that will
never come.
Aside from its concern with social and moral questions of continuing consequence, The
Great Gatsby is one of the most carefully constructed and precisely written novels in
American literature. The subtle complexity of the language; the calculated use of colors,
references, and connotations; the striking configurations of verbal patterns and
repetitions—all lead the reader to read and reread sentences time and time again to catch
the multi-level nuances of meaning. The style is poetic and repays the application of the
techniques of studied explication.
Because of the disarray of his personal life, his dwindling financial resources, and his
increasing self-doubts as a writer, Fitzgerald was unable to bring his artistry to such a
perfect pitch again. His numerous short stories written primarily for pay (some of which
were collected in All the Sad Young Men and Taps at Reveille) and his indifferent work
for Hollywood only occasionally encouraged his best talents. His next novel, Tender Is
the Night, which came nine years after Gatsby, used European locales and his
experiences with his wife's mental illness, another foray into autobiographical materials.
What some critics felt was an unresolved problem in structure and a failure to provide
clear character motivation caused many to overlook its impressive sweep of characters
and its admirable effort to deal with significant psychological and social themes.
The doomed anti-hero of Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver, a psychiatrist turned
husband/keeper of the beautiful, spoiled, wealthy Nicole, is, in part, a dark version of
Fitzgerald's fears for his own crackup into alcoholism and decadence. The sprawling
canvas of the novel—set in the south of France, full of echoes of America and equally
filled with brilliant cameos of lost American expatriates—catches the tone of the
Depression United States both in the personal despair of the Divers and in the social
clarity that highlights the waste of spirit and money that leads to a society's collapse. In
his attempt to write a "big" novel, Fitzgerald tries to control his variety of themes,
characters, and settings by techniques that are almost, but not quite, triumphant: the use
of an innocent eye as narrative viewpoint in the book's opening, through Rosemary, a
young, tough but unspoiled Hollywood actress who over-identifies with the glamorous
Divers' surface; then a long flashback section to World War I and Dick's psychiatric
career as well as Nicole's illness, told from an omniscient viewpoint that concentrates on
Dick's thoughts; finally a scattered, staccato ending of drunkenness and violence shown
through both Dick's and Nicole's minds.
After his death, the fragments of a novel, The Last Tycoon, were found, many pages of
which suggest that Fitzgerald was regaining control of his creative skills at the last.
Despite his lapses and occasional self-indulgence, the high quality of his best work, and
most certainly the striking achievement in The Great Gatsby, has brought his work the
esteem which eluded Fitzgerald himself during his own lifetime.
Source Citation: Eric Solomon, . "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Overview." Reference Guide to
American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature
Resource Center. Gale. Beacon School. 2 Nov. 2009
<http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=nysl_me_79_bcsc>.