The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby: overview
Fitzgerald’s Early Life
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Born in St. Paul, Minnesota on
September 24, 1896.
• Scott was a distant relative of Francis Scott
Key, the composer of our national anthem.
• His father, Edward Fitzgerald was a failure in
business & the family lived on the mother’s
money;
• Her name was McQuillen & she had inherited
money from her father.
The Formative Years
• Fitzgerald grew up, surrounded by wealth
• Because of the his mother’s family money, he
was able to attend private schools where he was
painfully reminded that he was not quite as well
off as his classmates.
• He attended Princeton where he once again
was in the company of young men who were
much better situated in life.
• Some speculate that this “tension” surfaced in
some of his better known works, e.g. Gatsby
Zelda…
• The Influence of Zelda Sayre…
• Scott wanted to marry Zelda immediately, but she
had reservations
• She had many boy friends and Scott’s future was
uncertain
• Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the muse of the Jazz
Age. She was the embodiment of all things modern
and new, and once described herself as “without a
thought for anyone else…I did not have a single
feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no
moral principles.”
• Their marriage was quite the celebrity event…and
very representative of the “unattainable other.”
Just love this quote of Zelda’s when
she first met F. Scott
• "There seemed to be some heavenly
support beneath his shoulder blades that
lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic
suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the
ability to fly but was walking as a
compromise to convention."[
Fitzgerald’s Literary Lineage
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Fitzgerald’s Works
1920 This Side of Paradise
1925 The Great Gatsby
1934 Tender is the Night
1941 The Last Tycoon
Fitzgerald wrote over 160 short stories
Gatsby and
the American Dream
• The American Dream: the idea that in America
one might hope to satisfy every material desire,
& thereby achieve happiness.
• Fitzgerald believed the American Dream to be
deceptive: proposing the satisfaction of all desire
as an attainable goal, and equating desire with
material acquisitions only leads to dissatisfaction
• One can end up with great wealth and “stuff” and
be quite empty…
Gatsby Themes
• Decline of the American Dream (1922)
– Old $$ v. New $$
– Prosperity, Material Excess, Bootlegging
v.
– Discovery, Individualism, “Pursuit of Happiness”
• Hollowness of the Upper Class
– Lack of “Grounded” Values
• Time
– Notice the different approach to time from the
perspectives of Gatsby and Carraway
• Geography: East v. West
The Viewing Lens
• To fully understand the Great Gatsby (&
Fitzgerald) we must observe the novel through
the lens of alcohol;
– alcohol is the drug of possibility The theme of “time” is
central to the novel; for Gatsby, time is non-existent;
he believes he can repeat the past
– The juxtaposition of East & West is an important part
of the novel as well…those who have v. those who
have not
Gatsby Symbolism
• The Green Light (Buchanan’s Dock)
– Positive and negative aspects of the color
• Opportunity v. Greed
• Valley of Ashes: The Wasteland
– T.S. Eliot’s epic poem
– Purgatory
– Moral and Social Wasteland
• Dr. Eckleburg’s Eyes
– God views moral decay of America?
Geographic Influences
• East Egg v. West Egg: Morals & Values
– West Egg being the less fashionable of the two
‘In my younger and more vulnerable years,
my father gave me some advice that I’ve
been turning over in my mind ever since.’
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he
told me, “just remember that all the people
in this world haven’t had the advantages
you’ve had.”
East v. West
“When I came back from the East last autumn
I felt that I wanted the world to be in
uniform…and at a sort of moral attention
forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions
with privileged glimpses into the human
heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
name to this book, was exempt from my
reaction – Gatsby, who represented
everything for which I have an unaffected
scorn.” (p.2)
Chapter 1…
• Tom: Two shining arrogant eyes had established
dominance over his face and gave him the
appearance of always leaning aggressively
forward. (p.7)
• Daisy and Jordan: The only completely stationary
object in the room was an enormous couch on
which two young women were buoyed up as
though upon an anchored balloon. They were both
in white, and their dresses were rippling and
fluttering as if they had just been blown back after
a short flight around the house. (p.8)
– Our first archetype
Racism surfaces…
• Tom: Well, it’s a fine book (The Rise of the
Colored Empires) and everybody ought to
read it. The idea is that if we don’t look
out, the white race will be – will be utterly
submerged.
– What do you feel this adds to the story line?
The Green Light
• 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…(p. 21)
The Wasteland
…the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue
and gigantic – their retinas are one yard
high. They look out of no face, but, instead,
from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles
which pass over a non-existant nose. (p. 21)
The Wasteland and Myrtle…
p. 24: The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by
a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to
let barges through, the passengers on waiting
trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as
half an hour.
– What significance does this imply?
p. 25: She was in her middle thirties, and faintly
stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously
as some woman can. Her face…contained no
gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately
perceptible vitality about her…
The Lavish Gatsby
p. 39: On the weekend his Rolls Royce
became an omnibus…
p. 41: I believe that on that night when I first
went to Gatsby’s house, I was one of the few
guests who had actually been invited.
People were not invited…they went there.
p. 49: Speculation on Gatsby’s origin…
– Why didn’t anyone seem to know? Did anyone really care?
Nick’s Perception of Humanity
p. 59: Every one suspects himself of at least
one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I
am one of the few honest people I have ever
known.
The Four Cardinal Virtues:
– Temperance: Moderation
– Prudence: Wisdom
– Justice: Fairness
– Fortitude: Strength, endurance
Gatsby’s Origins…and character
James Gatz – that was really, or at least
legally, his name. He changed it at the
age of seventeen and at the specific
moment that witnessed the beginning of
his career…(p.98)
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it
was before…” (p.110)
• Gatsby becomes the “fixer” that Meyer Wolfsheim
once was…
What is the American Dream?
• The Laments of a Teenager
• Sometimes, when Efrain Garcia is heading home
on the A train, he wishes it would roll through his
Euclid Avenue stop and deposit him somewhere
else. In his fantasy, somewhere else would be a
place with large single-family homes, with nice
cars in the driveways, and with jobs that are easy
to find.
• “Everybody wants to live in a good
neighborhood,” he said in his soft-spoken way.
“It’s the American Dream.”
The Relationships
(p. 109) Daisy and Gatsby: One autumn
night, 5 years before…they had been
walking down the street when the leaves
were falling…
(p.124): Tom and Myrtle: He (Wilson) had
discovered that Myrtle had some sort of
life apart from him in another world, and
the shock made him physically sick…
And again, those eyes…
(p.124): Over the ash heaps, the giant eyes of
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil…In one of
the windows over the garage, the curtains had
been moved aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was
peering down at the car…
(p. 125): There is no confusion like the confusion
of a simple mind…
• Who is the simple mind?
Tom and Gatsby’s Confrontation
(p. 130): I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to
tell me…
• It all begins to unravel…
(p. 133): He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of
side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and
sold grain alcohol over the counter…
(p. 135) Human sympathy had its limits, and we
were content to let all their tragic arguments fade
with the city lights behind…
Myrtle’s Death…and Gatsby’s
protection…
(p. 137)…A moment later she rushed out in to the
dusk, waving her hands and shouting – before
he could move from his door the business was
over.
…The “death car” as the newspapers called it,
didn’t stop…and then disappeared around the
next bend…
(p. 139): It was a yellow car…big yellow car. New.
(p. 143): “Was Daisy driving?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of
course, I’ll say I was…”
Again, those eyes…
(p. 159): …and I said ‘God knows what you’ve
been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You
may fool me, but you can’t fool God.!’
‘Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock
that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J.
Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and
enormous, from the dissolving night.’
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
The price of death…
(p.160): If that was true, he must have felt
that he had lost the old warm world, paid
too high a price for living too long with a
single dream…
(p. 162): It was after we started with Gatsby
toward the house that the gardener saw
Wilson’s body a little way off in the
grass…and the holocaust was complete.
Tom’s confession…
(p. 178): “I told him the truth,” he said. “He
came to the door while we were getting
ready to leave, and when I sent down
word that we weren’t in…he ran over
Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never
even stopped his car.”
(p. 179): They were careless people, Tom
and Daisy…
The Close…and final fix
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown
world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first
picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s
dock.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic
future that year by year recedes before us…
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne
back ceaselessly into the past…