F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby
"That was always my experience- a poor boy in a rich town; a
poor boy in a rich boy's school; a
poor boy in a rich man's club at
Princeton ... . However, I have
never been able to forgive the
rich for being rich, and it has
colored my entire life and works."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
We’ll look at:
• 1. Modernism and the Modern Novel
• 2. Gatsby and the Modern Novel
• 3. Autobiographical links to F. Scott
Fitzgerald
• 4. Commentary on The Great Gatsby
• 5. The American Dream and The Great
Gatsby
1. Modernism & the Modern
• When did Modernism occur?
• Novel:
A: It was evident in literature post-WW 1.
• What was Modernism?
• A: Broke with Victorian bourgeois morality;
rejected 19th C optimism; presented
pessimistic picture, a culture in disarray.
Society’s despair leads to apathy and moral
relativism.
• An ordered, stable 19th C
world view could not accord
with, "the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy which
is contemporary history."
T.S. Eliot
Modernism & The Great Gatsby
• Modernism: A pessimistic picture of a
culture in disarray where despair leads
to apathy and moral relativism.
• How is this shown in TGG?
• Despair - The Valley of Ashes – people with no
hope in the land of the American Dream.
Apathy – Daisy and Jordan lying around the
house with nothing to do, Daisy’s wail that
they would not know what to do “the next day
and the day after that”
Moral Relativism – Gatsby getting money by
illegal means is okay because he is doing it for
love and not greed. Jordan cheating at golf is
okay because she’s a woman.
Essay diction: bold words = Modernist
analysis
• Literature has two components: content
and form. Which one do you think
Modernists focus on?
• A: form.
• The failure of language to ever fully
communicate meaning e.g "That's not it at
all, that's not what I meant at all" laments
Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, leads to
fragmented, non-chronological,
poetic forms.
• Which of these (in bold) applies to TGG?
• A: All of them.
• Modernism embraces the changes of M…..
odern
life over traditional life -- more scientific,
faster, more technological, and more
mechanized.
• Technological innovation with machinery
inspired new techniques in the arts. For
example: Electrical light fascinated modern
artists (and writers). Posters and
advertisements of the period are full of images
of floodlit skyscrapers and light rays shooting
out from automobile headlights and
watchtowers to illuminate the darkness.
• Why is this significant in the context of TGG?
• Because darkness is equivalent to ignorance
and old-fashioned traditions, new money
people like Gatsby reject it. Tom’s activities
are old established ones, like Polo, but Gatsby
has a motor boat and plane.
• Vision and viewpoint
became an essential
aspect of the
modernist novel as
well.
• It was not sufficient to
write a
straightforward thirdperson narrative or
use a pointlessly
intrusive narrator.
The way the story was
told became as
important as the story
itself.
Gatsby
the Modern
•2.
Fitzgerald
left and
the Victorian
era behind, Novel:
creating a Modernist masterwork that is
regarded as The Great American Novel.
• Fitzgerald wanted to portray the J.. Age, as
azz
a period in which dark
fantasy reigned.
• Modernism offered FSF
the chance to craft a
surreal landscape in which
life is viewed more
metaphorically than in a
meticulously detailed way.
• All The Great Gatsby’s characters
participate in Modernism’s examination of
things such as wealth, power and class. FSF
critique of these institutions via his novel,
already in use by poets of the time, began a
long tradition of social commentary in
American literature.
3. Autobiographical links to F. Scott
Fitzgerald:
• “Lost Generation”
• The life he lived became “the stuff of
fiction,” and the characters and plots seem
autobiographical.
• He was sent East for a disciplined
education, and went to the Newman
School, where he developed a friendship
with a teacher called Father Fay.
• Fitzgerald received a
good inheritance, yet
seemed always to be
amongst others who
were more affluent
than he.
• FSF enrolled in
Princeton but never
graduated from the
Ivy League school.
• He left Princeton and
joined the army in 1917, as a
second lieutenant. While in
Officers’ School in
Alabama, he met and fell in
love with Zelda Sayre.
• Is this replicated in Jay
Gatsby’s obsession with
Daisy and her fascination
with a military man?
The marriage was mixed—
both destructive and
constructive
 Fitzgerald drew largely upon
his wife's intense and
flamboyant personality in
his writings
 Argued and fought --- both
drank --- she had
schizophrenia
 There were other women
after (and during?) Zelda
Later Life
 Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories
for such magazines
 “whoring myself”
 Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and
became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily
heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s
 Worked for Hollywood (whoring)
 Had either tuberculosis or alcoholism
 Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940
 Died in his apartment on Dec 21
• Fitzgerald has been called
America’s greatest modern
romantic writer, His works
reflect the spirit of his times,
yet they are timeless.
• Fitzgerald spoke of writing
as a “sheer paring away of
oneself.”
4. Historical Context of
The Great Gatsby:
• In the 20’s, America experienced a cultural
and lifestyle revolution:
• the stock market boomed,
• the rich spent money on fabulous
parties and expensive acquisitions,
• the automobile became a symbol of glamour
and wealth, and profits were made, both
legally and illegally.
• The whirlwind pace of this post-World War I
era is captured by Gatsby, whose tragic quest
and violent death foretell the collapse of that
era and the onset of disillusionment with the
American Dream.
Roaring Twenties!
•
•
•
•
Age of decadence
Flappers
Time of prohibition (1920-1933)
Jazz Age
Jazz Age
• The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the
music called jazz, promoted by such recent
inventions as the phonograph and the radio,
swept up from New Orleans to capture the
national imagination.
• Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of
music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at
the rules of the past.
World War I
• World War I ended in 1918.
• Disillusioned because of the war, the generation
that fought and survived has come to be called
“the lost generation.”
• While the sense of loss was readily apparent
among expatriate American artists who
remained in Europe after the war, back home the
disillusionment took a less obvious form.
The New Woman
• Among the rules broken were the age-old
conventions guiding the behavior of women.
The new woman demanded the right to vote and
to work outside the home.
• Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish
“bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of
the fashionable twenties “flapper.”
• Near the 20th century, major
industrialist personalities
became the new model of the
American Dream, many
beginning life in the humblest
of conditions, but later
controlling enormous
corporations and fortunes.
Perhaps the most notable were
the great American capitalists
Andrew Carnegie and John D.
Rockefeller. This acquisition of
wealth demonstrated to many
that if you had talent,
intelligence, and a willingness
to work hard, you were likely to
be a success as a result.
• The American
dream in a
nutshell: the rise
above poverty to
wealth and the
winning of a love.
5. The American Dream and The
Great Gatsby:
• The American Dream is the idea held by many
in the United States of America that through
hard work, courage, and determination one
can achieve financial and personal success.
These were values held by many early
European settlers, and have been passed down
to subsequent generations.
• What the American dream has become is
a question under constant discussion,
and some believe that it has led to an
emphasis on material wealth as a
measure of success and happiness.
What are the Origins of the
American Dream?
• European explorers and the Puritans—Doctrine
of Election and Predestination
• The Declaration of Independence—life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness
• American Revolutionary War—promise of land
ownership and investment
• Industrial Revolution—possibility of anyone
achieving wealth & the nouveau riche
• Individualism and self-reliance
• Westward expansion and the Gold Rush
• Immigration
• While The Great Gatsby explores a number of
themes, none is more prevalent than that of
the corruption of the American dream.
• Gatsby appears to be the embodiment of this
dream – he has risen from being a poor farm
boy with no prospects, to being rich, having a
big house, servants, and a large social circle
attending his numerous functions. He has
achieved all this in only a few short years,
having returned from the war penniless.
• However, Gatsby is never truly one of the elite
– his dream is just a façade.
• Fitzgerald explores more than the failure of
the American dream – he is deeply concerned
with its total corruption. Gatsby has not
achieved his wealth through honest
hard work, but through bootlegging and
crime. His money is not simply ‘new’
money – it is dirty money, earned
through dishonesty and crime. His
wealthy lifestyle is little more than a façade, as
is the whole person Jay Gatsby.
• The society in which the novel takes place is
one of moral decadence. Whether their money
is inherited or earned, its inhabitants are
morally decadent, living life in quest of
cheap thrills and with no seeming
moral purpose to their lives. Any person
who attempts to move up through the social
classes becomes corrupt in the process.