The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Great Gatsby overview

• Fitzgeralds Early Life
• 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 mothers
  money
• Her name was McQuillen she had inherited money
  from her father.

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The Formative Years

• Fitzgerald grew up, surrounded by wealth
• Because of the his mothers 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

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Zelda

• The Influence of Zelda Sayre
• Scott wanted to marry Zelda immediately, but she
  had reservations
• She had many boy friends and Scotts 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 elseI did not have a single
  feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and
  no moral principles.
• Their marriage was quite the celebrity eventand
  very representative of the unattainable other.

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Just love this quote of Zeldas 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."

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Fitzgeralds Literary Lineage

• Fitzgeralds 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

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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

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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

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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 wellthose who have v. those
  who have not

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Gatsby Symbolism

• The Green Light (Buchanans Dock)
• Positive and negative aspects of the color
• Opportunity v. Greed
• Valley of Ashes The Wasteland
• T.S. Eliots epic poem
• Purgatory
• Moral and Social Wasteland
• Dr. Eckleburgs Eyes
• God views moral decay of America?

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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 Ive 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 havent had the advantages youve had.

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East v. West

• When I came back from the East last autumn I
  felt that I wanted the world to be in uniformand
  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)

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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

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Racism surfaces

• Tom Well, its a fine book (The Rise of the
  Colored Empires) and everybody ought to read it.
  The idea is that if we dont look out, the white
  race will be will be utterly submerged.
• What do you feel this adds to the story line?

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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)

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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 facecontained
  no gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately
  perceptible vitality about her

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• 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 Gatsbys house, I was one of the few
  guests who had actually been invited. People
  were not invitedthey went there.
• p. 49 Speculation on Gatsbys origin
• Why didnt anyone seem to know? Did anyone
  really care?

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Nicks 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

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Gatsbys Originsand 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)
• Im going to fix everything just the way it was
  before (p.110)
• Gatsby becomes the fixer that Meyer Wolfsheim
  once was

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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. Its the
  American Dream.

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The Relationships

• (p. 109) Daisy and Gatsby One autumn night, 5
  years beforethey 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

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And again, those eyes

• (p.124) Over the ash heaps, the giant eyes of
  Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigilIn 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?

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Tom and Gatsbys 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

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Myrtles Deathand Gatsbys 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,
  didnt stopand then disappeared around the next
  bend
• (p. 139) It was a yellow carbig yellow car.
  New.
• (p. 143) Was Daisy driving?
• Yes, he said after a moment, but of
  course, Ill say I was

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Again, those eyes

• (p. 159) and I said God knows what youve
  been doing, everything youve been doing. You may
  fool me, but you cant 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.

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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 Wilsons
  body a little way off in the grassand the
  holocaust was complete.

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Toms 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 werent
  inhe ran over Myrtle like youd run over a dog
  and never even stopped his car.
• (p. 179) They were careless people, Tom and
  Daisy

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The Closeand final fix

• And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown
  world, I thought of Gatsbys wonder when he first
  picked out the green light at the end of Daisys
  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