Oakwood Publishing Company:
SAT; ACT; GRE
Study Material
xx
|
STUDYWORLD STUDYNOTES:
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE GREAT GATSBY CRITICISMS
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: A LETTER TO FITZGERALD FROM HIS EDITOR, NOVEMBER
20, 1924
I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book . It is an
extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted
exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more
of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation
on a h igher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance
that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely
effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the
strangeness of human circums t ance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of
Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their
presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes,
expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It's mag nificent!
Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author:
The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, 1950
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: FITZGERALD'S DREAM: A PARALLEL TO GATSBY
When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned
how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I
decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and
meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her, but being
patient in those days, made the best of it a nd got to love her in another way.
You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our
lives. But I was a man divided--she wanted me to work too much for her and not
enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was digni ty, and the only
dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and
she broke and is broken forever.
Scott Fitzgerald, "Letter to His Daughter,"
July 7, 1938 from Letters to His Daughter, 1965
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: FITZGERALD'S DOUBLE VISION
He cultivated a sort of double vision. He was continually trying to present
the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the Riviera, on the North
Shore of Long Island, and in the Hollywood studios; he surrounded his charact
ers with a mist of admiration and simultaneously he drove the mist away... He
regarded himself as a pauper living among millionaires... a sullen peasant among
the nobility, and he said that his point of vantage "was the dividing line
between two generatio n s," prewar and postwar. It was this habit of
keeping a double point of view that distinguished his work. There were popular
and serious novelists in his time, but there was something of a gulf between
them; Fitzgerald was one of the very few popular write rs who were also serious
artists.
Malcolm Cowley, "Third Act and Epilogue,"
The New Yorker, 1945
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: FITZGERALD'S ARTISTIC METHOD IN GATSBY
...the characters are not "developed": the wealthy and brutal Tom
Buchanan haunted by his "scientific" vision of the doom of
civilization, the vaguely guilty, vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker, the dim
Wolfsheim, who fixed the World Series of 1919, are treated, we might say, as if
they were ideographs, a method of economy that is reinforced by t he ideographic
use of that is made of the Washington Heights flat, the terrible "valley of
ashes" seen from the Long Island Railroad, Gatsby's incoherent parties, and
the huge sordid eyes of the oculist's advertising sign. (It is a technique which
gives t h e novel an affinity with The Waste Land, between whose author and
Fitzgerald there existed a reciprocal admiration.) Gatsby himself, once stated,
grows only in the understanding of the narrator. He is allowed to say very
little in his own person. Indeed, a part from the famous "Her voice is full
of money," he says only one memorable thing, but that remark is
overwhelming in its intellectual audacity: when he is forced to admit that his
lost Daisy did perhaps love her husband, he says, "In any case it was ju st
personal." With that sentence he achieves an insane greatness, convincing
us that he really is a Platonic conception of himself, really some sort of Son
of God.
Lionel Trilling, "F. Scott Fitzgerald,"
The Liberal Imagination, 1950
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: THE GREAT GATSBY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a
corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that
divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than the
reality itself. Embodied in the subordinate characters in the novel, they
threaten to invade the whole of the picture. On the other hand, the reality is
embodied in Gatsby; and as opposed to the hard, tangible Illusions, the reali ty
is a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the possession of a vision, a
faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood possibilities of life.
Marius Bewley, "Scott Fitzgerald's
Criticism of America," 1954
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: THE SYMBOLISM OF EAST AND WEST
Fitzgerald's dichotomy of East and West has the poetic truth of James's
antithesis of provincial American virtue and refined European sensibility. Like
The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, Gatsby is a story of "displaced
perso ns" who have journeyed eastward in search of a larger and experience
of life. To James this reverse migration from the New to the Old World has in
itself no special significance. To Fitzgerald, however, the lure of the East
represents a profound displacem ent of the American dream, a turning back upon
itself of the historic pilgrimage towards the frontier which had, in fact,
created and sustained that dream.
Robert Ornstein, "Scott Fitzgerald's \
Fable of East and West," 1957
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: COLOR SYMBOLISM IN THE GREAT GATSBY: DAISY
The white Daisy embodies the vision which Gatsby (who, like Lord Jim, usually
wears white suits) seeks to embrace--but which Nick, who discovers the corrupt
admixture of dream and reality, rejects in rejecting Jorda n. For, except in
Gatsby's extravagant imagination, the white does not exist pure: it is
invariably stained by the money, the yellow. Daisy is the white flower--with the
golden center. If in her virginal beauty she "dressed in white and had a
little white roadster," she is, Nick realizes, "high in a white palace
the king's daughter, the golden girl." "Her voice is like money";
she carries a "little gold pencil"; when she visits Gatsby there are
"two rows of brass buttons on her dress."
Daniel J. Schneider, "Color-Symbolism
r in The Great Gatsby," 1964
^^^^^^^^^^THE GREAT GATSBY: AN ATTACK ON NICK AS A CHARACTER
Carraway's distinctiveness as a character is that he fails to learn anything
from his story, that he can continue to blind himself even after his p rivileged
overview of Gatsby's fate.... He refuses to admit that his alliance with Gatsby,
his admiration for the man, results from their sharing the same weakness.... He
has learned nothing. His failure to come to any self-knowledge makes him like
the pe r son who blames the stone for stubbing his toe. It seems inevitable that
he will repeat the same mistakes as soon as the feeling that "temporarily
closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of
men" has departed.... Had Carrawa y been defeated by the impersonal forces
of an evil world in which he was an ineffectual innocent, his very
existence--temporary or not--would lighten the picture. But his defeat is caused
by something that lies within himself: his own lack of fibre, his o wn
willingness to deny reality, his own substitution of dreams for knowledge of
self and the world, his own sharing in the very vices of which his fellow men
stand accused.
Gary J. Scrimgeour, "Against The Great Gatsby," 1966
|
Teacher Ratings: See what
others think
of your teachers
|
