The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

…The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic…

The Great Gatsby

The protagonist of the novel is James Gatz, a men who comes from a modest family.

He makes many effort to rise above poverty, he even changes his name into Jay Gatsby.

While in the army, Jay fall in love with Daisy, a beautiful and superficial woman who marries Tom Buchanan.

Plot

Gatsby makes a fortune as a bootlegger (the illegal transport of alcoholic beverages) and through other illegal activities.

He rents a magnificent mansion on the fashionable shore of Long Island, on the opposite side to Daisy’s house. In the hope to see her again, Jay gives fabulous parties, open to everybody.

Gatsby’s neighbor is Nick Carraway, a young stockbroker and Daisy’s cousin. Thanks to him, Daisy and Jay meet again and have an affair (relation).

One day Daisy, while driving back to Gatsby’s house, runs over Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. She doesn’t stop and Gatsby had to hide the car.

Mr. Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, finds out that the car is Gatsby’s and, for this, he thinks that Gatsby killed his wife.

Jay doesn’t protest his innocence, because he wants to protect Daisy, but she leaves he and returns with her husband Tom.

The novel ends with the Gatsby’s death, killed by Myrtle’s husband in his garden.

Only Nick tried to defend his name, but when there was the funeral, nobody came.

“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I

can’t go through this alone.”

The decay of the American dream

The Great Gatsby contains many illuminations and criticism of American life in the ‘Jazz Age’.

There are many themes in this novel:

The move from west to east;

The confrontation between the ideals of courage, honour and beauty and the corrupted world of money;

The relationship between Gatsby’s achievements to the myth of ‘rags to riches’;

The growth of car industry;

The corrupting effects of Prohibition;

The poverty of spiritual life.

The central theme, however, is the blindness.

The characters don’t wish to see, they remain blind to danger.

Only Nick sees, because he is Fitzgerald’s spokesman.

Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway

Jay Gatsby is presented as a mysterious character. Rich and attractive, with some hidden secrets. He represents the romantic hero who died for his dreams, but also the self-made man who tries to recreate the past through the power of money.

Fitzgerald shows that the American dream has been corrupted. In fact we see that Gatsby has a pure dream that became corrupted when he tries to realize it.

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you

may come across four or five times in life.

Nick Carraway is, at the same time, the observer and participant in the novel. He is the only character to show a sense of morals and decency.

Nick can represent the outsider that Fitzgerald felt himself to be. They didn’t feel as a part of that society, high society with dishonest people.

Nick is also linked to the theme of the opposition between east and west. He is the character that Fitzgerald uses to show the West as a moral land.

Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway

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 any

one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Retrospective narration

Nick Carraway is the narrator who presents all the events and characters of the story. He is a retrospective narrator.

Fitzgerald doesn’t use chronological order, but the fragmentation of time and many flashback to represent the inner world of his characters.

For this, Gatsby’s personality is developed through the footsteps of Nick's own experience.

"They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. ‘”You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Symbolic imagesFitzgerald’s style is characterised by many appeals to the sense, by the use of colours and the use of repetition, simile and metaphor.

The language is real and symbolic.

The description of the society is extremely detailed and full of symbolic images. The most impressive description is ‘the valley of ashes’, a land full of rubbish, waste and ashes.

Also Gatsby’s house is real and symbolic. Described in its various rooms and acres of garden, it celebrates Gatsby’s luck and success during his parties, but embodies his melancholy and loneliness when it is empty.

“All right”, I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. and I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little

fool.”

https://avoenglish.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/the-great-gatsby.png

Giorgia Marchesini 5^B

The End