ENGL1001 – American LiteratureF. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great

Gatsby (1926)

Dr. John Masterson3rd Lecture

July-August 2011

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The Great Gatsby

• P.32 - “so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.”

• P.37 – “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

The Second Sentence of The Great Gatsby

• Mr. Carraway’s advice to his son, Nick –

“ ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone … just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”

A.E. Dyson, ‘The Great Gatsby – 36 Years After’

• “Carraway is the one middle-class character in the novel – vaguely at home in the worlds both of Daisy and Myrtle, but belonging to neither, and so able to see and judge both very clearly. He is conscious of “advantages” of moral education that enable him to see through false romanticisms to their underlying insincerity, and savour their bitter ironies.”

George W. Bush

The Great Gatsby, p.26• “About half way between West Egg and New York the

motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

The Great Gatsby, p.26• “About half way between West Egg and New York the

motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

Edwin Fussell, ‘Fitzgerald’s Brave New World’

• “the two dreams are … so intimately related as to be for all practical purposes one: the appearance of eternal youth and beauty centers in a particular social class whose glamour is made possible by social inequality and inequity. Beauty, the presumed object of aesthetic contemplation, is commercialized, love is bought and sold. Money is the means to the violent recovery or specious arrest of an enchanting youth.”

Edwin Fussell, ‘Fitzgerald’s Brave New World’• “Fitzgerald repeatedly affirms his faith in an older,

simpler America, generally identified as pre-Civil War; the emotion is that of pastoral, the social connotations agrarian and democratic. In such areas he continues to find fragments of basic human value, social, moral and religious. But these affirmations are for the most part subordinate and indirect; Fitzgerald’s attention was chiefly directed upon the merchandise of romantic wonder proffered by his own time and place. Like the narrator in Gatsby, he was always “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Through a delicate and exact imagery, he was able to extend this attitude of simultaneous enchantment and repulsion over the whole of the American civilization he knew.”

An Archetypal Scene of the American Mid-West

The New York Skyline in the 1920s

OED Definition• ambivalence• Noun - [mass noun] • the state of having mixed feelings

or contradictory ideas about something or someone

Jordan Baker, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

•“ ‘I’m stiff … I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.’”

Exchange between Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

• “We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.• ‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we

plan?’ She turned to me helplessly: ‘What do people plan?’

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1• “We had luncheon in the dining room, darkened

too against the heat, and drank down nervous gaiety with the cold ale.”

• “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? ...

and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over

again when it gets crisp in the fall.’‘But it’s so hot,’ insisted Daisy, on the verge of

tears, ‘and everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town.’”

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1• “Why [the Buchanans] came East I don’t

know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it – I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

Nick’s comment on Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

• “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.”

The All-American Hero?

OED Definition• Irrecoverable• adjective• not able to be recovered,

regained, or remedied: his liquid assets had to be written off as irrecoverable

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9 (the final chapter)

• “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

Image of the American Prairie

Lionel Trilling, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (1945)

• “Gatsby is said by some to be not quite credible, but the question of any literal credibility he may or may not have becomes trivial before the large significance he implies. For Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, “the American dream.”

Marius Bewley, ‘Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America’ (1954)

• “The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience ... The theme of Gatsby is the withering of 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.”