The Great Gatsby - Weeks 1-5

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Penguin Classics Edition

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F. Scott Fotzgerald

• Born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minn.
• Scott was a distant relative of Francis Scott Key, the composer of the American national anthem.
• Enrolled in Princeton in 1913.
• Withdrew from school in 1917 to enter Officers Training school in the army
• He never made it to Europe to fight in the war, nor did he graduate from college.
• Instead, he fell in love…

Zelda Sayre

• She broke off their engagement shortly thereafter, unwilling to live on his small salary.
• Fitzgerald was made famous by his This Side of Paradise.
• In 1919 his earnings totaled $879; the following year, following the publication of This Side of Paradise, an instant success, his earnings increased to $18,000.
• Zelda then married him => In Gatsby, Jay Gatsby feels he needs wealth in order to win Daisy...

A hedonistic lifestyle

• They had a “rich life of endless parties.”
• The two had a very volatile relationship; both alcohol and domestic rows played a large part in their marriage.

“I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.”

• Zelda decided to become a professional ballet dancer, but her intense exercise lead to her decline in health (both mentally and physically).
• She spent the rest of her life in sanitariums. She died in a mental hospital that caught on fire.

The Great Gatsby

• The Great Gatsby, the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925.

• It received great critical acclaim but only became a literary classic some 20 years after its initial release, in the years that followed the end of WW2.
• It is usually viewed as the writer’s best work.

The context

This novel proves to be a very perceptive observation of the Roaring Twenties => a contrastive picture of America in those days, a period which is marked by post-war economic progress and a great prosperity.

Liberation and Libation: A Toast to Freedom in the Roaring Twenties

• The author captures the frenzy and passion of American society, right in the middle of Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal
• Many famous bootleggers emerged during this age, such as Arnold Rothstein and Johnny Torrio (both working in New York) and Al Capone in Chicago. Arnold Rothstein was Fitzgerald’s real model for Gatsby's unscrupulous associate, Meyer Wolfshiem.

CRIME AND PROHIBITION

02

01

03

aka "The Brain"

AL CAPONE

Arnold rothstein

JOHNNY TORRIO

1882-1928American racketeer, crime boss, businessman, gambler in Jewish Mob in New York City

1882-1957American mobster who helped build the Chicago Outfit

1899-1947co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1925 to 1931

“The parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, and the morals were looser”.

Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

some like it hot (1959)

Starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon

The Great Gatbsy

• Fitzgerald shows the new faith people in America used to place in money and materialism then, but he also renders the anxiety and sorrow lurking behind their superficial world.

The Great Gatbsy

• The novel conveys the instability of the Twenties, presenting us with a world on the brink of breaking down, with a sense of general chaos and confusion about to happen.
• A mood of decadence and summer heat seem to combine to create the prevailing atmosphere in the book.

The Great Gatbsy

'the sun's getting hotter every year ...pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun - or wait a minute - it's just the opposite the sun's getting colder every year.'(124)

The Great Gatsby

• TMore than three years to complete the final version of The Great Gatsby (after the novel went through different stages and shapes).

• The author wanted to try original writing techniques and he claimed the novelty and uniqueness of his project.

“I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and 'intricately patterned'”.

F. S. Fitzgerald, letter to his publisher

The Great Gatbsy

• The Great Gatsby was thus made up of more than 200 drafts and many short stories.
• He used the story “Absolution” and to a larger extent the story “Winter Dreams” (written in 1922)

=> Dexter Green is a middle-class boy becomes rich but loses Judy Jones the rich girl, the romantically attractive heroine who motivated his ambitions in the first place – many of these themes will be expanded upon in The Great Gatsby.

A Scrambled Chronology

• All the action unfold during only one summer – that is, from mid-June to early September 1922.
• This summer is then the foundation from which Nick Carraway recreates retrospectively Gatsby's past life.
• There are a prologue and an epilogue that frame the events occurring within that interval of four months.
• These two key moments also correspond to the time of writing when Nick is back in the Mid-West and he thinks over his past experiences.

A Scrambled Chronology

• The tragic aspect of the plot is also increased due to the fact that the major events have all taken place before the action in the book actually begins.
• Every action then receives its meaning in retrospect.

A Few EXAMPLES

The crucial meeting with Dan Cody is only recounted in chapter 6.

It is not until the last chapter that we learn about Gatsby's boyhood through Mr. Gatz's testimony.

The crucial meeting with Dan Cody is only recounted in chapter 6.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Chapter 9

Finally Gatsby's admission into the mafia thanks to Wolfshiem is narrated in Chapter 9.

Gatsby's war experiences as well as his journey back to Louisville are told in chapter 8

The two versions are reported by Nick and they constitute three independent narratives in the book.

Chapter 9

Chapter 8

Chapters 4, 6, 8

The Jazz Age

• Fitzgerald to capture the atmosphere of confusion and the loss of values that is distinctive of the Jazz Age.
• Jazz Age coincided with Prohibition. Prohibition, or 'National Prohibition', refers to the period between 1919-1933 when alcohol was prohibited (with a few minor exceptions).
• => production, distribution, and sale of alcohol was illegal throughout the entire U.S. => speakeasies.

The Jazz Age

• The Jazz Age was a unique time because strong feminist sentiments were running through society. Feminism was a key element of the era.

• Flappers often wore gaudy jewelry and short hair. Feminism was not only confined to the dance floor of speakeasies.

THE JAZZ AGE

• Flappers have become an icon of the Jazz Age.
• Flappers is a term that refers to young, independent women who defied traditional norms by engaging in activities like smoking, drinking, dancing, and other shenanigans.
• Before the 1920s, these activities were acceptable only among men.

WOMEN at the Jazz Age

WOMEN at the Jazz Age

THE JAZZ AGE

• In 1920 women gained the right to vote under the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Jazz Age

• Popular musicians during this time included Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. In the decades that followed, Armstrong became famous for his trumpeting and his unique, raspy voice. Like Ellington and Armstrong, many jazz musicians during this time were African-Americans.

• The speakeasies of the day often afforded the opportunity for blacks and whites to mingle in an environment that was more racially tolerant than mainstream society.

The Great Gatsby

• The novel remarkably conveys the dizziness of the Twenties, reproducing in its construction something of the staccato rhythm of the Jazz Age. The author’s main concern was clearly with the sense of mood, the colours, tones and rhythms associated with the period, and his prose displays all his descriptive skills (including synesthesia like in “yellow cocktail music”) to evoke this past.

Nick's mediation as a narrator

• Fitzgerald's chief innovation in The Great Gatsby is to introduce a first person narrator and protagonist whose consciousness always reorganizes and filters the past events (Henry James, Joseph Conrad).
• A homodiegetic narrator => he participates into the story he tells.
• There is a permanent internal focalization since events are seen exclusively from his point of view. Nick Carraway is a peripheral narrator, at the margin of events, someone who's always on the outside looking in.
• A filtering voice

Nick's mediation as a narrator

• “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (37)

A Moral Perspective

• Thomas Hanzo rightly writes that he gives a moral perspective on the unfolding action:

“formally and most significantly, through the personal history of a young American provincial whose moral intelligence is the proper source of our understanding and whose career, in the passage from innocence to revaluation, dramatizes the possibility and mode of a moral sanction in contemporary America.” (Thomas A. Hanzo. “The Theme and the Narrator of The Great Gatsby”. Modern Fiction Studies 2, Winter 1956-57: 190.)

A Moral Perspective

• ‘I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter' (187).

DID YOU KNOW...

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