Fitzgerald''s The Great Gatsby

FITZGERALD'S
THE GREAT GATSBY

CONTINUUM READER'S GUIDES
Achebe's Things Fall Apart - Ode Ogede

William Blake's Poetry - Jonathan Roberts
Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Allan Simmons
Dickens's Great Expectations - Ian Brinton
Sylvia Plath's Poetry - Linda Wagner-Martin
FITZGERALD'S
THE GREAT GATSBY
A Reader's Guide
NICOLAS TREDELL
continuum
Continuum International Publishing Group
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First published 2007

Reprinted 2007, 2009,2011
© Nicolas Tredell 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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Nicolas Tredell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9780826490117
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Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester

CONTENTS
1 Contexts 1
2 Language, Style and Form 17
3 Reading The Great Gatsby 33
4 Critical Reception and Publishing History 77
5 Adaptation, Interpretation and Influence 93
6 Guide to Further Reading 111
Index 129
NOTE
Gatsby page references are to the 2000 Penguin Classics

paperback.
Crack-Up references are to the 1962 New Directions paperback.
Definitions are from the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford

English Dictionary, unless otherwise stated.
CHAPTER 1
CONTEXTS
FITZGERALD'S LIFE
Scott Fitzgerald was a legend in his own lifetime and has become
even more so since his death. He seems to epitomize an American
era - the 'Jazz Age' of the 1920s - and to symbolize its delights,
dangers and defeats. His spectacular early success as a writer, his
frantic pursuit of pleasure, his fraught relationship with his wife
Zelda, and his decline into alcoholism, obscurity and premature
death represents the trajectory of a generation. While his fiction
is never simply autobiographical, his life and work are intricately
interwoven and he created, in The Great Gatsby, one of the most
pervasive and appealing of modern American myths.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota,
on 24 September 1896; his forenames were taken from his great-
great-uncle, Francis Scott Key (1779-1843), who, in 1814, had
written the song that would eventually be adopted as the
American national anthem in 1931, T h e Star-Spangled Banner'.
Fitzgerald's birth was haunted by death: three months earlier,
two of his infant sisters had died. In Author's House' (1936), he
identifies this loss as the point at which he started to be a writer.
Another sister, born in 1900, lived just an hour; his only surviv-
ing sibling, Annabel, arrived in 1901.
The dominant theme of his boyhood, which would also figure
strongly in his fiction, was social insecurity. He later wrote that
he 'developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex' because of the
division between the dual strands of his family background: an
FITZGERALD'S THE GREAT GATSBY
Irish strand with the money, and an old American strand with
'the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions' and the 'series of
reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered
word "breeding"'. The disparity between money and 'breeding'
would be one of the key concerns of Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's sense of inferiority was increased by his father's
downward mobility. When the novelist was born, Edward
Fitzgerald owned a furniture factory, the American Rattan and
Willow Works; but this failed less than two years later, in April
1898, and forced him to take a job as a wholesale grocery sales-
man with Proctor and Gamble in Buffalo, New York State. Then
in July 1908, when Fitzgerald was 11, his father, then aged 55, lost
his job; his son later saw this a decisive blow: 'That morning he
had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength,
full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a
completely broken man.' His father had suffered an experience
that would permeate his son's fiction: failure. The family moved
back to St Paul; they were now dependent on the income from
the mother's capital and while this allowed them to maintain a
comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle, it also highlighted, for
Fitzgerald, the gap between his own, broken father and the suc-
cessful men who lived around them in the Summit Avenue area
of St Paul. The most famous of these was James J. Hill
(1838-1916), the tycoon who had pushed the railroad across the
West to the Pacific Coast. In Gatsby, Henry C. Gatz, the failed
father, says that his son, if he had lived, would have been a great
man like James J. Hill who would have helped to build up the
country (p. 160).
Fitzgerald became a pupil at the St Paul Academy in
September 1908 and first appeared in print the following year, at
the age of 13, with a detective story, 'The Mystery of the
Raymond Mortgage', in the school magazine. But his academic
work was weak, and his family, hoping to improve it, sent him,
in 1911, to Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in
Hackensack, New Jersey. His academic work did not improve
much there and he was no great social success, but the stories he
published in the Newman school magazine showed that he was
developing an individual style and tone. His most important
CONTEXTS
experience at Newman, however, was his friendship with Father

Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay, an impressive, urbane priest with
many interests. Fitzgerald would use him as the model for
Monsignor Darcy in his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920).
In September 1913, Fitzgerald went east to Princeton
University, though his poor performance in the entrance exams
had nearly denied him admission. He was disappointed at being,
as he later put it in T h e Crack-Up' (1936), 'not big enough (or
good enough) to play football' (p. 70), but he formed two friend-
ships with fellow students that were to be important for his liter-
ary development. One was with John Peale Bishop (1892-1944),
who taught him a great deal about poetry and who would later
become a poet, essayist and novelist; the other and more lasting
friendship was with Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), who would
become one of America's leading literary critics, and, by
Fitzgerald's own account in 'The Crack-Up', his 'intellectual
conscience' (p. 79). Fitzgerald read widely, and contributed to
the Princeton Tiger, the Nassau Lit. and to scripts for the
Triangle Club shows, but his academic performance remained
poor and forced him to withdraw from Princeton in December
1915. He returned to Princeton in September 1916 but never
completed his degree.
Since Christmas 1914, Fitzgerald had maintained a romantic
attachment to Ginevra King, a girl from St Paul who seemed to
embody all his aspirations: she was beautiful and wealthy, held a
high place in the social hierarchy, and had many admirers. But
the relationship did not endure and came to an end in January
1917; it seemed to Fitzgerald to demonstrate his sense of the
social and financial barrier which stopped poor boys from
marrying rich girls - a concern that would be crucial to Gatsby.
On 6 April 1917, the USA entered the First World War, and
Fitzgerald signed up for the army in May. He was commissioned
as an infantry second lieutenant and in November he reported for
duty to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It was there that he began
the first draft of a semi-autobiographical novel, 'The Romantic
Egotist'. He completed it in March 1918, while on leave from the
army at Princeton, and submitted it to Scribner's. Three months
later, in July 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a local
judge, at a country club dance in Montgomery in Alabama, and

fell for her. Scribner's returned T h e Romantic Egotist' in August
1918, with a letter suggesting revisions, probably written by
Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947), an editor at Scribner's who would
become very important to Fitzgerald and to Gatsby. Fitzgerald
quickly tried to alter the novel to take account of these sugges-
tions and sent it to Scribner's again, only to have it rejected
once more.
In November 1918, Fitzgerald reported to Camp Mills, Long
Island, to await embarkation for military service in Europe; but
the war came to an end before his unit could be sent abroad. He
would always regret that, as the title of a 1936 short story put it,
'I didn't get over'. In Gatsby he would portray, in the narrator,
Nick Carraway, and in the eponymous hero, men who did get
over and whose war service forms one of the bonds between
them.
Fitzgerald returned to civilian life wanting to marry Zelda; but
she would not rush into a marriage with a jobless, unproven
writer. He got a job in New York writing copy for the Barron
Collier advertising agency, and his rhyming slogan for a laundry
in Muscatine, Iowa - 'We Keep You Clean in Muscatine' - made
his boss feel that he had a future in the advertising business.
Fitzgerald's experience of the advertising industry may have con-
tributed to the strong awareness he shows in Gatsby of its power
to provide iconic images and shape behaviour and desire, but his
future lay elsewhere, and in the evenings he tried to pursue it,
writing stories, sketches, film scripts, verses and jokes which he
hoped would bring him recognition and money. He received
many rejection slips, creating a frieze of 122 of them in his room,
and sold only one story, 'Babes in the Wood' to the magazine The
Smart Set, which paid him $30. This was hardly enough to con-
vince Zelda to accept him as a prospective husband; in June 1919,
she broke off their engagement.
It was time for decisive action; and in July 1919, Fitzgerald
took a big gamble, threw up his job with Barron Collier and went
back to live with his parents in St Paul and to rewrite T h e
Romantic Egotist'. The gamble paid off: Maxwell Perkins of
Scribner's accepted the revised version - now called This Side of
CONTEXTS
Paradise - in September 1919. While waiting for the novel to

appear, Fitzgerald also started to get more short stories pub-
lished and in February 1920 broke into the mass-circulation mag-
azine market for the first time, with the publication of 'Head and
Shoulders' in The Saturday Evening Post for a fee of $500; the
Post would become his primary short-story market. It paid
well and had a comparatively large circulation which reached
2,750,000 copies a week in the 1920s. In Gatsby, the Post is the
magazine from which Jordan Baker reads aloud to Tom
Buchanan (p. 22).
Fitzgerald was proving that he could earn enough money to
support Zelda in the style to which she was accustomed. He
began to visit her again in Montgomery and in January 1920 they
became engaged once more. This Side of Paradise was published
on 26 March 1920 and was an instant success. It is a lively and
entertaining novel which uses a rich range of techniques to
portray Amory Blaine's life from boyhood to young manhood.
Its subject matter caught the mood of the moment, pleasing the
young and shocking their elders because it showed privileged
young people behaving with what was, at the time, unaccustomed
freedom. The first print run of 3,000 copies sold out in three days.
Fitzgerald's triumph with This Side of Paradise enabled him to
make Zelda his wife: they were married in New York on 3 April
1920 and honeymooned at the Biltmore. It confirmed the feeling
which Fitzgerald, would later in T h e Crack-Up', attribute to his
youthful self: 'Life was something you dominated if you were any
good' (p. 69). He did not forget, however, what might have hap-
pened if he had not won the means to marry Zelda: 'The man with
the jingle of money in his pocket who married [her] would always
cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class
- not the conviction of a revolutionary but the smouldering
hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able
to stop wondering where my friends' money came from, nor to
stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur [lord's
right] might have been exercised to give one of them my girl'
(p. 77). Gatsby focuses on a man with nothing in his pockets who
loses a girl from the leisure class and then finds, when his pockets
are full to overflowing, that it is too late to win her back; the
phrase that Fitzgerald uses in The Crack-Up' - the 'jingle of

money' - echoes Nick Carraway's words when he confirms
Gatsby's observation that Daisy's voice is 'full of money': 'that
was . . . the jingle of it' (p. 115).
After their marriage, Scott and Zelda plunged into the pursuit
of pleasure and into the maelstrom of modern publicity, party-
ing, leaping into fountains, riding on the roofs of taxicabs, giving
interviews, constructing a vivid public identity for themselves. To
finance this wild and luxurious lifestyle, Fitzgerald had to keep
writing for magazines and, despite the excellence of some of his
shortfiction,a troubling split developed, in his own mind, and in
the perception of his peers, between the stories that he wrote for
money and the novels that he wrote to try to realize the ambition
he had expressed to Edmund Wilson at Princeton: to be one of
the greatest writers that ever lived. His first short-story collec-
tion, Flappers and Philosophers, came out in September 1920. In
May to July 1921, the Fitzgeralds made their first trip to Europe
and came back to St Paul for the birth of their first and only
child, Scottie, on 26 October 1921. As Zelda came out of the
anaesthetic, she said of her newborn daughter, 'I hope it's beau-
tiful and a fool - a beautiful little fool' - words which Fitzgerald
would later weave into Daisy's account, in Gatsby, of her remarks
after the birth of her baby (p. 22).
Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned,
appeared on 4 March 1922. Longer and more sombre than This
Side of Paradise, it followed the chaotic trail of a wannabe writer
who waits for a large legacy to fall into his hands while his life
and marriage disintegrate. It got fairly good reviews and sold
quite well, but it was insufficiently accomplished to establish
Fitzgerald as a major novelist, and did not make enough money
to enable him to give up writing for magazines.
Fitzgerald seems to have begun to think about his third novel
in June 1922, when he and Zelda were staying at the Yacht Club
at White Bear Lake in Minnesota; he wrote to Maxwell Perkins
that this novel would be set in the Midwest and New York in
1885 and would cover a shorter span of time than his two pre-
vious novels. He wanted it to be different from, and better than,
its predecessors: as he told Perkins in a letter of July 1922, in a
CONTEXTS
statement of intent which seems to anticipate his achievement in

Gatsby. 'I want to write something new - something extraordi-
nary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.'
In August 1922, the Fitzgeralds were asked to leave the Yacht
Club because of their wild parties, and the following month,
before they moved back east, Fitzgerald wrote the first of the
Gatsby group of stories - the three short stories which appeared
during the gestation of Gatsby and which seem related to the
novel. The first, 'Winter Dreams' (1922), follows the passion of
Dexter Green for Judy Jones from its awakening in his early ado-
lescence, through their tortuous relationship when he is a young,
rising entrepreneur, to his disillusionment when he learns that
she is a married mother who has lost her looks and whose
husband is drunk and unfaithful: the description of Dexter's
response to Judy Jones's house was later removed from the mag-
azine version of the story to become Jay Gatsby's reaction to
Daisy's Louisville dwelling. The second story, '"The Sensible
Thing"' (1924) is also about the loss of a dream; George O'Kelly
is initially rejected by the girl he loves, Jonquil O'Cary, because
he has neither job nor money, but when he makes good and
returns to marry her, he realizes that the freshness of their first
love can never be recaptured. The third story of the Gatsby
group, Absolution' (1924), which Fitzgerald himself said was
taken from the initial drafts of his third novel, has a Catholic
element that is absent from Gatsby but the character of Rudolph
Miller resembles the young Gatsby in his proneness to exalted
fantasies and his rejection of a father who, like Henry C. Gatz,
beats his son and admires James J. Hill.
In October 1922, the Fitzgeralds rented a house at Great Neck,
Long Island, and it was this locale that provided the basis for the
setting of Gatsby: Great Neck was favoured as a place of resi-
dence by nouveau riche show-business people while the inhabi-
tants of Manhasset Neck, across the bay, were from families that
had made their millions in the nineteenth century. In Gatsby,
Great Neck and Manhasset Neck become West and East Egg.
Fitzgerald's satirical play The Vegetable flopped in November
1923, and in April 1924, Scott and Zelda set off for France once
more. Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby on the French Riviera in the
summer and autumn of 1924 and sent it to Scribner's; Maxwell

Perkins responded with two letters praising the novel but also
making some criticisms. Fitzgerald revised the novel extensively
on the galley proofs, and the final version was published on 10
April 1925.
Although the reviews of Gatsby were mixed and its sales slug-
gish, Fitzgerald would later regard the novel as the peak of his
career which had shown him the road he should have taken. In a
letter collected in The Crack- Up, written to his daughter in the
year of his death, 1940, he said: 'I wish now I'd never relaxed or
looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby. "I've
found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my imme-
diate duty - without this I am nothing"' (p. 294).
In fact, Fitzgerald had little time to relax after Gatsby, his life
was demanding and debilitating. It involved his decline from
celebrity into obscurity; his alcoholism and bouts of depression;
his protracted effort to write another novel; his repeated failure
to become an established Hollywood screenwriter; and his need
to keep writing short stories to pay for Scottie's upkeep and
schooling and for Zelda's psychiatric care after her mental illness
became acute in 1930. Once he had felt he was dominating life;
now life was dominating him. In T h e Crack-Up', he observes:
'the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness'
(p. 84). But he went on trying to be a serious writer. His fourth
novel, Tender is the Night (1934), tells the story of a brilliant psy-
chiatrist, Dick Diver, who marries a wealthy young woman who
has been sexually abused by her father, but finally falls into obliv-
ion. While it did not put him back in the centre of the literary
map on its first appearance, its accomplishment can now be
appreciated. Fitzgerald's Crack-Up essays of 1936, which fellow
writers such as Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) and John Dos
Passos (1896-1970) deplored at the time for their self-revelations,
now seem not only superbly crafted but also one of the sources
of a rich crop of confessional writing by such authors as Robert
Lowell (1917-77), Sylvia Plath (1932-63) and William Styron
(1925-2006). And The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western - the
unfinished novel about Hollywood he was working on when, at
the age of 44, he died suddenly of a heart attack in Hollywood
CONTEXTS
on 21 December 1940 - is, even in its incomplete form, a remark-

able piece of fiction which shows him developing in new direc-
tions and which, had he lived, might have become a masterpiece
to equal or surpass Gatsby.
As things stand, however, Gatsby remains his most popular
and most potent novel, constantly attracting new readers and
capable of generating an apparently infinite range of meanings.
But, while Gatsby certainly transcends its time, it is also, like any
enduring work of art, very much of its time, emerging in, repre-
senting and contributing to a very specific historical context, the
decade when, as Fitzgerald put it in 'Early Success' (1937):
'America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history'
(The Crack-Up, p. SI).
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The multiple, intertwining causes of this great and gaudy spree

included the after-effects of the First World War; the impact of
prohibition; the growth of organized crime; the emergence of the
gangster as an object of fear and fascination; the alarm caused
by immigration and the legislative attempt to restrict it; the eco-
nomic boom; the conspicuous consumption of the rich; the
accelerating pace of technological innovation in the areas of
transport - the automobile; communications - the telephone;
and popular entertainment - the motion picture; the growth of
advertising and consumerism; the loosening of sexual and
marital constraints; and the emergence of more independent
kinds of woman. All these elements feature to a greater or lesser
extent in Gatsby.
The entry of the USA into the First World War in April 1917
was its first involvement in a major European military con-
flict and ended decades of isolationism. The American
Expeditionary Forces (AEF) were sent to the Western Front and
saw action in several significant battles - for example, the Meuse-
Argonne offensive: in Gatsby, both Nick and Gatsby would have
taken part in this. The war took young men abroad, from the
New World back to Europe, and some of them - like Nick in
Gatsby - returned to the USA restless. But if the war caused some
social dislocation, it also stimulated the American economy and

enhanced the global influence of the USA, confirming it as a
world power and diminishing its sense of cultural inferiority to
Europe. As Fitzgerald put it in 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' (col-
lected in The Crack-Up): 'We were the most powerful nation.
Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was
fun?' (p. 14).
In the year after the end of hostilities, however, leading
Americans tried to tell their fellow citizens that there was one
kind of fun they could not have. On January 15 1919, Congress
ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the man-
ufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks, and the Volstead Act put it
into force. But Prohibition, an outgrowth of old American
Puritanism which was designed to create a sober and temperate
society, backfired dramatically. It fuelled the rapid growth of
organized crime networks engaged in bootlegging - the making
and selling of illegal alcoholic drinks - and fostered the emer-
gence of wealthy and powerful gangsters who - like Gatsby -
were also active in other criminal fields, such as gambling and
bond fraud, and who aspired to social status.
As the example of Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928) in New
York, on whom Wolfsheim in Gatsby was partly based, or of Al
Capone (1899-1947) in Chicago shows, however, gangsterism
also provided a means of rapid upward mobility for certain
members of some ethnic groups at a time when restrictions on
immigration were being tightened. Before the First World War, a
larger number of immigrants had come to the USA than ever
before, reaching a record high of 1,285,349 in 1907. The National
Origins Act of 1924 laid down a quota system based on 2 per cent
of the numbers of each nationality in the USA in 1890 which
effectively discriminated against those from southern and eastern
Europe. The anxiety about ethnic others which issued in such leg-
islation as well as in more overt racist attitudes is evident in
Gatsby in two of its white Anglo-Saxon male protagonists: Tom
and Nick.
Although immigration was being curtailed, the population of
the USA was expanding along with the economy in the 1920s.
The total of national wealth rose from about $ 187 million in 1912
10
CONTEXTS
to $450 million in 1929. This economic boom was fuelled by new

industries, particularly the manufacture of automobiles. In 1895,
only four trucks and passenger cars had been made; by 1919, this
had risen to 7,565,446 and it went on rising throughout the
decade. Automobile production stimulated growth in associated
industries, such as road-building, petroleum, iron, steel, rubber
and glass. Other industries concerned with communication and
entertainment also expanded, selling more telephones, radios
and movies. Along with this growth in production went a growth
in advertising - the industry in which Fitzgerald found his first
job - and in financial services, such as the provision of loans on
the instalment plan to enable more people to buy - or to get into
debt trying to pay for - the new consumer goods.
The expansion of industry, technological innovation and the
greater, though still limited, availability of consumer goods con-
tributed to the important changes in the 1920s in the position
and role of women in the USA. Whereas the Eighteenth
Amendment which introduced prohibition seemed like a restric-
tion, the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 was an emancipation,
since it gave American women the right to vote for thefirsttime.
For those who could afford them, technological innovations and
the proliferation of consumer goods lessened the burden of
housework, such as washing clothes and cleaning carpets, which
had traditionally fallen on women, while the mass production of
processed foodstuffs eased the demands of food preparation.
The opportunities for female employment increased, although
they were still considerably constricted. In advertisements and
magazines, a new model for femininity emerged in a social type
with which Fitzgerald and his fiction were particularly associ-
ated: the flapper. The term had originally been coined in the
early twentieth century to refer to a teenage girl with a plait tied
in a large bow which flapped against her back as she walked,
but in the 1920s it came to refer to a young woman who pursued
her own pleasure - including sexual pleasure. A related term,
'baby vamp' - 'vamp' was an abbreviation of 'vampire' - was
applied to a young woman who appeared to pursue sexual plea-
sure in a predatory way, using her sexuality to attract and exploit
men. These changes in the position and role of women created a
11
situation that could be, for both genders, liberating and disturb-
ing at the same time: women would have to negotiate mixed, con-
flicting demands and men would be faced with apparent threats
to their own patriarchal assumptions and privileges. The three
female protagonists of Gatsby - Daisy, Jordan and Myrtle - are
all placed in painful, difficult situations as they try to assume a
measure of freedom for themselves, and they present challenges
to the men in their lives, each of whom embodies, in varying
ways, patriarchal ideology: Tom, Gatsby, Nick and George
Wilson.
The economic and cultural changes in 1920s America which
we have considered were complemented by changes in the intel-
lectual and cultural context, and we shall examine these next.
THE INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
The 1920s in America and Europe were a time in which the chal-
lenges to traditional ways of understanding the world which had
emerged earlier in the century began to be popularized and more
widely circulated through the mass media of magazines, radio
and the movies. Two of the strongest challenges originated
in Europe: the theory of relativity which Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) had proposed in 1905 was verified by experimental
observations in 1919 and seemed to undermine the concepts of
time and space developed by Isaac Newton (1642-1727), while
the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
suggested that human beings were much less rational than they
had liked to imagine, and that the sexual drive was far more
important than the nineteenth century had been prepared pub-
licly to acknowledge. In the USA itself, William James
(1842-1910), elder brother of the novelist Henry James
(1843-1916) and himself a superb expository writer and lecturer,
had explored the human mind, from a different perspective from
Freud, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), where he had
argued that consciousness could not be called a 'chain' or 'train'
butflowedlike a river or stream, and that it would therefore be
most appropriately called 'the stream of thought, of conscious-
ness, or of subjective life'. This was the origin of the phrase
12
CONTEXTS
'stream of consciousness', used by literary critics to describe a

way of writing, most notably exemplified by James Joyce
(1882-1941), which aimed to represent the flowing movement of
thought. James also developed, in his lectures and the books
based on them such as The Will to Believe (1897), Pragmatism
(1907) and The Meaning of Truth (1909), the philosophy of prag-
matism, which argued that the truth of a proposition depended
not on its correspondence to some ultimate reality, but on
whether or not it worked in terms of its practical, social or psy-
chological results. On the one hand, this justified holding on to
beliefs which could not be decisively proven - religious beliefs, for
example - if they seemed to have a beneficial effect upon feelings
and behaviour; on the other hand, it appeared to suggest that
truth was always relative and provisional. All these ideas sug-
gested that the world and the universe were stranger and more
disturbing than had been dreamt of in the nineteenth century.
This sense of strangeness also altered the traditional arts
which experienced that great transformation which we now call
Modernism. The landmark Modernist works are the painting
Les demoiselles d'Avignon (The Maids of Avignon, 1906-7) by
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973); the ballet score Le sacre duprintemps
(Rite of Spring, 1913) by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971); the novel
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce; and the poem The Waste Land
(1922) by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). All these works fragmented
traditional artistic forms in startling ways and helped to create
an exciting but challenging cultural context for Fitzgerald's third
novel.
THE LITERARY CONTEXT
In terms of literature, the most immediate Modernist influence

on Gatsby was T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot's vision of the
city and of modern life, his capacity to capture extremes of
entropy and ecstasy, his use of the residual traces of myth and
religion to provide a shadowy structure for his mobile fragments,
all play through Gatsby. But Fitzgerald's Modernism was of a
quieter kind than Eliot's and the strongest influence on his third
novel was the slightly more distant one of Joseph Conrad
13
(1857-1924). From Conrad, Fitzgerald learned more about how

to use a first-person narrator who is a participant-observer and
how to scramble chronology effectively. These techniques helped
Conrad to pursue the aim he expressed in his preface to The
Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), which Fitzgerald reread just
before he wrote Gatsby: 'My task is by the power of the written
word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make
you see' Fitzgerald also learned more about how to make the
reader hear, feel and see from the 'scenic method' employed by
Henry James and Edith Wharton (1862-1937); this entailed pre-
senting a series of scenes from which readers could draw their
own conclusions rather than having them spelled out by the
author. One further important lesson was provided by the sym-
bolic prose of Willa Cather (1873-1947) in My Antonia (1918)
and A Lost Lady (1923). Fitzgerald's letters show that he knew
both these novels and they both have echoes in Gatsby. But
important though all these influences are, they do not explain
Fitzgerald's unique achievement in Gatsby, to find out more
about that, we must look closely at the text of his novel.
STUDY QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 1

1. Although Gatsby is not semi-autobiographical in the manner
of This Side of Paradise, it can be seen as a novel which is indi-
rectly about Fitzgerald's life, in the same way that the film
Citizen Kane (1940) can be interpreted as a film which is,
obliquely, about the life of its director, Orson Welles
(1915-85). In what ways might Gatsby be about Fitzgerald's
life? How useful is a knowledge of Fitzgerald's biography in
appreciating the novel?
2. This chapter has suggested a range of elements of 1920s
America which figure in Gatsby, from the after-effects of the
First World War to the emergence of more independent kinds
of women. Which of these elements do you think are espe-
cially important in Fitzgerald's novel, and why are they
important? To what extent does a knowledge of American
society in this period help us to understand Gatsby!
3. How far do you feel Fitzgerald in Gatsby is trying to fulfil the
14
CONTEXTS
task of the writer as defined by Joseph Conrad - 'before all,

to make you see'! Is the 'seeing' of which Conrad speaks of a
visual, psychological or moral kind, or a combination of
these? Why should a novelist in this period feel that 'making
us see9 is important? (One very interesting way to pursue this
question is to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), and to
consider how that text 'makes us see\ Heart of Darkness
offers a range of fascinating comparisons and contrasts with
Gatsby which you could explore further - some of the struc-
tural similarities and differences are discussed in the next
chapter.
15
CHAPTER 2
LANGUAGE, STYLE AND FORM
LANGUAGE AND STYLE

The language of Gatsby is a rich, complex mixture drawn from a
wide variety of sources. These include Romantic poetry; biblical
and Christian discourse; the Modernist prose of James Joyce and
the Modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot; American slang and edu-
cated speech of the 1920s; society guest lists; self-improvement
schedules; advertisements; popular song lyrics; and illustrated
magazines. All these features are assimilated into a distinctive
style which could be called 'Romantic Modernism'. It is a style
which combines the images and rhythms derived and developed
from nineteenth-century Romantic poetry with the precision,
conciseness and topical reference which were becoming the hall-
mark of Modernist writing in both poetry and prose. In Gatsby,
Fitzgerald updates Romanticism for the twentieth century and,
true to the Modernist demand for high-impact language, packs
every sentence with meaning.
In examining the language and style of Gatsby, it is important,
first of all, to indicate briefly the senses in which the term
'Romantic', with a capital 'R', and 'romantic', with a small 'r',
will be employed. 'Romantic' means 'relating to Romanticism' -
to those large changes in the tenor of thought and feeling and in
artistic practices which began in the late eighteenth century,
proved explosively innovative in the early nineteenth century,
persisted as a pervasive but increasingly enervated dominant
force in high culture until the early twentieth-century, and
17
spread into the new popular culture of newspapers, magazines,

movies and songs even as they lost ground in leading-edge high
culture. The changes which were involved in Romanticism are
complicated and multi-faceted and its leading literary figures
included poets as different as Lord Byron (1788-1824), William
Blake (1757-1827), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), John
Keats (1795-1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and
William Wordsworth (1770-1850); but broadly speaking, we can
say that Romanticism involved an emphasis on imagination
rather than intellect, on feeling rather than reason, on subjectiv-
ity rather than objectivity, on art rather than science and tech-
nology, on transgression rather than conformity, on extremism
rather than moderation, on ambiguity rather than clarity, and on
seeking transcendence rather than staying within limits. In
Gatsby, this sense of the 'Romantic' is more important than the
everyday modern sense of 'romantic', which means 'related to
love, particularly of a sentimental or idealized kind'. Gatsby is,
however, certainly 'romantic' in this everyday sense as well -
indeed it is part of its popular appeal - and the 'Romantic' and
the 'romantic' mingle and diverge in all kinds of ways in its pages.
Terms with Romantic and often romantic connotations in
Gatsby include adjectives such as deathless, enchanted, exhilarat-
ing, thrilling and wild, and nouns such as beauty, magic, melan-
choly, mystery and wonder. In using these terms so extensively in
a novel written in the 1920s, Fitzgerald took a tremendous risk:
for by this time Romanticism seemed, to the innovative writers of
Modernism such as T. S. Eliot, to have long lost its original force
and to have become an inert and stultifying remnant of the nine-
teenth century. The terms of which Fitzgerald was especially fond
had become highly suspect in state-of-the-art serious literature.
They seemed like devalued creative coinage, worn smooth
through overuse and further debased by their exploitation in
advertising, magazines and popular fiction. If they were permit-
ted at all, it was only as residual fragments of an irrecoverable
past or as objects of ironic deprecation, as in Eliot's The Waste
Land. At the time of Gatsby's publication, the writing of Ernest
Hemingway was almost unknown and had only a few admirers,
Fitzgerald among them; but Hemingway's style would emerge as
18
the antithesis of Fitzgerald's and the most radical challenge to it,

aiming to strip out Romantic verbiage and get its emotional and
aesthetic effects by means of hard, minimalist prose. For
Fitzgerald, however, Romantic terms, and the experiences, per-
ceptions and intimations which they evoked, were crucial and he
could not simply excise or ring-fence them; instead he aimed to
renovate them by assimilating them into a disciplined Modernist
style and by letting them share the text with other terms drawn
from the contemporary world - from technology and consumer
culture, for example.
For instance, Fitzgerald challenges the conventional Romantic
opposition between technology and art, the machine and the
imagination, by drawing on technological imagery to help evoke
Romantic perspectives and perceptions - which are, however,
themselves inevitably modified in the process. At the start of
Gatsby, for example, Nick likens Gatsby's enhanced responsive-
ness to the possibilities of life to a machine which registers
distant earthquakes (p. 8) - a seismograph. A little later, he takes
one of the commonplaces of Romantic and lyric poetry - the
growth of leaves on the summer trees - and compares them to the
way things grow 'in fast movies' - films which show the growth
of a flower or tree compressed into a few minutes (p. 9).
Technology here is not opposed to nature but provides an image
through which its processes can be quickly grasped and con-
veyed. Later in the novel (though earlier in its fictional time), we
learn that Daisy's house in Louisville hints to Second Lieutenant
Gatsby of 'romances' that are 'fresh and breathing and redolent
of this year's shining motor-cars' (p. 141); the imagery here
draws not only on the technology of the automobile but also on
consumer culture, on advertising. This is also the case when
Nick, meeting Jordan to say goodbye to her for the last time and
still 'half in love with her' (p. 169), thinks that she looks like
'a good illustration' in a magazine (p. 168) - a simile that echoes
the moment during his first meeting with her when he recalls that
he has seen her many times in the 'rotogravure' (p. 23) - a maga-
zine or newspaper with photographs printed by means of what
was, in early-twentieth-century terms, a high-tech system that
employed a rotary press with intaglio (engraved) cylinders. It
19
might be said that the use of such imagery, particularly in the

cases of Jordan and Daisy, does not so much renovate
Romanticism - or the 'romantic' - as show that it has become
reduced to mechanical superficiality in the modern age; but
while the way in which Fitzgerald deploys these images certainly
raises the question of whether a valid Romanticism is still possi-
ble in the contemporary world, it does not imply that the ques-
tion can only be answered in the negative. Fitzgerald's
combination, in his style, of Romantic imagery and attitudes
with imagery drawn from modern technology and consumer
culture puts two opposed ideas into play: the idea that
Romanticism is irretrievable for modernity, and the idea that
modernity provides new Romantic possibilities.
Compared to its copious use of Romantic vocabulary, Gatsby
employs Christian terms sparingly, but it does so at strategic
points in the narrative which give those terms especially strong
significance. Above all, they are crucial to Nick's account of
Gatsby's relationship with Daisy and suggest its quasi-religious
nature. Just before Gatsby kisses her for thefirsttime, he sees, out
of the corner of his eye, that the blocks of the sidewalk form a
ladder which climbs to 'a secret place above the trees' (p. 106); the
ladder alludes to Jacob's dream, in the Old Testament book of
Genesis, of a ladder rising from earth up to heaven, with the
angels of God ascending and descending on it (Gen. 28.12). It is
this ladder and its promise which Gatsby knows he will renounce
when he kisses Daisy: 'his mind would never romp again like the
mind of God' (p. 107) - we can see, in the application of the verb
'romp' applied to the mind of God, one of Fitzgerald's unusual
juxtapositions. But the kiss will itself be a kind of religious expe-
rience, an embodiment like that of Christ when he descended to
earth: 'At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like aflowerand
the incarnation was complete' (p. 107, my italics). The kiss
eventually leads to the full physical consummation of his rela-
tionship with Daisy and he finds, probably to his own surprise,
that this consummation has committed him to pursuing a 'grail'
(p. 142): in medieval legend, the grail was the cup or platter
which Christ used at the Last Supper and which Joseph of
Arimathea employed as a receptacle for Christ's blood.
20
The most extended and significant use of Christian language

in Gatsby occurs, however, when Nick is describing, in Chapter
6, the young Gatsby's rejection of his parents and his change of
name; this passage also invokes classical philosophy and includes
romantic vocabulary.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island,
sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son
of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that
- and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a
vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.' (p. 95).
The first sentence refers to the ancient Greek philosopher

Plato (c.429-347 BC) and his idea that there was a world of ideal
forms of which the material world was an imperfect representa-
tion: the implication is that Gatsby created an ideal form of
himself which he then tried to represent in the material world -
an attempt which was, given the nature of the material world,
bound to fail. But this reference to Plato and Gatsby could also
be seen to encompass a reference to the American Dream: for it
could be said that the USA sprang from its Platonic conception
of itself: that it attempted to put into practice the ideals inscribed
in the American Declaration of Independence - and, perhaps
inevitably, failed.
The second sentence introduces explicit references to Chris-
tianity: Christ is the son of God, and in the New Testament
Gospel of St Luke (2.42-52) it is the 12-year-old Christ who,
without telling his parents, goes to hear and question the doctors
in the temple in Jerusalem and who, when his parents find him
and Mary asks why he has caused his parents sorrow by disap-
pearing in such a way, replies: 'wist [know] ye not that I must be
about my Father's business?'. These allusions to Plato and Christ
place Gatsby in a very exalted frame of reference; but the final
phrase of the second sentence perturbs the picture by defining
the nature of the business in which he must engage in ambiguous
terms, as 'the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty'.
Here a romantic noun which denotes aesthetic and erotic experi-
ence, 'beauty', and a romantic adjective which indicates huge
21
size, 'vast', are linked with 'vulgar' - a term whose older meaning
is 'of the people' but which has come to denote a lack of taste -
and 'meretricious', which means 'showily but falsely attractive'
(and its archaic meaning, 'characteristic of a prostitute', also has
relevance here).
The only character in Gatsby who calls on God directly is
George Wilson, in his agonized vigil after Myrtle's death. But
Wilson's God is both strange and estranged. In his initial extrem-
ity of distress he seems to fragment God when he repeatedly
splits His name into two - 'Ga-od' (p. 132) - and unwittingly
makes the first syllable of the broken name of the divinity sound
like the start of a name he does not yet seem to know but will
soon learn, with lethal consequences: 'Ga-tsby'. In the early
hours of the morning, in response to Michaelis's reiterated ques-
tion as to whether he is a member of a Christian church, he
replies that he does not belong to any. In a final, uncanny
moment, as the oculist's billboard becomes visible in the blue
dawn, he seems to conflate God with the eyes of Dr Eckleburg
(p. 152).
While Christian language and imagery is reserved for especially
significant moments in Gatsby, there is another strand of vocab-
ulary in the novel which is also important but occurs more often:
colour adjectives. Listed in the order of the frequency of their
occurrence, these include white (47 times), yellow (22), blue (22),
green (17), red (9) and pink (6). They help to give Gatsby its vivid
and varied visual allure and also contribute significantly to its
symbolism. There is, however, no simple correlation between the
symbolic and thematic importance of a colour term in the novel
as a whole and the number of times it appears, and no simple cor-
respondence between a specific colour term and a particular
meaning; rather, the colours alter in their significance according
to their contexts, linked sometimes with the positive, sometimes
with the negative, and sometimes with the ambivalent.
Consider, for example, green, which is perhaps the most
important colour term in Gatsby, though not the most frequent
one. It is the colour of aspiration and desire and covers both
Daisy and America, nature and culture, the 'fresh, green breast
of the new world' (p. 171) and its technological equivalent, the
22
green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Jordan Baker's voice

usually comes across on the phone to Nick as if it were a divot -
a piece of turf which a golf club cuts out in making a stroke -
from a green golf course (p. 147); the fresh green breast of the
new world has become a carefully cultivated sward on which the
leisure class may disport itself. But traditionally green is also the
colour of envy and jealousy, and these associations play into its
significance in Gat shy as well. The fresh green breast of the new
world was an open invitation to human rapacity; the green light
lures Gatsby to his death because it represents a woman whose
voice is full of money; according to Nick, Jordan Baker lies and
cheats at golf because she always has to have the upper hand.
Other points in the novel at which green occurs reinforce its neg-
ative connotations. Green is the colour of the upholstery of
Gatsby's car - the vehicle which the newspaper will later call the
'death-car' and which Michaelis describes as light green to the
first policeman he sees after the accident (p. 131). When Tom and
Nick stop at Wilson's garage on the way into New York and the
confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, Wilson's face, when he comes
out into the sunlight, is green (p. 117).
In Gatsby's use of colour terms, aspects of the real world as we
perceive it - colours - take on, within the fictional world of the
novel, extra meanings over and above their primary meaning;
these extra meanings, however, cannot be fully articulated or
finally fixed and limited and they may sometimes appear incon-
sistent and contradictory. In these respects, they exemplify the
way in which symbolism works in Gatsby. as well as colours,
there are a host of other features of the real world which, as they
are evoked in the novel, assume extra meanings and thus func-
tion as symbols. These symbols are drawn from the human body,
from the supernatural, from nature and from technology, and
include eyes, noses, breasts, breath, ghosts, automobiles, trains,
ships, telephones, ashes, heat, water, flowers, the sun, the moon
and eggs. To increase our understanding of how these work, we
shall look at the most memorable of them: eyes.
The importance of this symbol in Gatsby is epitomized by
the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. This symbol straddles the
contemporary commercial world and the world of traditional
23
religious faith, in a way that both brings them together and high-
lights the disjunction between them: the eyes are on a billboard,
advertising an optician's practice in Queens which is long since
defunct; but they become, in Wilson's eyes, the eyes of God, who
sees all. On one level, this is ironic: in the early twentieth century,
God has absconded, is dead, has become no more than an adver-
tisement image, an illusory representation on a flat surface with
nothing but the valley of ashes behind it; but the moment in
which Wilson identifies the image as God is sufficiently chilling
to allow the reader momentarily to share his perception and to
raise the possibility that an observing, judging presence may still
be there, but not necessarily a compassionate or merciful one.
The billboard eyes can be linked with other eyes in the novel -
particularly Owl Eyes, the man with huge owl-eyed spectacles
who assesses Gatsby's achievement as an illusionist when he
inspects the books in his library (pp. 46-7), who reappears a little
later as a passenger in the coupe driven by a drunken guest which
has gone into the ditch and had its wheel torn off (pp. 54-5), who
is the only party guest apart from Nick to come to Gatsby's
funeral and who pronounces a curt epitaph on the dead man:
T h e poor son-of-a-bitch' (pp. 165-6).
Then there are Daisy's eyes, which for Gatsby are the eyes of
judgement: when he shows her round his mansion for the first
time, he looks at her constantly and Nick, looking at him, infers
that he revalues 'everything in his house according to the
measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes' (p. 88); her
eyes also make Nick look at Gatsby's guests and the whole social
world of West Egg differently, an experience which lowers his
spirits. 'It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at
things upon which you have expended your own powers of
adjustment' (pp. 100-1). Nick's own eyes are those of the
observer-participant, and perhaps to some extent can be seen as
Fitzgerald's version of Tiresias, the ancient bisexual sage who
sees and foresuffers all in Eliot's The Waste Land. His eyes are
perhaps also those of the voyeur: on his first visit to the
Buchanan mansion, when the phone rings again as Tom, Daisy,
Jordan and Nick are at dinner, Nick is aware that he wants 'to
look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes' (pp. 20-1);
24
and in New York, he exemplifies 'the restless eye', satisfied, like a

movie watcher, by 'the constant flicker of men and women and
machines' (p. 57). Near the end of the novel, he declares: 'After
Gatsby's death, the East was haunted for me . . . distorted
beyond my eyes' power of correction' (p. 167) - a remark which,
taken with other elements of Gatsby, raises doubts about Nick's
reliability as a narrator, the accuracy of his eyes.
We can see, then, that the symbolism of eyes has many mean-
ings in Gatsby; but it also, like the other key symbols, contributes
to the structure of the novel. For the power of Gatsby is not due
only to its language and style, remarkable though they are; it is
also due to its form, and we shall now examine this more closely.
FORM
As well as supplying a rich range of extra meanings, the symbols
in Gatsby contribute to the form of Fitzgerald's novel by helping
to bind it together through their recurrence at strategic points:
the faceless eyes of Eckleburg rise up, blue and gigantic, at the
start of Chapter 2; recur, briefly but ominously, in Chapter 8
during Tom and Nick's journey into New York; and return with
enormous force when they emerge as the eyes of God in the blue
quickening of the dawn after Myrtle's death. The primary
binding agent of Gatsby, however, is its narrator, Nick Carraway.
As we observed in the last chapter, Fitzgerald had learned much
from Joseph Conrad about the possibilities of a first-person nar-
rator who is both observer and participant and who is involved
in a close and complex way with a man who cannot tell his
own story because he is dead. Despite the differences in terms of
characters and settings between Gatsby and Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, the two narratives are, in a structural sense, similar: the
positions of both Nick and Marlow in relation to their own
stories could be summed up by Nick's comment on his dual,
divided role in the scene at Myrtle's apartment when he imagines
how its lighted windows would look to a casual observer in the
streets below: 'I was within and without' (p. 37). But Nick is
'without', not only because of the inner reserve which operates
even when he is in the thick of a situation, but also, like Marlow,
25
because of the distance in time which separates him from the

events he describes; unlike Marlow, however, he is, supposedly,
recreating those events through the act of writing and this
lends another dimension to his detachment. Whereas Heart of
Darkness starts and ends with another, anonymous narrator, one
of Marlow's listeners, who provides a frame for the story that
Marlow tells, Nick provides his own frame, presenting himself as
the voice of experience and setting himself at a geographical, cul-
tural and temporal distance from the East from which he
returned the previous autumn in a rigid and withdrawn state of
mind. In contrast to Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Nick has no
listeners around him and he never indicates the nature of his
potential audience - perhaps it is himself, since his revelations
would have an explosive impact if they were true and he pub-
lished them - and he does not explicitly indicate in this opening
section that he intends to tell, or write, a story. But in Chapter 3,
after the section break which ends his portrayal of Gatsby's
party, he clearly announces himself as the supposed writer - and
reader - of the narrative, when he remarks that, reading over
what he has written, he sees how his account has falsified the
reality of his life at the time by focusing only on those events
which relate to the story of Gatsby and which, it is implied, have
only assumed in retrospect the narrative significance they now
enjoy.
Nick makes only two further explicit references to himself as
narrator, in Chapters 6 and 8, and on both those occasions he
draws attention to his alteration of the chronological order of
events. In doing this, he highlights another key aspect of the nar-
rative form of Gatsby: its manipulation of time. In examining
this aspect of the novel, it is illuminating first of all to recon-
struct the story of Gatsby's earlier life in chronological order
from his birth up to the time that Nick first sees him, making use
of and rearranging the flashbacks and other relevant references
to the past in the novel. Around 1890, James Gatz is born to
poor parents in the Midwest, in North Dakota; as an adolescent,
he finds that his ambitions are developing and he inwardly
rejects his parents and engages in extravagant fantasies about
his future. He goes to St Olaf's, a small Lutheran College in
26
southern Minnesota, intending to study and support himself by

working as a janitor; but this humble approach does not corre-
spond to his own sense of his potential, and he leaves after two
weeks. He then becomes a kind of beachcomber and odd-job
man, working as a clam-digger, salmon-fisher or anything else
that enables him to find food and accommodation. In about
1907, when he is 17, he sees Dan Cody's yacht anchor over a dan-
gerous flat on Lake Superior and rows out to warn him about it;
when Cody asks him his name he gives it, for thefirsttime, as Jay
Gatsby. Cody takes him on as a kind of personal assistant and
jack-of-all-trades and Gatsby works for him for five years, until
around 1912. In that year, one night in Boston, a lady called Ella
Kaye comes aboard the yacht, and Cody dies a week later,
although no information is given about the cause of his death.
He leaves Gatsby 25 thousand dollars, but Gatsby never gets it;
the will is declared invalid and the remains of Cody's millions go
to Ella Kaye.
We have no information about Gatsby's life from 1912 until the
time he enters the army. It is while he is a second lieutenant sta-
tioned in Camp Taylor in Louisville that he starts going to
Daisy's house with other officers, and then begins to visit on his
own. One October night, he makes love to Daisy, and finds that
he feels married to her and has committed himself to the pursuit
of a 'grail'. Their love affair continues until he is sent off to the
war in Europe. He has been promoted to captain by the time he
is sent to the front and after the Argonne battles he is promoted
to major, placed in command of his division's machine guns and
decorated with medals. When the armistice is declared, he tries
to get home but ends up going to Oxford forfivemonths instead.
While he is at Oxford, he receives a letter telling him that Daisy
is to marry Tom Buchanan. While Daisy and Tom are on their
honeymoon, he returns to Louisville for a nostalgic and melan-
choly week and then goes to New York. Still wearing his army
uniform because he has no money to buy civilian clothes, he
walks into Winebrenner's poolroom in New York asking for a
job; he has had nothing to eat for two days. Wolfshiem sees him
there, buys him a meal, and puts him to work, presumably using
him as a front for various criminal activities. No further hard
27
facts about those activities are given and we are told no more
about how Gatsby gets to the position he is in when Nick first
meets him.
To tell the story of Gatsby's earlier life in this way is to high-
light how very different it seems in the novel, when it emerges
through flashbacks. In a sense, of course, almost all of Gatsby is
a prolonged flashback: according to the opening section of the
novel, Nick is recalling events that happened the previous year
(p. 8), and although by the last chapter of the novel the time-
lapse seems to have extended to two years (p. 155), this apparent
inconsistency could be explained by saying that it has taken Nick
a year to write his story. Within this prolonged flashback, other,
shorter flashbacks are inserted. In Chapter 4, there is Jordan
Baker's story, told in thefirstperson, of the young Daisy Fay, her
encounter with the young Gatsby, her marriage to Tom, his early
infidelity with a chambermaid at the Santa Barbara Hotel, and
the birth of Tom and Daisy's daughter, Pammie (pp. 72-5). In
Chapter 6, Nick provides, near the start of the chapter, a
summary of Gatsby's years with Dan Cody (pp. 94-7), and then
concludes the chapter with an account of the first time Gatsby
kissed Daisy (pp. 106-7). In Chapter 8, Nick interrupts his
account of the morning of Gatsby's death with aflashbackbased
on what Gatsby supposedly told him that morning. This flash-
back covers the development and consummation of Gatsby's
relationship with Daisy in Louisville, his success in the war, his
going to Oxford, Daisy's marriage to Tom, and Gatsby's brief
return to Louisville (pp. 141-6). The final fragment of Gatsby's
story is supplied in Chapter 9, when Wolfshiem tells Nick he first
met Gatsby in Winebrenner's poolroom. Few details of what
working with Wolfshiem involved are given, however; as we have
already mentioned, there is still a large gap in Gatsby's story
between the point at which Wolfshiem takes him up and his
emergence as the lavish party-giver of West Egg; the source of
Gatsby's wealth remains a mystery, though there are hints that he
is engaged in a range of lucrative criminal activities - boot-
legging,fixingthe results of sporting events in order to win bets
on them, and dealing in stolen bonds. But the reader who seeks
traditional narrative satisfactions and wants to know the whole
28
truth about the novel's protagonist will be thwarted: Gatsby will

not fill in all the gaps.
Apart from the smaller timeshift to the scene between
Michaelis and Wilson, Gatsby does provide one more flashback,
however, and it is a surprising one. As we approach the closing
pages - the point at which, in a more traditional narrative, we
might have expected to receive some definitive truth, or at least
some more information, about Gatsby - the focus shifts to Nick
and a significant part of his past. This flashback does not relate
a one-off episode but rolls features of a repeated experience into
a single vivid recollection - lovingly and sharply evoked, laden
with nostalgia - of Nick's Christmas returns by train, as a
schoolboy and then a college student, to the Middle West. It is a
return he has now made again, perhaps for good, and the flash-
back concludes with an attempt to assimilate the characters
whose conflicts have had lethal consequences - Tom, Gatsby,
Daisy, Jordan and Nick himself - into an imaginary unity on the
basis of their common Midwest origin: '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' (p. 167). It is as if, by the power
of Nick's narrative, their forward movement has led them finally
back to their beginnings.
This ring of return anticipates the huge and breathtaking
flashback that will conclude the novel, a flashback not to an
episode in an individual's past but to the prehistory of the USA
itself and to the idea that the attempt to reach the future is coun-
tered by a force that drives us endlessly back to the past. This
conclusion implies that the shuffling of chronology in Gatsby is
not only a technical device to sharpen the interest of the reader
and to create contrasts and similarities between earlier and later
events in the life of its eponymous protagonist: the shifting
between past and present is a part of the novel's concern with
truth and appearance and its questioning of the dominant
Western notion that earthly reality lies in linear time, in forward
movement, in the attainment of future goals.
As well as the use of participant-observer narrator and the
rearrangement of linear time, Gatsby also employs the scenic
method we discussed in the previous chapter - the method,
29
developed by Henry James and taken up by Edith Wharton and

Willa Cather, which favours 'showing' the reader, by a series
of dramatized scenes, rather than telling them by means of an
omniscient narrator. In fact the narrator of Gatsby, while not
omniscient, does 'tell' us quite a lot, but the novel combines his
commentary with vivid scenes that demonstrate Fitzgerald's
ability to speed up or slow down time, to build up a sense of
tension and conflict, and to capture different ways of speaking.
These scenes are made more realistic, and dramatic, by their focus
on the difficulty the characters have in connecting with one
another or even with themselves; a difficulty ironically counter-
pointed by the presence, in several of them, of the most up-to-
date technological means of human connection available at the
time: the telephone. It is the 'shrill metallic urgency' (p. 21) of this
extra guest, which enables Myrtle's voice to invade the Buchanan
mansion, that causes Nick's first visit to Daisy, Tom and Jordan
to collapse into 'broken fragments (p. 20) - and 'broken frag-
ments' could be a good description of all the extended scenes in
Gatsby, in which characters talk at cross-purposes, fail to listen or
reply to one another, find it difficult or impossible to finish what
they are saying, and only truly connect through conflict - when
Tom breaks Myrtle's nose, when Tom and Gatsby face off in the
Plaza Hotel. In the dialogue of these scenes, Fitzgerald employs,
at strategic moments, the rhetorical device of aposiopesis, in
which a speech is suddenly broken off and the sentence left unfin-
ished; the breaking-off is usually marked by a dash, one of
Fitzgerald's favourite punctuation marks, which is also used a
great deal in Nick's prose narrative in preference to semicolons or
colons and which helps to give a sense of immediacy and nervous
energy to Nick's discourse. On one level, the use of aposiopesis in
the dialogue of Gatsby serves, as it often does in fiction, to rein-
force an impression of verisimilitude, echoing the way in which
sentences are often left unfinished in real-life conversations. On
another level, more integrally related to the themes of the book,
it indicates the difficulty the characters have in articulating them-
selves and communicating with one another.
There are four especially striking aposiopeses in the novel:
Myrtle's 'Daisy! Dai—' which breaks off when Tom breaks her
30
nose (p. 39); Gatsby's laughing 'I can't- when I try to—' which
breaks off when Gatsby cannot find the words to express his emo-
tions on meeting Daisy again for the first time after almost five
years (p. 89); Daisy's words to Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel scene
just after she has made it obliquely but unmistakably clear to
Tom that she loves Gatsby: 'You resemble the advertisement of
the man . . . You know the advertisement of the man—' (p. 114)
which breaks off when she cannot find an image which is equal
to what she feels for Gatsby; and Gatsby's desperate attempt, in
the same scene, to evade the reality of Daisy's refusal to say that
she never loved Tom: 'I want to speak to Daisy alone . . . She's
all excited now—' (p. 126) which breaks off when Daisy admits
that she cannot comply with Gatsby's demand. The end of the
Plaza Hotel scene once more collapses into 'broken fragments';
and this time the damage is irreparable.
Nick's phrase 'broken fragments' echoes Eliot's line near the
end of The Waste Land: 'These fragments I have shored against
my ruins' (1. 430). In Gatsby, Fitzgerald, as a novelist, faced the
challenge that Eliot, as a poet, faced in The Waste Land: how to
find an artistic form which would adequately represent the frag-
mentation of modern life without itself falling to bits.
Fitzgerald's response was to develop, both at the levels of lan-
guage and style, and at the level of form, the techniques of
Conrad, James, Wharton, Cather and Eliot himself and to forge,
in Gatsby, a unique work which transcended these influences and
succeeded in representing fragmentation in a way that was aes-
thetically satisfying but which did not evade engagement with
large themes. We shall explore these themes in the next chapter.
1. In its discussion of colour terms in Gatsby, this chapter has

focused on green, but it also mentions other recurrent colours
in the novel, especially white, yellow and blue. Find some sig-
nificant examples of colours, other than green, which recur in
Gatsby and consider what they contribute to the specific pas-
sages in which they feature and to the overall symbolic and
thematic structure of the novel.
31
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a first-

person narrator in Gatsbyl What would the story gain and/or
lose if it were told by more than one first-person narrator -
for example, Nick and Daisy - or in the third person by an
omniscient narrator? (A stimulating way to pursue this ques-
tion is to try to rewrite scenes from the novel from the view-
points of other characters or an omniscient narrator - for
example, the scene near the end of Chapter 7 in which Nick
sees Tom and Daisy through the pantry window.)
3. Explore further what the 'scenic method' contributes to the
novel by focusing on specific scenes - for instance, the gather-
ing in Myrtle's apartment in Chapter 2 or the confrontation
in the Plaza Hotel in Chapter 7 - and examining how these
scenes employ dialogue and description to reveal character,
develop the action of the story, and contribute to its themes.
32
CHAPTER 3
READING THE TEXT
As our examination of the language, style and form of Gatsby

in the previous chapter has suggested, the novel is a tightly
written, carefully structured work in which every sentence is
packed with meaning. Its richness has given rise to many inter-
pretations, and we shall survey the critical response to the novel
in the next chapter; in this chapter, we shall focus on six key
themes which seem especially important in exploring Gatsby
from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. These
themes are:
1. Romanticism
2. America: Dream and History
3. America: The 1920s
4. Money
5. Sexuality and Gender
6. Appearance and Reality
These themes are interwoven in Gatsby and cannot easily be sepa-

rated. For the purposes of analysis, however, we shall take each of
them in turn. The start of each section will identify criticism related
to its theme which is discussed in the next chapter. There will then
be an exploration of each theme which will incorporate a close
reading of a particularly relevant passage from the novel. The last
section of this chapter will include discussion points, questions and
suggestions for further study.
33
ROMANTICISM
(See discussion of Mizener and Troy in Chapter 4, and

'Romanticism' section of Chapter 6.)
The previous chapter of this guide gave a broad definition of
Romanticism as a cultural and artistic movement which valued
imagination over intellect, feeling over reason, subjectivity over
objectivity, art over science and technology, transgression over
conformity, extremism over moderation, ambiguity over clarity,
and the quest for transcendence over the respect for limits. It
emerged in the later eighteenth century and dominated the nine-
teenth century but, by the early twentieth century, it seemed
bankrupt. Fitzgerald, however, in Gatsby, forged a style which
could use Romantic vocabulary without seeming regressive; he
did so by incorporating it into disciplined prose which had the
precision and concentration characteristic of the best Modernist
writing, and by bringing it into conjunction with vocabulary and
imagery drawn from modern life. But Romanticism in Gatsby is
not just a matter of style: it is a central theme of the novel. Gatsby
investigates two key aspects of Romanticism. One aspect is his-
torical: the fate of Romanticism in a specific time and place,
America in the 1920s; the other is universal: its dependence on
disappointment.
The issue of the fate of Romanticism in modern America is
focused in Gatsby by two allusions to Keats. In Chapter 1, during
Nick's first visit to the Buchanan mansion, Daisy twice uses the
adjective 'romantic' to describe the view when she looks out-
doors and sees a bird which she suggests must be a nightingale
that has travelled over on the Cunard or White Star shipping line
(p. 20). In this situation, the meaning of the term 'romantic'
hovers between the two senses that we identified in the previous
chapter; on one level, it relates to love - or, more precisely, it is an
oblique and ironic reference to Tom's affair with Myrtle, to
whom he has just been speaking on the phone; on another level,
it relates to Romanticism, since the mention of a nightingale calls
up Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1820), a poem which
poignantly evokes the transience of beauty and the desire for
death. The allusion to Keats's 'Ode' may seem to invite an ironic
34
READING THE GREAT GATSBY
comparison between an intense founding vision and a vapid

stock response; but there is more to it than that.
Daisy's remark that the nightingale must have travelled over by
ship is not simply a piece of whimsy; nightingales are not native
to America and if there really had been one in her garden, it
would have had to have come from elsewhere. Looked at in this
way, the allusion can be seen as a reference to the difficulty of
translating Romanticism from England to the USA. That
difficulty is heightened by Daisy's reference to the shipping lines,
which were capitalist companies run for profit; the implication is
that Romanticism, if it comes to the USA, cannot evade com-
mercial considerations.
Gatsby does not propose, however, that Romanticism must
necessarily be wholly debased in its translation to modern
America. The creative possibilities of positive translation are
illustrated by a second allusion to Keats which Fitzgerald
himself highlighted in a letter to his daughter when he chal-
lenged her to find, in stanza four of Keats's 'Ode to a
Nightingale' - the stanza which gave him the title for Tender is
the Night - some lines which he adapted for Gatsby. These are
the concluding lines of the stanza: 'But here there is no light, /
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through ver-
durous glooms and winding mossy ways.' Near the end of
Chapter 5 of the novel, when Gatsby and Daisy have been
reunited for the first time and they are in the music room of his
mansion, these lines become: 'He lit Daisy's cigarette from a
trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across
the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor
bounced in from the hall' (pp. 91-2). The differences between
the language used and the situation evoked in Keats's 'Ode' and
in Fitzgerald's novel are indicative of more general differences
between early-nineteenth-century English Romanticism and
early-twentieth-century American Romanticism. Whereas the
Keats poem is set out of doors, the Gatsby scene is indoors;
Keats's light comes from 'heaven' - from the skies, but also, it is
implied, from some supernatural and quasi-divine region - and
is carried on the breeze, whereas Gatsby's light comes from elec-
tricity - a few moments before, he hasflippeda switch at the top
35
of the stairs - and it is reflected from below - presumably from

the hall floor - rather than brought from above through natural
means. The verb 'blown' in the Keats stanza is replaced by
'bounced', an unusual verb in this context, which gives the light
the resilience of a hard-struck tennis ball. Fitzgerald's adapta-
tion of the Keats lines provides a compressed example of the
way in which Gatsby creatively reconstructs Romanticism in a
different cultural space.
This creative reconstruction takes place throughout the novel
and effectively demonstrates the continuing potential of
Romanticism. This is not to diminish the fact that Gatsby
shows, unsparingly, that Romanticism, in early-twentieth-
century America, is bound up with capitalism, with materialism,
with brutality, with waste, with selfishness, with sexual infidelity
and predatoriness; but it still affirms the value of Romantic
aspiration. But that aspiration also presents another kind of
problem, one that is not specific to twentieth-century America:
for there is a sense that such aspiration is doomed to disappoint-
ment: that it can never attain its goal because the desirability of
that goal depends on its separation from the desiring subject.
Romantic desire is insatiable; once satiated, it ceases to be
Romantic desire. A passage which epitomizes this contradiction
occurs in Chapter 5 when, at the end of the afternoon on which
Gatsby and Daisy are reunited after almostfiveyears, Nick spec-
ulates on what Gatsby may be feeling:
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of

bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a
faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his
present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been
moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of
his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the
colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her,
beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a cre-
ative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with
every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or
freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly
heart, (pp. 92-3)
36
This passage provides a good example of the way in which Nick,

although a first-person narrator rather than an omniscient one,
can suggest the inner workings of the minds of other characters,
especially Gatsby's, by entering imaginatively into them. Nick
infers from an outward sign which he observes - Gatsby's expres-
sion of bewilderment - that Gatsby faintly doubts the quality of
the happiness he feels. The word 'doubt' sounds an ominous
note, especially if we link it with the idea cited in the previous
chapter - that for Gatsby, Daisy was a 'grail' (p. 142), a quasi-sacred
object of devotion. In the context of Gatsby's semi-religious
devotion to Daisy, 'doubt' implies that Gatsby is starting to lose
his faith. 'Quality' is also a significant term: it means the stan-
dard of one thing measured against other similar things and it
suggests here that Gatsby is starting to evaluate his happiness
and finding that it does not quite measure up to the happiness
which he had imagined his reunion with Daisy would bring.
The exclamation 'Almost five years!' seems to plunge the
reader, momentarily, into Gatsby's mind. It is, in fact, uncertain
whether we should attribute the phrase to Nick or Gatsby; but
because it is in direct speech, it gives a sense of immediacy, as if
Nick were no longer indirectly relating his own or Gatsby's
thoughts but giving them as they occurred. The next sentence
draws back from such immediacy, but by using the verb 'must
have', it gives a sense of authority to what follows, making it
seem that it is very likely that Gatsby felt this. 'Must have' is a
form of phrasing that occurs at other significant moments in the
novel, most notably in Nick's speculation, near the end of
Chapter 8, about how Gatsby 'must have felt' on the last day of
his life, after the final collapse of his Romantic, and romantic,
dream (pp. 153-4). Nick's belief that he knows what 'must have'
been going on inside Gatsby's head demonstrates the strength of
his identification with Gatsby - or, more precisely, with his idea
of Gatsby.
In specifying what Gatsby's feelings 'must have' been, Nick's
substitution of the verb 'tumbled short' for the more usual
'fell short' is characteristic of the surprising use of language in
the novel; and the change of verb, suggesting a more sudden
and dramatic descent than a mere fall, emphasizes Gatsby's
37
disappointment. Nick makes it clear, however, that Daisy is not

to be blamed for this disappointment; the fault lies with the
'colossal vitality' of Gatsby's illusion. Once again, this is a sur-
prising combination of words. 'Colossal' suggests something
huge, much larger than life, with the monumental grandeur of an
ancient Egyptian statue but perhaps also with the inflated and
vain ambition symbolized by the broken colossus in Shelley's
poem 'Ozymandias'. 'Vitality' connotes energy and activity in
the present - the only other times it is used in Gatsby are in rela-
tion to Myrtle Wilson. 'Illusion', however, suggests a false idea
or belief and the next sentence implies that it has got hopelessly
out of proportion. But if this seems to lead towards a final, dis-
missive judgement that Gatsby is deluded, the term 'creative
passion' in the following sentence turns in another direction,
implying that Gatsby is possessed, not so much of an illusion,
but of an artistic, even religious impulse - one meaning of
'passion' is the suffering and death of Christ, and this links up
with the other Christian imagery related to Gatsby in the novel.
These exalted implications are reduced by the next sentence,
which suggests that Gatsby lacks discrimination and is attracted
by the fragile, insubstantial allure of 'bright feathers'; the reli-
gious associations are revived, however, by the adjective
'ghostly', which links up with the other references to 'ghosts' in
the novel but also retains traces of the older meaning of 'ghost':
spirit or soul. But here the 'ghostly heart' may not so much be
spirit or soul as the Romantic imagination, which is stronger
than the sensuous ('fire') or the new ('freshness').
This passage is a microcosm of the complex way in which
Gatsby treats the theme of Romanticism. Within the space of a
fairly short paragraph, a range of attitudes have been referenced.
Romanticism is huge, energetic, delusive, excessive, creative,
Christlike, ornamented, and stronger than the pleasures of the
senses and the lure of novelty. And it is this complex, multi-
faceted contradictory Romanticism that is embodied in Gatsby
himself and pervades the novel of which he is the protagonist. It
is a Romanticism which enters into and overlaps with a second
key theme of Gatsby: the American Dream and American
history.
38
AMERICA: DREAM AND HISTORY
(See discussion of Bewley, Bicknell, Callahan, Fussell and

Trilling in Chapter 4, and America: Dream and History' section
of Chapter 6.)
Gatsby does not use the term 'American Dream', and the
major warrant for interpreting it as a novel on this theme is the
famous passage which, in the original manuscript, was situated
at the end of the first chapter but which now concludes the novel
as a whole. On his last night at West Egg, Nick is lying on the
beach at night after visiting Gatsby's forsaken mansion:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were
hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferry-
boat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the
inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became
aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch
sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its van-
ished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had
once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have
held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into
an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face for the last time in history with something com-
mensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I
thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green
light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to
this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that
he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was
already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity
beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on
under the night, (p. 171)
In this passage, we see the culminating evidence of Nick's

romanticism - but it is a romanticism specifically linked to the
pre-history of the USA. At night, on the margin between the
primal elements of earth and water, a transformation takes place
39
that is explicable in realistic terms but also has a magical quality,

as the too, too solid houses 'melt' and give way to a vision of a
past time, a founding moment. In the second sentence of the
passage, three important symbols in Gatsby - eyes, flowers and
breasts - and one important colour term - green - come
together: it is the eyes of the sailors for which the island flowers
and then becomes, in a rapid metamorphosis in which the later
form retains the after-image of the earlier, 'a fresh, green breast
of the new world' - a metaphor which combines the maternal,
erotic, natural and territorial. The use of the word 'breast' here
contrasts sharply with its only other use in Gatsby, in the descrip-
tion of Myrtle's 'left breast. . . swinging loose like a flap', inca-
pable of giving suck or sexual pleasure, after Gatsby's car has
killed her (p. 131).
There is, however, another word in the novel which means
'breast' or 'nipple' - 'pap'; this occurs only once, but at a very
significant moment: in Gatsby's vision of what he will renounce
when he kisses Daisy for the first time - the chance to climb
alone to the 'pap of life' and gulp 'the incomparable milk of
wonder' (p. 107). If we link this 'pap' with the two uses of
'breast' in the novel, we have one of those complex patterns
of imagery connecting different and sometimes widely separated
parts of the novel which is characteristic of Gatsby. 'the fresh,
green breast of the new world' can be seen as an earthly, territo-
rial embodiment of 'the pap of life' but, like Myrtle's breast, its
earthiness and seductiveness make it vulnerable; it can be ripped
and torn. In the concluding passage of Gatsby, the sentence
which immediately follows the phrase 'a fresh, green breast of
the new world' indicates that this tearing has taken place: the
trees which were once a feature of that 'breast' have 'vanished',
but not by magic; they did not melt away like the inessential
houses; human beings felled them. Nick's verb 'make way' is a
decorous personification of the trees which implies that they
politely made room for the newcomers; but the personification
develops in a more sinister direction which suggests that the pre-
sumed innocence even of the new world is compromised:
the trees 'pandered in whispers'. The verb 'pander' originally
derived from the name Pandarus, a character in the medieval
40
poem Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)

who acts as a go-between to foster the love affair between his
niece Cressida and Troilus; in that sense, the verb alludes to
Nick's role in the affair between Gatsby and Daisy. It has since
taken on the more general meaning of 'to gratify or indulge an
immoral or distasteful desire or habit' and in this sense it sug-
gests that the trees on 'the fresh green breast of the new world'
appeal to dubious desires.
The sinister quality of this appeal is deepened by the phrase
'in whispers' which, in this context, especially recalls Marlow's
comment on Kurtz in the novella which, as we said in the last
chapter, influenced the structure of Gatsby. Conrad's Heart of
Darkness: 'the wilderness . . . had whispered to him things about
himself which he did not know, things of which he had no con-
ception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the
whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.' These sinister inti-
mations cast a shadow over the phrase 'The last and greatest of
all human dreams', though they do not wholly obscure its uplift-
ing elements: the moment remains 'enchanted'. But it is also
'transitory', a fleeting moment in time, and the aesthetic con-
templation it compels is neither understood nor wished for; it is
the product of an intense but brief compulsion that will give way
to actions - felling trees, felling indigenous inhabitants - which
will transform the geographical and demographic shape of the
continent. The moment is also subject to time because it is unre-
peatable: it is happening for the last time in history.
In the second paragraph of the passage, Nick moves on to
imply a similarity between those early dreamers and Gatsby. His
dream, it is suggested, is also the dream of those Dutch sailors,
of the early settlers. But he has come too late; the attempt to
realize the dream has already been tried and has failed; the fields
of the republic are 'dark' not only because it is night but also, and
more significantly, because of the dark deeds which have taken
place there - we may see another link here with Conrad's Heart
of Darkness.
Insofar as the concluding paragraphs do refer to the American
Dream and present Gatsby as representative of that dream, they
reconfigure what has gone before in the novel and enable us to
41
see it as offering a compressed history of America by means of

metonymy - the rhetorical device in which a part stands for a
larger whole, or vice versa - and anecdote. As with the story of
Gatsby's life, these allusions are incomplete and fragmentary and
are not presented in chronological order; the reader who wants
to understand more about the novel's representation of America,
like the reader who wants to understand more about Gatsby (and
in practice, these will often be the same reader), has to extract the
fragments, relate them where possible to the larger events and ele-
ments which they represent, and reassemble them in chronolog-
ical order.
The end of the novel returns to the European occupation of
American territory which laid the ground for the emergence of
the USA, and it would thus feature first in such a reassembly.
Next would come the description of the Buchanan mansion as
'Georgian Colonial', which alludes to the period in which
America was a British colony under the rule of the English
Kings George I, II and III - and it was during the reign
of George III that the American Revolution against English
rule took place (1775-83), the American Declaration of
Independence was signed (1776) and the USA became a nation
in its own right. The third fragment would be Nick's brief
mention of the American Civil War (1861-5), which tore the
USA apart and resulted in huge loss of life; however, Nick's
great-uncle, who started the wholesale hardware business Nick's
father still runs, evaded military service by hiring a substitute to
go to war for him - which could be done for about $300. The
fourth fragment would be that concerning Dan Cody, who,
since he was 50 years old when Gatsby first met him in about
1907, would have been born about 1857. He is a tough man who
has joined in all the hunts for precious metals that took place in
the USA in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including
the rush for silver in Nevada, in the west, and for gold in the
Yukon, in the north; he has made millions by trading in
Montana copper; he is, in Nick's judgement, 'the pioneer
debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought
back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier
brothel and saloon' (p. 97). He shares his forename with Daniel
42
Boone (1734-1820), the pioneer who founded the first settle-

ment in Kentucky in 1775 and who became a legend in his own
lifetime, and his surname with William F. Cody (1846-1917),
known as 'Buffalo Bill', who popularized the Wild West show
and thus contributed significantly to the transformation of 'the
American West' into myth and spectacle - a process which
would be accelerated and greatly expanded by the development
of the movies. Cody is a transitional figure between the original
American pioneers like Boone and the big-time capitalists of
the early-twentieth-century USA who will convert the images of
those pioneers into powerful propaganda. But his own mental
faculties are failing and he is dominated and manipulated by a
woman, Ella Kaye, who sends him off on a yacht in 1902 and
who, when she comes on board ten years afterwards, seems to
precipitate or even perpetrate his death: Cody dies a week later.
Nick compares Kaye's role in relation to Cody to that of
Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719), the second wife of King
Louis XIV of France, who had a large and suspect influence
over her husband. In about the same year that Cody died, 1912,
a brewer built the house that would later be Gatsby's; he
intended to found a family and it was said that he had offered
to pay five years' taxes on all the cottages around him if their
owners would have their roofs thatched with straw, but they
refused and he went into a decline and died. The attempt to con-
struct a kind of tradition for oneself, to create a history, is
evident here. The final fragment is Nick's participation in the
First World War, which he briefly mentions near the start of the
novel, and which becomes the initial topic of conversation
between Nick and Gatsby before Nick realizes who Gatsby is.
So the range of historical reference in Gatsby spans the
European discovery of America, the colonial period, the US
Civil War, the hunt for mineral wealth in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, and US involvement in the First World War.
The American history which can be reconstructed from the novel
raises challenging questions about the American Dream in the
past; those questions are amplified and developed by Gatsby's
exploration of the American present of the 1920s. We shall now
examine this.
43
AMERICA: THE 1920s
(See discussion of Berman, Forrey, Hindus and Westbrook in

Chapter 4, and 'America: The 1920s' section of Chapter 6.)
In Gatsby the present is, like the eponymous hero of the novel,
an ambiguous, morally and politically questionable realization
of the American Dream. It is a time characterized by vast wealth
which is poured upon some and denied to others - compare Tom
Buchanan and George Wilson; it is a time in which the old social
elite, insofar as they are embodied in Tom Buchanan, are undis-
ciplined, irresponsible, racist, idle and philandering; it is a time
of violence. The kind of frontier savagery Dan Cody represents
may have been 'forgotten' (p. 157), but the re-emergence of vio-
lence in the USA in the 1920s seems to suggest that it is an
unavoidable element of American history and the American
Dream: the rapt wonderment of thefirstEuropeans who arrived
in the new world quickly gave way to their violent settlement of
the land, and the repression and expulsion of its indigenous
inhabitants; the English and French colonial powers fought over
the possession of territory and, when England emerged tri-
umphant, it was soon trying to hold the American colonies by
violence, only to be overthrown by violence; the US Civil War
was a huge internecine conflict which claimed millions of lives;
the rush for metals brought violence back to the East Coast of
America; the First World War found America drawn into a
European conflict for thefirsttime. In the 1920s, violence is most
apparent in the activities of gangsters - Gatsby sometimes looks
as if he has killed a man, Rosy Rosenthal is shot three times in
the belly - and it is also evident in the way in which Tom
Buchanan treats women.
The American present in Gatsby is also a time in which explicit
and implicit racist attitudes and practices prevail, and this raises
the issue of the inclusiveness of the American Dream. Tom, the
embodiment of American old money, is openly racist in his
stumbling assertion that the white race is the dominant one
which has produced science and art and all the elements of civ-
ilization, but which is now threatened by the rise of the coloured
empires (p. 18). Nick does not endorse Tom's ideas in this
44
respect but he does not directly condemn them either, seeing

them as an index of Tom's intellectual backwardness rather than
as an example of race prejudice: limited intelligence and intel-
lectually outmoded ideas rather than racism; and Nick himself,
a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, displays a deprecatory attitude
to members of ethnic groups other than his own. The Dutch
sailors are sufficiently distant for him to see them as representa-
tive of 'man'; but members of contemporary ethnic groups
other than his own are rarely seen or heard. His Finnish house-
keeper is presented as a partly comic, partly disturbing figure
who seems crucial to the running of his domestic life and who at
one point provides useful information about Gatsby, but who is
otherwise marginal, endowed with neither an articulate voice of
her own nor a name - a striking omission, in this novel with so
many names. In Chapter 1, Nick tells us that she mutters
'Finnish wisdom' when she is cooking (p. 9) and in Chapter 7,
he provides us, in indirect speech, with her report on Gatsby's
dismissal of his servants and its aftermath; but she never says a
word in direct speech or has even a brief scene in which she and
Nick engage in dialogue. Nick gives no sign that he has any con-
ception that she has a life of her own and seems to think that she
is at his beck and call - on the day of Gatsby and Daisy's visit to
his bungalow, he recalls that he has forgotten to tell 'my Finn' to
come back and goes to find her in what is presumably a poor
quarter of West Egg, without any apparent awareness that she
may have other demands on her time. Soon afterwards, she is the
object of Gatsby's slightly reproachful look when Nick takes
him into his pantry, and a little later her floor-shaking 'Finnish
tread' alarms him (p. 82); when she brings in a tea tray for
Gatsby and Daisy, Nick calls her 'the demoniac Finn' (p. 84).
This deprecatory attitude towards a person of Scandinavian
origin is echoed in a more general way by Nick's exclusion, in
Chapter 9, of 'the lost Swede towns' from his idea of the Middle
West (p. 167). Are Scandinavians also excluded from his idea of
America?
Figures from other ethnic groups also remain on the periphery
of Nick's consciousness and vision. In Chapter 2, he and Tom
wait for the train to New York in the valley of ashes. It is a few
45
days before the Fourth of July and Nick observes a grey, thin
Italian child laying 'torpedoes' (firecrackers) along the railroad
track which will explode when the train runs over them (p. 29).
This probably underfed child, playing in a desolate, polluted
environment, could seem an ironic comment on the celebration
of America which takes place on the Fourth of July. On his drive
with Gatsby into New York, Nick undergoes greater exposure to
the gaze of ethnic otherness, although he is safely insulated from
any contact that goes beyond the visual: the mourners in the cars
which follow a hearse look out at Gatsby's spectacular vehicle
'with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern
Europe'; a limousine passes with a white chauffeur at the wheel
and three fashionably dressed African-American passengers, two
men and a girl; Nick laughs aloud as 'the yolks of their eyeballs
rolled toward us in haughty rivalry' (p. 67). The racist stereo-
typing in which Nick momentarily engages when he sees the
African-Americans is let loose when he meets Wolfshiem, a
'small, flat-nosed Jew' with 'two fine growths of hair' in his nos-
trils, 'tiny eyes' (p. 68) and 'Finest specimens of human molars'
for cufflinks (p. 70). The novel itself does not imply that there is
anything wrong with Nick's responses, but the modern reader
may find the attitudes which he exemplifies questionable and see
them as casting further doubt not only on the generosity and
accuracy of Nick's perceptions, but also on the validity of the
American Dream. Only Michaelis, the young Greek who runs
the all-night restaurant and coffee house beside the ashheaps, is
characterized in an extended and positive way, in the scene in
Chapter 8 in which he stays with Wilson all night and tries to
calm and console him after Myrtle's death, invoking the tradi-
tional sources of comfort - children and church - which Wilson
does not possess. But Michaelis, who seems both compassionate
and intelligent, is trapped in the valley of ashes, even if he is still
young enough to escape.
Gatsby also shows an American present which is still drawing
on European models that are implicitly presumed to be superior.
For example, the exterior of Gatsby's house looks as though it is
trying to imitate a Hotel de Ville - & French city hall or munici-
pal building - in Normandy, and inside it is a museum of
46
European styles: it includes a neo-Gothic library, panelled in

carved English oak and named after an Oxford college, which
was 'probably transported complete from some ruin overseas'
(p. 46); Marie Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration Salons;
and a study which imitates the designs of the eighteenth-century
Scottish architects Robert Adam (1728-92) and James Adam
(1732-94). Myrtle's apartment mirrors in miniature the multiple
mimicries of Gatsby's mansion. It is crammed with overlarge fur-
niture whose tapestry covers display scenes that come from or
resemble those of eighteenth-century French rococo paintings,
especially The Swing (about 1766, now in the Wallace Collection,
London) by Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806). The implica-
tion is that Myrtle and Gatsby, both of humble origins, both in
their respective ways romantics, and both representative of
strands of populist vitality in American life, have in common a
lack of taste and originality which especially shows itself in sub-
servience to European stylistic models that are improperly
understood. But it is not only Gatsby and Myrtle who are guilty
of this: Tom, the embodiment of old money, endorses their lack
of taste and originality, implicitly by paying for Myrtle's flat
and furniture, and explicitly by becoming a kind of mimic man
whose attempts to imitate the old colonizers through his riding
clothes and his conversion of his garage into a stable threaten
to turn him into an inadvertent parody of an English country
gentleman.
It is important, however, to recognize that Gatsby's portrayal
of the American present is not wholly critical: the novel also
conveys the excitement and appeal of modern America and thus
foreshadows a world in which the American Dream will go
global, not only because of the capacity of the USA to impose
its will through violence, but also because of its ability to arouse,
direct and gratify desire. Gatsby's parties may have their motiva-
tion in his desire to attract Daisy, but their extravagant conspic-
uous consumption also functions as an image of the USA itself:
they depend, as Nick recognizes, on the toil of large squads of
servants who clean, repair, prune and press buttons on kitchen
gadgets: but these rude mechanicals disappear in the excitement,
the exhilaration of the parties themselves - the cocktails come in
47
'floating rounds' as if by magic. Nick's account captures this

excitement:
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the
sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music,
and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier
minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a
cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new
arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there
are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there
among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous
moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,
glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and
colour under the constantly changing light, (p. 42)
Thefirstsignificant point about this passage is that it is mostly in

the present tense throughout: 'grow', 'lurches', 'is', 'pitches',
'change', 'swell', 'dissolve', 'form', 'are', 'weave', 'become',
'glide'. Like most novels, Gatsby is told largely in the past tense,
and this particularly befits its ostensible nature as Nick's retro-
spective account of his experiences; but the switch into the
present tense at this point gives his account of Gatsby's parties a
greater immediacy. The immediacy is more striking if we con-
sider that this passage describes not one particular Gatsby party,
but a typical Gatsby party, a synthesis of distinctive features
drawn from Nick's observations of a number of parties that take
place at his neighbour's mansion. If we recall the context of the
passage, we will remember that it is the second of three present-
tense paragraphs near the start of Chapter 3, and that this
chapter opens with a description of Gatsby's parties as repeated
events which is, though full of vivid detail, necessarily more
distanced than an evocation of one particular party; to use the
distinction we discussed in the previous chapter, it is more like
'telling' than 'showing'. The switch to the present tense, however,
transfers us into the showing mode so vibrantly that the reader
may well feel he or she is reading about a specific rather than a
typical party, even though Nick does not start to describe a spe-
cific party - thefirstparty that he goes to, where he meets Gatsby
48
for the first time - until after the end of the third present-tense
paragraph, when he shifts back into the past tense.
The next significant point is that the clause The earth lurches
away from the sun' is an unusual way of describing the onset of
evening; it reverses the imagery that is still in common use today,
in which it is the sun rather than the earth which moves - 'sets' -
as the day ends; an imagery that depends on a long-discredited
pre-Copernican cosmology. Fitzgerald inverts this imagery and
updates it to accord with a modern sense of the nature of the uni-
verse. But in doing so he also reanimates the kind of anal-
ogy between cosmic and human processes which occurs in
Shakespeare and in the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets,
most notably John Donne (c.1572-1631): the change in the posi-
tion of the earth in relation to the sun mirrors, on a much mag-
nified scale, the change in human behaviour in relation to
daylight standards of conduct which takes place at Gatsby's
parties as night falls. Something of the nature of this change is
suggested by one of those unusual combinations of words that
are characteristic of the style of Gatsby: the juxtaposition of
'earth' and 'lurches'. 'Lurch' means 'to make a sudden, unsteady
movement, to stagger', and it is an unexpected, rather undigni-
fied verb to apply to the earth; it offers an image of the transition
from day to evening as a clumsy, erratic, abrupt shift rather than
as a gentle gradation - as in the eighteenth-century 'Ode to
Evening' by William Collins (1721-59) - or a magnificent
pageant - as in the painting The Fighting Temeraire (1838)
by the nineteenth-century Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner
(1775-1851); it is, in other words, a Modernist, jarring way of
describing the coming of night, and it matches the way in which
some of the guests at Gatsby's party are starting to lurch with the
intoxication of the alcohol and excitement.
A further unusual combination of words follows: 'yellow
cocktail music'. 'Yellow' is one of the key colour adjectives in
Gatsby, but its application to 'cocktail music' is an example of
synaesthesia, in which experiences and perceptions that are
usually associated with one of the five senses are transferred to
another; in this example, sound (music) is expressed in terms of
sight (yellow); this gives a sense of how daylight categories are
49
starting to collapse and exchange qualities as the party gets

under way. This blurring of categories is also suggested by the
metaphor of 'the opera of voices'; this creates a kind of crossover
effect, linking the popular cultural form of 'cocktail music' -
light and frivolous music appropriate to the taking of cocktails
in the evening - to the high-cultural form of opera, and trans-
forming the fragments of party chit-chat into a dignified artistic
production. The phrase 'opera of voices' also exemplifies the way
in which individual human agents are displaced in this passage:
the subjects of the verbs are not T , 'she' and 'he', but techno-
logical devices ('lights'), astronomical bodies ('earth', 'sun'), col-
lective entities ('the opera of voices', 'the orchestra', 'groups')
and generic forms of behaviour and types ('laughter', 'wander-
ers', 'girls'); human beings here are not unified and autonomous
selves but are represented by metonymies. Metonymy is a figure
of speech in which something is represented by a part of itself or
by something closely associated with it; in this passage, however,
parts which stand for human wholes almost come to substitute
for or replace wholes: voices, laughter, faces become more impor-
tant than specific individuals with distinctive features who might
be talking or laughing. This foregrounding of part over whole
gives a sense of processes in which people are caught up willy-
nilly and, these processes, we could suggest, are not only those of
Gatsby's parties but also of modern America and, given
America's global reach, of the modern world. They are processes
which displace individual identity and give a sense that every-
thing is always changing, and fast.
This sense of rapid change is conveyed by some of the verbs
we have already cited - 'swell', 'change', 'dissolve', 'form' - and
by the sense that these processes are proceeding simultaneously,
'in the same breath', in an instant of human existence. Such
change is exciting and in some ways liberating: for example, it
provides the possibility of greater freedom for women, as the
wandering girls who weave confidently about demonstrate. It
may also be more deeply transformative, as the use of the term
'sea-change' in the last sentence of the passage suggests. The
term originally comes from Shakespeare's play The Tempest
(1611), where the spirit Ariel sings a song that seems to confirm
50
Ferdinand's mistaken belief that his father has drowned in the

storm and that his corpse 'doth suffer a sea-change / Into some-
thing rich and strange' (1.2, 403-4); a more immediate intertext
for its use in Gatsby is Eliot's The Waste Land which uses another
line from Ariel's song (1.2.401) to suggest the ambivalent results
of that transformation - Those are pearls that were his eyes' (1.
125) - and whose fourth section is called 'Death by Water'. In this
Gatsby passage, the term 'sea-change' conveys the idea that the
party, like modern America, can effect an apparently magical
transformation but it also implies that such a change may be inti-
mately connected with death: relating this idea to the eponymous
hero of the novel, it alludes to the transformation that James
Gatz has already undergone through his seagoing with Dan
Cody and that Jay Gatsby will undergo as he suffers his own
death on water, in the vulnerable luxury of his swimming pool,
near the end of the novel.
To mention Gatsby's death is to return to an awareness that the
magical, mythical and mortal transformations which Gatsby's
parties stage and symbolize are bound up, like the USA itself,
with violence and with a further great theme of Fitzgerald's
novel, which we shall look at in the next section of this chapter:
money.
MONEY
(See discussion of Godden in Chapter 4, and 'Money' section of

Chapter 6.)
Gatsby is full of money. The novel allows its readers and critics
- the majority of whom will not be millionaires - to be guests at
Gatsby's parties, to live vicariously, as Nick does, in a world of
fabulous wealth even as it implicitly, and sometimes explicitly,
criticizes the moral and artistic shortcomings of that world.
Gatsby challenges any simple opposition between money and
happiness, material and spiritual wealth, money obtained by
crime and money obtained by ostensibly legal means. In this
novel, money is sexy, in both the erotic and the more generally
exciting sense; it gives the kind of buzz that it would give again
in the headyfinancialsprees of the 1980s. But it is also one of the
51
most romantic and mysterious elements in the novel. Money may

corrupt, but it also creates: it is crucial to Gatsby's attempt to
realize his dream - he cannot take Daisy from Tom with money,
but without money he could not even have tried to take her from
him; it is crucial to the American Dream; and it is crucial to the
twenty-first-century dream of global capitalism. All the major
characters, perhaps all the minor ones as well, in the novel are
significantly defined by their relationship to money. Money is not
seen as external to some implied human essence but as shaping
the ways in which people are perceived and the ways in which
they perceive themselves, and the ways in which they behave. In
Daisy's case, money permeates one of the most traditional chan-
nels of presence, individuality and authenticity: the voice.
Nick's great-uncle, the founder of his line, chose business, the
making of money, over a war - the US Civil War - which was, in
the view of some historians, itself motivated more by economic
considerations than ethical ones - the struggle of the industrial
North with the agricultural South mattered much more than
slavery. Great-uncle Carraway was able to make that choice
because he had the money to pay for a substitute to go to war in
his place. In contrast to his prudent forebear, Nick has been to
war and enjoyed it; but it has, at least temporarily, unfitted him
for the family wholesale hardware business. The proceeds of that
family business, channelled through his father, will, however,
subsidize his attempt to change his relationship to money by
becoming a financier rather than a wholesaler, selling bonds
rather than hardware.
The term 'bond' is a significant one in relation to Gatsby's
exploration of the theme of money. It is word which suggests reli-
ability and security: on thefinanciallevel, it is a certificate which
a government or public company issues to a purchaser in which
they promise to repay the value of the bond - its purchase price
- at a fixed rate of interest at a specific time; while it may offer
less of a return on an investment than shares, it provides greater
security. On the social level, it also suggests the bonds which bind
individuals together; Nick says that all his contemporaries are
working in bonds, and there is an implication that in modern
Americafinancialbonds provide a means of human bonding, of
52
creating some kind of like-minded community, in an epoch when

other forms of bonding, other connections, have broken down.
In the nineteenth century, the Scottish social thinker and writer
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) observed in his book Chartism
(1839) that, as a result of the changes brought about by indus-
trial capitalism, 'cash payment has become the sole nexus [con-
nection] between man and man'; by Fitzgerald's time, cash
payment was increasingly being supplemented by other forms of
payment, such as bonds, which were substitutes for money itself
and which were making money increasingly intangible. The only
times when physical money changes hands in the novel are the
humble transactions between Tom and the dog seller in
Chapter 2 ($10 for the 'Airedale') and Tom and Wilson in
Chapter 8 ($1.20 for the gasoline). But the power of financial
bonds to promote human community and dependability is
shown to be limited in Gatsby: as an honest bond salesman, Nick
does not make much money, as he admits to Gatsby, and Nick
recognizes that he might, but for politeness, have been tempted
in different circumstances to accept Gatsby's offer to help him
make more, presumably by illegal means; near the end of the
novel, when Nick answers the telephone to a caller who thinks
Nick is Gatsby, he learns that Gatsby was involved in trading
stolen bonds. In Gatsby, bonds, financial and human, are impli-
cated in activities which deepen the mistrust between human
beings.
In Chapter 3 of the novel, Nick portrays his hourly study of
investments in the Yale Club library after his evening meal as an
act of duty which he conscientiously performs before giving
himself over to the freedom and excitement of walking the city
and engaging in erotic and romantic fantasy. This suggests a
familiar division between dull money and bright life; but that
division has already been challenged by the visual allure of the
books about finance which he buys when he starts work as a
bond salesman; these books seem attractive and appealing,
sources of sensuous pleasure: red and gold, the colour of blood
and sun, they themselves look like new-minted money and
promise to reveal the bright secrets of Midas, Morgan and
Maecenas. This trio, linked in an alliterative chain, encapsulate
53
the mixed attitudes to money, not simply of Nick, but of the

whole novel - and, it might be said, of Western civilization.
Midas is the mythical king whose touch turned everything to
gold, including food, and who therefore starved to death because
he could find nothing to eat; he illustrates that the lust for lucre
may be fatal. Morgan is John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), the
financier who founded the Morgan banking corporation, reor-
ganized and revived flagging railway companies, and funded con-
solidations like US Steel and General Electric; he shows that the
quest for wealth can lead to worldly success and power.
Maecenas is Gaius Maecenas (c.70-8 BC), a Roman diplomat
and famous patron of literature and the arts who encouraged the
great classical poets Virgil (70-19 BC), Propertius (c.50-c.l6 BC)
and Horace (65-8 BC): he demonstrates that money can foster
high culture. These examples provide a spectrum of attitudes to
wealth which complicate any simple opposition between money
and other human goods.
Nick's complex attitudes to money are also evident in his view
of Tom. On the one hand, he is in awe of his huge wealth, as he
is in awe of his huge body; on the other hand, he sees Tom's
money as possibly encouraging him, and Daisy, in their irre-
sponsible behaviour because it provides a refuge into which they
can retreat from the consequences of the damage they cause. In
contrast to Gatsby, there is no reference to, or speculation on, the
source of Tom's wealth, and perhaps that is a key difference
between 'old' and 'new' money: 'old' money is the money that
arouses few questions about its sources. Since Tom comes from
Chicago, it is possible that his wealth, like that of the Warrens in
Tender is the Night, derives from one of the big meat-packing
companies which developed in that city in the later nineteenth
century; Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) offered an explosive expose
of this industry from the viewpoint of its workers in his novel The
Jungle (1906). But we do not know; Tom's money is, to use a
phrase Nick later coins about the lucre on which New York was
built, 'non-olfactory' (p. 67) - it does not smell.
Money as well as sex is one of the bonds between Tom and
Myrtle. If he gives her the sensuous satisfaction that her husband
cannot deliver, he also provides her with the pleasures that
54
money can buy - the pleasures of consumption and possession

which the USA has now made globally attractive. When Tom
takes Nick into Wilson's garage to meet 'my girl', the first adjec-
tive Nick uses to describe its interior is an economic one -
'unprosperous' (p. 27) - and its lack of prosperity is immediately
demonstrated by the only car visible in this business which aims
to make money by buying and selling cars: this is a wrecked and
dusty Ford, which contrasts with Gatsby's magnificent car which
will appear later and also provides a wry comment on Henry
Ford (1863-1947), the founder in 1903 of the Ford Motor
Company, a much-vaunted American success story and a leading
representative of US industry, prosperity and the production of
cheap consumer goods - epitomized by the Ford Model T - for
the mass market. Nick's romantic imagination wants to reject the
interior of the garage as an illusion, a shadow, and he surmises
that 'sumptuous and romantic apartments' lie above (p. 27); but
the only sumptuous and romantic apartment he does find is a
parody of his imagined dwelling, Myrtle's small, furniture-
stuffed New York apartment. When Tom, Myrtle and Nick reach
that apartment, Nick implicitly invites the reader to share his
deprecation of her lack of taste and of the snobbery she affects;
but the narrative also displays Nick's snobbery and enables the
reader to understand, even to share, the pleasure she takes in her
furnishings, decor and dresses, in the purchases she makes on her
trip to the city - a copy of a scandal magazine and a movie mag-
azine, cold cream and perfume, and a puppy - and in the list she
wants to make of the things she still has to buy - a massage and
a wave, a collar for the puppy, an ash-tray with a spring mecha-
nism, and, for her mother's grave, a wreath with a black silk bow
which will last all summer. She is an early practitioner of retail
therapy and Tom's money buys her a certain measure of happi-
ness, brief though it may be. But her consumerism also con-
tributes to her death - it is Wilson's discovery of the costly leather
and braided silver dog-leash that she has bought for the puppy
which leads him to suspect that she has been having an affair and
to lock her up.
Gatsby's relationship to money is especially interesting.
When he waits for Daisy to come to Nick's cottage for their first
55
reunion after almost five years, he looks 'with vacant eyes'

through a copy of what is presumably one of Nick's books
about money, Economics: An Introduction for the General
Reader (first published in the USA in 1918), by the British econ-
omist Henry Clay (1883-1954). While Gatsby would presum-
ably find it difficult to read any book in these circumstances, the
fact that it is a book about economics which fails to engage
his eyes might seem to illustrate a familiar romantic - and
Romantic - commonplace: the irrelevance of money to love.
But in Gatsby, money, or the lack of it, is fundamentally inter-
woven with love. One response to that interweaving might be to
advocate - as Clay's Economics does - redistributing wealth for
the benefit of all; but this is not Gatsby's way. It is not that
Gatsby has no concern with economics or with the distribution
of income, but rather that he has a different understanding of it
from that which an egalitarian economist might provide, and it
is summed up in the most famous line of dialogue in the novel.
This occurs in Chapter 7, in a passage which particularly merits
close reading. It relates an exchange between Nick and Gatsby
as they wait outside the Buchanan house to go to New York
after Daisy has, in front of Tom, effectively but indirectly told
Gatsby that she loves him:
'She's got an indiscreet voice,' I remarked. 'It's full of—' I hes-

itated.
'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of
money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in
it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of i t . . . High in a white
palace the king's daughter, the golden g i r l . . . (p. 115)
We can see first of all that Nick's 'It's full of—' provides a
further example of the rhetorical device we discussed in
Chapter 2 - the device of aposiopesis, a sudden breaking-off of
a sentence indicated by a dash. But then Gatsby, who for most
of the novel stays silent, speaks evasively, or has his words
paraphrased by Nick, supplies the missing word with unusual
conviction, clarity and directness, not by simply adding it on to
56
the end of Nick's unfinished sentence, but by incorporating it

into a complete and concise sentence of his own: 'Her voice is
full of money.' The juxtaposition of Daisy's voice and money
remains startling - even if one has read Gat shy before - because
the previous descriptions of that voice have been couched in a
romantic and erotic vocabulary rather than a financial one;
prior to this moment, Nick has found it variously thrilling,
exciting, compelling, glowing, singing, exhilarating, fluctuat-
ing, feverish, warm, deathless, murmuring, husky, rhythmic
and sweet, and Jordan - the only other person besides Nick
and Gatsby who comments on Daisy's voice - associates it with
'amours'.
The bottom-line identification of money as the key quality of
Daisy's voice gives Nick a shock of recognition and his assent to
Gatsby's statement is immediate and terse: 'That was it. I'd never
understood before.' The statement is then repeated in Nick's nar-
rative prose almost verbatim, but quickly followed by the elabo-
rate vocabulary and rhythmic phrasing which often feature in
Nick's storytelling style. The rhythm of Nick's prose at this point
revives the lyrical quality that 'full of money' has threatened to
dissipate; the internal part-rhymes - 'jingle'/'cymbalsV'king' -
may sound slightly discordant, reminding us of Gatsby's mone-
tary metaphor (especially if we recall 'the jingle of money' in
Fitzgerald's Crack-Up essay, quoted in Chapter 1 of this guide).
But Nick's prose also distracts us from this discord. It does not
wholly do so, however. Nick employs the kind of romantic
vocabulary we discussed in Chapter 2, and the most immed-
iate ancestor of the images here is nineteenth-century pre-
Raphaelite poetry and painting - for example, the work of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) and William Morris
(1834-96); but the context in which that vocabulary is used and
the juxtaposition of such terms with Gatsby's comment brings
out an element that is largely absent from pre-Raphaelite verbal
and visual discourse: the material element, the element of
money. This is not to say, however, that the material element
negates the romantic element, or that the two elements are
absolutely distinct: the juxtaposition of the two elements sug-
gests that money is the stuff that dreams are made on.
57
The passage also has echoes of the Bible and of Greek myth.
'Cymbals', as a plural, occurs eight times in the Old Testament,
in the Authorized Version of the Bible, but its most famous
occurrence is in the New Testament, as a singular, in St Paul's
First Letter to the Corinthians, 13.1: 'Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become
as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.' On one level, we could
apply this quotation to Daisy, who, we might say, speaks with the
tongue of an earthly angel, but who - in her attitude to Gatsby,
at least - lacks charity. But the allusion may also implicitly chal-
lenge the value of charity, in both its biblical and modern secular
senses: could charity of either kind really have much effect
against the cymbals that symbolize the magic of money?
The imagery of the golden girl, the king's daughter, high in a
white palace, plays an intriguing variation on the ancient Greek
myth of Danae, who was imprisoned in a bronze tower by her
father Acrisius, King of Argos, because of a prophecy that her
son would kill him; Zeus, however, turned himself into a shower
of gold, entered her room, and made her pregnant with Perseus.
In Nick's revision of the image, it is the girl herself who takes a
golden form to allure the vulnerable male, Gatsby, even though
she has already had a child with the man of godlike physique,
Tom. This play with traditional gender roles brings us to a fifth
key theme of Gatsby: sexuality and gender.
SEXUALITY AND GENDER
(See discussion of Fraser, Fryer, Korenman and Person in

Chapter 4, and 'Sexuality and Gender' section of Chapter 6.)
Gatsby vividly dramatizes the shifting definitions of masculin-
ity and femininity and the uncertain roles of men and women in
a society in transition. Tom Buchanan embodies - and here the
verb 'embodies' seems especially apt - a powerful patriarchy
threatened by social change; Daisy seems to find little satisfac-
tion in the traditional roles of wife and mother but has no real
alternative to them; Jordan Baker is a financially independent
woman and sporting celebrity living a peripatetic life but she is
harshly criticized and eventually rejected by Nick; Myrtle is a
58
lower-middle-class woman of great but stifled vitality; Wilson

lacks key signs of conventional masculinity; Gatsby feels
'married' to Daisy but he tries to break up Tom's marriage; and
Nick is a sexually ambiguous figure.
As all these issues are refracted through Nick, the primary nar-
rator of the novel, it is worth focusing on the sexual ambiguity
which emerges from the story that is attributed to him, while
keeping in mind that the issue of his erotic orientation can never
finally be settled because he is a fictional character, a product
rather than source of the discourse which he supposedly writes,
and that discourse, in characteristic Modernist fashion, leaves
gaps and uncertainties that are never bridged or resolved.
First of all, we can ask what Nick looks like. His appearance
is hardly described at all in Gatsby - Fitzgerald makes no use of
the stock devices by which afirst-personnarrator can realistically
provide a physical description of himself - for example, by
looking in a mirror or at a photograph - but two potentially con-
tradictory references to his appearance are significant in relation
to his sexuality. In the early pages of the novel, he tells us that he
is said to resemble the great-uncle whose 'rather hard-boiled'
portrait hangs in his father's office (p. 8). 'Hard-boiled' has
strong masculine connotations - one thinks particularly of the
'hard-boiled detective' who features in American thrillers of the
period - but we have learned just before Nick makes this state-
ment that this great-uncle avoided service in the US Civil War
and possibly had no children of his own to carry on the business
he founded (unless - could there be a hint of this? - he adulter-
ously fathered Nick's father); thus, despite the 'hard-boiled'
appearance of Nick's great-uncle, he lacks two of the conven-
tional signs of masculinity. So the masculine inheritance sug-
gested by the physical resemblance is itself a dubious one. The
second reference to Nick's physical appearance is on hisfirstvisit
to the Buchanans, when Daisy says three times that he reminds
her of a rose (p. 19). Nick does not object to this description to
Daisy, but he does at once deny it emphatically to the reader, in
a way that might, taken with other hints in the novel, seem sus-
picious, and carry a hint of 'The lady doth protest too much,
methinks' (Hamlet, 3.2, 219). In 1920s America, a man who
59
looked like a rose would not smell sweet; he would seem too fem-
inine and threaten traditional gender boundaries.
Nick is perhaps particularly sensitive to Daisy's suggestion in
Tom Buchanan's house because, as Nick has already observed,
Tom has a body that is powerful enough to outweigh the
'effeminate' aspect of his riding clothes and can barely be con-
tained by them; it is a phallic body that fills and seems ready to
burst out of his boots; it shows 'a great pack of muscle shifting'
when his shoulder moves under his coat; it is 'capable of enor-
mous leverage - a cruel body' (p. 12). Nick's response is a
complex one, starting from a degree of pleasure in response to
the 'effeminate' aspect of Tom's appearance, moving to an
admiration of the way in which the feminine aspect is out-
weighed by Tom's physique, and culminating in an awed recog-
nition of the power of that physique and an admiration of, fear
of and perhaps desire for its potential cruelty.
If Daisy threatens to turn Nick into a rose, Myrtle threatens
to turn him into a nullity in the scene in her apartment when,
riled by her sister's claim that she was crazy about Wilson for a
while, she cries that she was no more crazy about him than about
the man to whom she points suddenly - Nick (p. 37). A discon-
certing momentary identification between Nick and Wilson is set
up and there is a more general implication that a sensuous
woman like Myrtle could not possibly consider Nick an object of
desire. It is also in Myrtle's apartment that Nick meets a male
character who is explicitly described as 'feminine' - Chester
McKee, the photographer whose wife is, among other things,
'handsome': the couple seem to have exchanged conventional
gender characteristics. After Tom shatters Myrtle's nose, McKee
leaves the apartment, and Nick, without offering any explanation
for his action, follows him; we shall engage in a close reading of
the passage which follows:
'Come to lunch some day,' he suggested, as we groaned down

in the elevator.
'Where?'
Anywhere.'
'Keep your hands off the lever,' snapped the elevator boy.
60
'I beg your pardon,' said Mr McKee with dignity, 'I didn't
know I was touching it.'
All right,' I agreed, 'I'll be glad to.'
. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up
between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfo-
lio in his hands.
'Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery
Horse . . . Brook'n Bridge . . .'
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the
Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and
waiting for the four o'clock train, (pp. 39-40)
Nick's response to McKee's invitation is delayed by the elevator

boy's rebuke which suggests McKee's hands have strayed, inad-
vertently or by subconscious impulse, into contact with a forbid-
den lever. On the literal level, the lever is presumably one of the
lift controls, but the dictionary definition of a lever - 'a project-
ing arm or handle that is moved to operate a mechanism' - also
suggests that it could be interpreted in symbolic terms as an erect
penis. McKee's apology to the elevator boy is immediately fol-
lowed by Nick's All right. . . I'll be glad to'. This is ostensibly a
reply to McKee's invitation to lunch; but insofar as it can be read
as a response to the elevator boy's rebuke and to McKee's
apology, it suggests that Nick would be glad to 'touch the lever'.
The narrative then cuts, without any transitional passage, to a
brief but vividly realized scene in which Nick and McKee are in
a bedroom together, with no indication of how they got there; it
is one of only two bedroom scenes in the novel, and a more inti-
mate one than the scene between Daisy and Gatsby in Chapter 5,
where Nick is present and where the closest Gatsby gets to
undressing is showering his shirts over Daisy - though not the
one he is wearing. By contrast, McKee is in bed, clad in his
underwear (Nick's state of dress is not indicated), and touching
not a lever, but 'a great portfolio' which he holds in his hands.
It is important to stress that there is no textual evidence that
a sexual encounter takes place between Nick and Chester -
though it is most unlikely that there would be any such evidence
in an American novel of 1925 by an author who hoped for a
61
large readership and financial rewards; Gatsby's representation

of adulterous and extramarital heterosexuality led the editor of
one magazine, Liberty, to refuse it for serial publication, and
other magazines may have turned it down for similar reasons;
explicit homosexuality would have been quite beyond the pale.
But we do not need to suppose that the McKee scene implies
that a homosexual encounter does occur to acknowledge
that the situation is fraught with homoerotic possibilities and
innuendoes. In this context, it is worth noting that the term
'underwear' which is used here recurs only once in the novel, in
Chapter 8: during the argument which leads to Nick, Jordan,
Tom, Daisy and Gatsby taking the parlour of a Plaza Hotel
suite, Nick confides, with an unusual frankness which resembles
that of James Joyce in Ulysses, that his underwear 'kept climb-
ing like a damp snake' round his legs (p. 120). Like the elevator
lever and the great portfolio, that 'snake' lends itself to a phallic
interpretation, though in this last case it suggests aflaccidrather
than an erect penis - and thus perhaps hints that Nick's body is
anticipating Gatsby's unmanning by Tom in the confrontation
over Daisy.
If Nick lacks erectness in the run-up to the Plaza Hotel scene,
there is anotherfigurewho possesses it from her first appearance
in the novel - Jordan Baker. In contrast to the sensuous, smoul-
dering, incorrigibly femalefleshof Myrtle, Jordan - the one char-
acter in the novel whom Nick admits that he enjoys looking at -
is androgynous: slim, with small breasts and 'an erect carriage'
which she emphasizes 'by throwing her body backward at the
shoulders like a young cadet' (p. 16). It is this hermaphrodite
body which Nick himself will soon throw backward but will
finally throw over. He is uneasy about his relationship with a
young woman who looks like an 'erect' young man and whose
prowess at playing and allegedly cheating at golf proves that she
knows how to handle her balls; the unacknowledged reason for
his uneasiness may be that she seems too much like a man -just
as his decision to reject the girl back home to whom he had been
writing letters signed 'Love, Nick' seemed to relate to the mous-
tache of perspiration that appeared on her upper lip when she
played tennis and thus not only made her female fleshliness
62
sweatily apparent but also, and perhaps more disturbingly, turned

her into a man.
Nick's attitude to Jordan contains considerable elements of
hostility and patronizing indulgence which could be read as a
defence against his attraction to her. Of the three major women
characters in Gatsby, Jordan has departed furthest from conven-
tional notions of femininity and might, in some emancipated
perspectives, seem an admirable figure: she is single, financially
independent and has a reputation of her own as a golf champion
which seems to be based primarily on ability; Nick, by compari-
son, is Mr Nobody from Nowhere and he might be expected to
think himself lucky to be the escort of a sports celebrity. He
shows no sign of doing so, however, and it is perhaps useful to
him that he can take the moral high ground in relation to her by
labelling her a cheat. An incident in which, when they are
together at a house party, she leaves a borrowed convertible out
in the rain and lies about it, presumably to its owner, is, for him,
confirmation of a story that she had moved her ball from a bad
lie in her first big golf tournament: an act that echoes, on a
smaller scale, thefixingof the baseball World Series which shocks
Nick so much when Gatsby tells him that Wolfshiem was respon-
sible for it. Despite Nick's claim at the start of the novel that he
is 'inclined to reserve all judgements' (p. 7), he seems highly
judgemental in the way he moves from a lie that he presumably
witnesses or hears about - without apparently contradicting or
protesting against it at the time or afterwards - to the assumption
that the rumour that Jordan cheats at golf is true and then to the
assertion that she is 'incurably dishonest'. He gives no further
examples of her alleged dishonesty and there is no indication
that, despite their intimacy, he tries to check out the truth of the
cheating rumour with her, even indirectly. Instead he goes on to
take her dishonesty for granted and to excuse her on the sexist
ground that 'Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame
deeply (pp. 58-9)'. It seems clear, however, that he does blame her
deeply - but perhaps less for dishonesty than for awakening his
uneasy sexuality. The assumption of her dishonesty may be a
projection of his own dishonesty about the sexual ambiguity in
himself which his relationship with her has helped to highlight.
63
Myrtle Wilson is imbued with vitality - the adjective is applied

to her four times, and only used on one other occasion in the
novel, when Nick speaks of the 'colossal vitality' of Gatsby's illu-
sion. When Nick first meets her, he at once sees a vitality which
makes her seem as if 'the nerves of her body were continually
smouldering' (p. 28); though dwelling in the valley of ashes, she
smoulders with banked-up rather than dying fire. In her New
York apartment, after she has changed her costume, her 'vitality'
changes to quasi-aristocratic disdain but has returned when he
later glimpses her, from Gatsby's car, 'straining at the garage
pump with panting vitality' (p. 66) - an energetic, sexually sug-
gestive image which contrasts with the inert image of her
husband that Tom evokes when he mockingly suggests that Mr
McKee should take a photograph of 'George B. Wilson at the
Gasoline Pump' (p. 35). The final use of the word 'vitality' occurs
in the description of her death when her wide-open mouth,
'ripped a little at the corners', looks 'as though she had choked a
little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long'
(p. 131).
Near the end of the novel, Daisy is harshly criticized by Nick
and placed on the same level as Tom but her position is, to say
the least, a difficult one. Marriage to the young Second
Lieutenant Gatsby would present many problems, and when he
meets her again, she is a wife and a mother, even if she is not
happy or fulfilled in those roles, and Gatsby is involved in large-
scale organized crime. The idea that they should go back and
marry from her home in Louisville seems impractical and unreal
- what would they do about Daisy and Tom's daughter, for
example? Tom's rampant infidelities began soon after their mar-
riage. Gatsby makes an impossible demand on her - that she deny
that she ever loved Tom. In refusing to do this, Daisy displays an
honesty that Nick, who affirms his own honesty, perhaps ought
to admire. Daisy's decision to cover up the truth about Myrtle's
death - and Gatsby's - is one to which Nick implicitly assents -
he could, after all, have made a statement to the police and given
evidence at the inquest.
In Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays a range of possible roles and
positions for women and for men and shows their constricting
64
effects. Daisy and Myrtle are both, in their different ways,

trapped, even though it is the lower-class Myrtle who is the sac-
rificial victim whose death restores the equilibrium of Tom and
Daisy's relationship. Jordan is comparatively free, but is the
object of harsh judgement and eventual rejection by Nick. Tom
and Wilson are both, in their respective ways, trapped by patri-
archal stereotypes, and both lash out violently to assert their
power over the vital Myrtle. Nick is caught between gender posi-
tions, a hard-boiled rose, who has a bedroom scene with a femi-
nine man and a half-loving relationship with a masculine
woman. In its exploration of the theme of gender and sexuality,
Gatsby shows that appearances can be deceptive and that truth
seems contradictory, complex and hard, perhaps impossible; and
in these respects, this theme, like the others which we have
explored so far, links up with what may be the overarching theme
of the novel: appearance and reality.
APPEARANCE AND REALITY
(See discussion of Berman and White in Chapter 4, and

'Appearance and Reality' section of Chapter 6.)
When Gatsby and Daisy meet again in Nick's bungalow after
almostfiveyears, Nick leaves them alone together, goes out into
the garden, takes shelter under a tree from the pouring rain, and
for half an hour stares at Gatsby's huge mansion like Kant at
his church steeple' (p. 85). The reference at this point in the novel
to the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804),
who was supposed to have looked at a church steeple from his
study window as he engaged in abstract thought, is, on one level,
the knowing joke of a university-educated man with a superfi-
cial philosophical culture trying to provide himself, and his
readers, with a moment of light relief in an emotionally tense
and physically uncomfortable situation. But on another level,
and taken in the context of Gatsby as a whole, the reference sug-
gests that Nick is a kind of philosopher - not because he pos-
sesses the exceptional intellectual prowess of a thinker of genius
such as Kant, but because he is constantly, anxiously engaged in
trying to distinguish between appearance and reality. In a novel
65
which dramatizes a range of philosophical positions - from

Gatsby's Platonic idealism to Jordan Baker's universal scepti-
cism - Nick's anxiety, his knack of getting into tangles, and his
attempts to grasp, to represent and sometimes to analyse those
situations through thinking and writing, make him an existen-
tialist, seeking meaning in an apparently absurd world and
basing his thought on specific situations, not on abstractions.
Nick, like the novel which he supposedly writes, conducts his
philosophical investigations through the techniques of art, of
fiction - characters, scene, situation and symbolism.
In the previous chapter of this guide, we saw the importance
of the symbolism of eyes in Gatsby; in considering the philo-
sophical implications of the novel in this chapter, we can suggest
that eyes, the most sophisticated of the human sense organs,
are a metonym for the attempt to grasp reality through sense-
impressions - sense-impressions which have to be processed by
the understanding to make sense. Nick himself spends a lot of
the novel looking and listening, and initiates action himself only
rarely; most of the time, he appears to be tagging along for the
ride, a restless eye/I trying to see what he can see and to under-
stand it; and, despite the confidence of many of his general pro-
nouncements, he, and the other characters whom we see through
his eyes, often find seeing difficult. In Gatsby, the problem of
accurate perception is sometimes significantly focused by
accounts of the act of looking at a photograph or through
windows. For example, when Nick first enters Myrtle's apart-
ment - and this is before he has had anything to drink - he sees
a photograph which seems to be a hen sitting on a blurred rock;
looked at from a distance, however, the image resolves itself, like
an Impressionist painting, and becomes a bonnet which tops the
beaming face of a stout old lady; the more general implication is
that appearances are deceptive and may change and vary in accu-
racy according to the distance from which one observes them.
While Nick later identifies the lady in the enlarged photo as
Myrtle Wilson's dead mother - one of only two mothers men-
tioned in the text, the other being Daisy - he nonetheless finds
that it hovers like the ectoplasm which a spiritualist medium
supposedly extrudes: here, the photograph becomes an ironic
66
comment on the attempt to demonstrate the existence of life

after death by visual means.
In Gatsby, looking through windows provides an especially
important set of models of perception and misperception, of the
desire and quest for knowledge and its satisfaction or frustration.
Although Nick claims, near the start of the novel, that it is better
to look at life through a single window, he himself looks through
or at, or sees or imagines other people looking through or at, a
range of windows. In the eyes of the casual watcher in the street
below, as imagined by Nick, the windows of Myrtle's apartment
awaken but do not satisfy the desire for knowledge. The poor
young clerks whom Nick observes on his nocturnal wanderings
through New York loiter in front of windows - presumably shop
windows - which, we may infer, awaken the desire for the knowl-
edge that comes with possession of the goods those windows
display, and the lifestyles which they connote; but they also
thwart those desires, which only money - or theft - can satisfy.
The windshields in Gatsby's car seem like a maze of mirrors in
their multiple reflections of the sunlight, while its layers of glass
enclose its driver and passengers in a conservatory of green
leather: here, an accumulation of windows seems to obstruct
rather than assist perception and knowledge, like the windscreen
of a car one drives in a nightmare which prevents one from seeing
the road ahead properly. It is through the windows of the cars
that pass Gatsby that Nick sees - or, more precisely, fails prop-
erly to see - people of south-east European origins and African
Americans whom he instantly slots into his perceptual stereo-
types; they, in turn, are looking at Gatsby's car, but their eyes -
as yet - lack sufficient social power to make Nick feel that he
himself is under scrutiny and to bounce his gaze back upon
himself. It is through a window in Gatsby's bedroom that Daisy
looks out at the pink and golden foamy clouds over the sea, a
setting for a rococo version of the Birth of Venus, and says that
she would like to push Gatsby around in one of them, suggest-
ing her flimsy grasp of the reality of Gatsby or of her own situ-
ation. When Tom and Nick stop for gas at Wilson's garage on the
fatal day which will climax in Myrtle's death, Nick glimpses,
through a curtained window above the garage, not the romantic
67
and sumptuous apartments which he had once imagined there,

but Myrtle's face peering down; she does not see Nick, who is
able to observe the emotions creeping into her face 'like objects
into a slowly developing picture' (p. 119) and concludes that she
is looking with 'jealous terror' on Jordan Baker, whom, Nick
believes, she takes to be Tom's wife (it could also be that she takes
Jordan to be Tom's new mistress and that Nick does not enter-
tain this thought because it would highlight the fragility of his
own hold upon Jordan and raise the possibility that a macho
man like Tom could take her from him). After Myrtle's death, it
is at the window of Daisy's room that Gatsby, on the outside of
his dream girl's house once more, looks for a signal of distress -
turning the light on and off- which will never come: this window
will show him nothing; he is a priest whose God has absconded
but who still waits for a sign. Meanwhile Nick looks through the
gap between the pantry window curtain and the sill and sees Tom
and Daisy sitting together at the kitchen table, appearing to be
both intimate and conspiratorial - and believes he has under-
stood the truth of the situation.
The image of the window also calls up the view of the German
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) in which the universe
consists of 'windowless monads'. Nick is a monad with a window
who constantly strives for a more panoptic view, a first-person
storyteller who tries to become an omniscient narrator, a restless
eye who is also a restless I, not content to stay within the limits of
his own perception and knowledge; a narrator who asserts that it
is better to look at life from one window but who tries, at especially
significant moments, to look at life through the windows of other
people's eyes and minds. At the end of Chapter 6, for example,
when he imagines Gatsby kissing Daisy for the first time, he pro-
vides a far more complete, cohesive and convincing story than
Gatsby himself could have supplied, if we judge by his own uncon-
vincing account of himself to Nick in Chapter 4; and near the end
of Chapter 8, Nick imagines, in a particularly powerful and con-
vincing way, how Gatsby must have felt after the collapse of his
dream of renewing the past with Daisy. What grounds does Nick
have for his apparent knowledge of these events, of what Gatsby
saw and felt? He employs, one presumes, a mixture of imagination
68
that calls on his own fantasies and desires, and inference from his
knowledge and experience of Gatsby and of Gatsby's situation;
but at crucial moments he tries to present this mixture as if it were
the authoritative discourse of an omniscient narrator. Inevitably,
however, his authority is undermined by those elements of his
style and stance which remind the reader that his viewpoint is the
relativist one of the first-person narrator. So there is a fluctuation
in the novel between an aspiration to absolute knowledge and an
acknowledgment of the difficulty of attaining even the compara-
tively humble goal of accurate perception.
This fluctuation is not just the problem of Nick or of the novel
in which he appears, however; it is a long-standing philosophical
problem which becomes especially pressing in the modern world
because the social and cultural structures - those of Christianity,
for example - which placed limits on relativism are breaking
down. The absence of absolute knowledge, the plunge into rela-
tivism, could seem liberating; perhaps it is for Jordan Baker, the
representative in the novel of 'universal scepticism' (p. 77), the
harbinger of jaunty postmodernism, for whom everything is per-
mitted, even lying or cheating at golf. For Nick, however - and
here he is joined by many other Modernist characters and artists
- the plunge into relativism is a plunge into anguish, into distress
and potential despair. One of world literature's great descrip-
tions of such anguish occurs in Gatsby in the passage where Nick
imagines what Gatsby must have felt like on the day of his death,
when no telephone call comes from Daisy:
I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would

come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he
must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high
price for living too long with a single dream. He must have
looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and
shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how
raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new
world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breath-
ing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that
ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amor-
phous trees, (pp. 153-4)
69
We can see how this passage begins with a speculative, provi-

sional, conversational, almost casual sentence - 'I have an idea',
'perhaps'; the narrator invites the reader to join him in specula-
tion but does so in an apparently humble way, acknowledging
that it is a matter of an idea rather than of facts, of possibility
rather than certainty. The next sentence starts in a more formal
though still provisional conditional mode - 'If that was true' -
but then adopts a verb form which brings with it a more defi-
nite and insistent tone - 'he must have felt'. It is as if we were
being led, gently butfirmly,into accepting the narrator's version
of things. As the sentence goes on, our interest is diverted from
the provisional nature of the narrator's account by his explo-
ration of what Gatsby felt: and the first element of Gatsby's
feelings is a sense of loss. To convey what has been lost, the
passage employs a phrase which, remarkably, combines nostal-
gic, sensuous and global connotations: 'the old warm world';
the implication is that he has lost the past - 'old'; that he has
lost sensuous comfort - 'warm'; and that he has lost every-
thing - 'the world'. The sentence then moves into an economic
metaphor - 'paid a high price' - which has a bitterly ironic rela-
tion to the many references to money in the novel. In material
terms, Gatsby has indeed paid a high price; but the psychic cost
is so much greater. The sentence concludes with a precise diag-
nosis of the cause of Gatsby's current condition: he has lived
too long with a single dream; but the phrasing here implies that
the 'dream' can also be harmful, can turn into damaging obses-
sion. The next sentence once more employs the 'must have'
formula but this time the reader is likely to be so gripped by the
evocation and analysis of Gatsby's state that he will not linger
on its provisional, speculative nature but move quickly into the
account of Gatsby's perceptions - and it is his perceptions,
especially visual ones, which are in the forefront here. What he
sees is the world of nature and horticulture: there are none of
the signs of modernity which are visible through so much of the
novel - cars, roads, petrol pumps, railways, the grey heaps of
the valley of ashes and the white heaps of New York skyscrap-
ers. All are absent and we are returned to the pre-urban, pre-
industrial landscape of the early Romantic poets. But nature
70
here brings no comfort; indeed, it is described in the kind of

way which is more commonly associated with the negative expe-
rience of urban life, particularly when encountering the city
for the first time; it is disorientating, alarming, chilling, ugly:
the sky is 'unfamiliar', the leaves are 'frightening', a rose is
'grotesque' and the sunlight is 'raw': and it produces a reaction
which is first of all physical: 'shivered'. The last phrase of the
sentence takes up the idea of 'rawness' and sets it in a quasi-
biblical context: the 'scarcely created grass' seems to evoke a
primal moment, the moment just after God created the world,
but this is a world from which God is absent and it needs the
completion which only the human imagination can provide. But
the human imagination, insofar as it is embodied in Jay Gatsby,
has broken down.
The start of the final sentence of the passage abandons the
'must have' formula and indeed abandons the pronoun 'he': the
narrator is no longer telling us what Gatsby must have felt - or
what he himself feels - but presenting an omniscient summary of
the nature of this strange new world - a new world which is very
different, much more alien, than the new world whose 'fresh
green breast',floweringfor the Dutch sailors, reassuringly recalls
the 'old warm world' of the mother. This new world is material
rather than maternal; it lacks the reality which imagination can
give; it is a world of the dead, of ghosts who feed on dreams
which no longer have any possibility of realization, which can no
longer animate reality. The implication is that Gatsby now
belongs to that world, even though he is not yet physically dead.
But he soon will be: the 'ghost' imagery which is used here was
applied earlier in the novel to a man whose wife walked through
him 'as if he were a ghost' (p. 28): George Wilson. After the pause
provided by the ellipsis (the three dots) it is Wilson who will, so
to speak, complete the sentence. Wilson is not named, but the
adjectives 'ashen' and 'fantastic', following on from the 'ghost'
imagery, help to identify him by associating him with the valley
of ashes which is called 'fantastic' when it isfirstdescribed at the
start of Chapter 2. The verb 'gliding' both conveys the sense of a
supernatural quality in Wilson's movements and suggests, on a
realistic level, its silence, stealth and speed; the ineffectual Wilson
71
at last proves himself lethally effective against a war veteran and

gangster who could presumably, in other circumstances, have
defended himself with ease. But, in a final twist of absurdity,
Wilson has got the wrong man. In a sense, however, the death of
Gatsby is merely the coda to the collapse of meaning that Nick
so vividly evokes; and it is that collapse of meaning, the philo-
sophical vacuum that it leaves, with which Nick will have to cope.
In the end - which is, of course, the beginning of the novel -
Nick seems to have turned away from the urgent philosophical
questions which his experiences at West Egg posed. He appears
to have reduced his philosophical concerns to the question of
how to regulate human behaviour and to have settled for an
answer that combines a measure of the pragmatism of William
James, which we discussed in Chapter 1 of this guide with a trace
of the sort of authoritarianism which would, in certain contexts,
harden in the next decade into fascism. Nick claims that he does
not care about the philosophical foundations of conduct; these
may be firm ('hard rock') or yielding ('wet marshes'), but beyond
a certain point of licence, it seems to him necessary to maintain
a kind of quasi-military discipline which, metaphorically, puts
the world in uniform and makes it stand permanently at moral
attention (p. 8). For Nick, however, this answer may be only tem-
porary, like his loss of interest in the joy and sadness of human
beings; after all, it is an answer he proffers as a preamble to a nar-
rative which reopens all the questions he has supposedly shut
down - reopens them not as abstract conundrums but as vivid
existential challenges. And it is these challenges, above all, which
give Gatsby its ongoing life.
DISCUSSION POINTS, QUESTIONS AND

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
Romanticism
1. Read John Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' - you can also listen
to a recording of Fitzgerald reading the poem at www.sc.edu/
fitzgerald/voice.html. As well as the passages discussed earlier
in this chapter, can you find other passages in Gatsby which
seem to you to be imbued with a similar mood to Keats's 'Ode'?
72
2. In a notebook entry first published in The Crack-Up,

Fitzgerald wrote 'Romanticism is really a childish throwback
horror of being alone at the top - which is the real horror'
(p. 148). What exactly does this definition mean, and how
might it apply to Gatsbyl
America: Dream and History

1. Shortly before publication, Fitzgerald tried unsuccessfully to
change the title of The Great Gatsby to Under the Red, White
and Blue, perhaps with reference to the national banners
flying during the war which Jordan mentions in her account
of Daisy in Louisville (p. 72). In what ways might this be a
suitable title for the novel?
2. In the last-but-one paragraph of the novel, Fitzgerald uses the
adjective 'orgastic'. When his editor, Maxwell Perkins, queried
this, asking whether it should be 'orgiastic', Fitzgerald
affirmed that 'orgastic' should remain in the text. What does
this adjective mean and what does it contribute to the idea of
the American Dream in the closing passages of the novel?
America: The 1920s

1. Reread the famous list of Gatsby's party guests at the start of
Chapter 4 of the novel (pp. 60-2). What image of American
society in the 1920s do these names give? What is Nick's
attitude to that society? Is it possible to infer Fitzgerald's
attitude?
2. Reread Nick's account of his evenings in New York in
Chapter 3 of the novel, in the section which starts 'Reading
over what I have written so far . . .' and ends 'Imagining that
I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate
excitement, I wished them well' (pp. 56-8). Then turn to the
Modernist work that has often been linked with Gatsby, T. S.
Eliot's The Waste Land, go to the third section of the poem,
which is called 'The Fire Sermon', and read the account of a
London evening which starts at line 215, At the violet hour,
when the eyes and back' and ends at line 256, And puts a
record on the gramophone'. Compare and contrast the atti-
tudes to the modern city in these two accounts.
73
Money
1. The third paragraph of Fitzgerald's 17,000-word short story
'The Rich Boy' (1926) begins with a statement which has
become famous: 'the very rich . . . are different from you and
me.' Often, however, the rest of the paragraph is not quoted.
Find a copy of the story (see Chapter 6 of this guide for
details of where you can do this) and read the complete para-
graph (the whole story is also well worth reading, both in itself
and in relation to Gatsby). How do you think the paragraph's
remarks about the very rich might apply to the representation
of the rich in Gatsby!
2. Fitzgerald's remark about the 'very rich' provoked an equally
famous riposte from Ernest Hemingway in 'The Snows of
Kilimanjaro': 'Julian . . . had started a story once that began,
"The very rich are different from you and me." And . . .
someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money'
(pp. 65-6). How far does Gatsby confirm or contradict the
view that the only difference between the very rich and other
people is that the very rich have more money?
Sexuality and Gender

1. In a newspaper clipping pasted in his scrapbook, and repro-
duced in The Romantic Egoists (1974), Fitzgerald is quoted as
saying that the Midwest girl is 'unattractive, selfish, snobbish,
egotistical [and] utterly graceless' (p. 97). In Gatsby, Daisy
and Jordan Baker are clearly identified as Midwest girls, and
the Midwest sometimes seems to be the place of virtue in the
novel. How far does Fitzgerald's description fit Daisy and
Jordan?
2. In a notebook entry first published in The Crack-Up,
Fitzgerald wrote: Tifty years ago we Americans substituted
melodrama for tragedy, violence for dignity under suffering.
That became a quality that only women were supposed to
exhibit in life or fiction - so much so that there are few novels
or biographies in which the American male, tangled in an
irreconcilable series of contradictions, is considered as any-
thing but an unresourceful and cowardly weakwad' (The
Crack-Up, p. 208). How far does this description of 'the
74
American male' in fiction and biography accord with the rep-

resentations of the major male characters in Gatsbyl
Appearance and Reality

1. Fitzgerald has been called 'a romantic philosopher caught in
his own trap'. On the basis of Gatsby, what do you think this
philosophical 'trap' might be and how far is it true that
Fitzgerald was 'caught' in it?
2. Read section 5, 'What the Thunder Said', of Eliot's The Waste
Land and pay particular attention to lines 411-14: M have
heard the key / Turn in the door and turn once only / We think
of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each con-
firms a prison.' Eliot's note to these lines quotes from
Appearance and Reality (1893) by the philosopher F. H.
Bradley (1846-1924): 'My external sensations are no less
private to myself than are my thoughts or feelings. In either
case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed
on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is
opaque to the others which surround i t . . . In brief, regarded
as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for
each is peculiar and private to that soul.' To what extent does
Gatsby portray characters (including Nick) who are 'opaque'
to one another, closed within their own spheres, and what are
the philosophical implications of this?
75
CHAPTER 4
CRITICAL RECEPTION AND

PUBLISHING HISTORY
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Gatsby received a mixed critical reception on its first appearance
in 1925. The spectrum of responses can be summed up by two
contrasting review headings: the New York World (12 April 1925)
declared that the book was a 'dud', while the Chicago Daily
Tribune (18 April 1925) affirmed that the novel proved that
Fitzgerald was 'really a writer'. Several reviewers felt that Gatsby
was more mature than This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
and Damned; for example, William Curtis, in Town and Country
(15 May 1925), said that meeting Fitzgerald again in Gatsby after
encountering him in his two previous novels was like 'realizing
that a hopeful child has become adult', while Gretchen Moult
roundly affirmed in the Detroit Free Press (21 June 1925): 'Scott
Fitzgerald has grown up.' Gatsbfs technique also came in
for praise. Walter K. Schwinn, for example, in a clipping in
Fitzgerald's scrapbook whose source has not been identified,
commended 'the masterly organization of the narrative', and an
anonymous review that Fitzgerald also pasted into his scrapbook
identified two aspects of the novel which would receive much
attention from later critics: the way in which the reader's knowl-
edge of Gatsby is built up piecemeal by means of what Nick
hears and sees, and the motif of the eyes of Dr T. J. Eckleburg.
The reviews made a range of comparisons with other writers,
most often Henry James: for instance, Edwin Clark, in the New
York Times Book Review (19 April 1925) likened Gatsby to Henry
77
James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) in terms of its shortness and
its refusal to resolve crucial uncertainties; Carl van Vechten, in
The Nation (20 May 1925), suggested that Gatsby and James's
Daisy Miller (1879) shared the theme of 'a soiled or rather cheap
personality transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing
through the possession of a passionate idealism'; and Gilbert
Seldes in The Dial (August 1925) remarked that Fitzgerald had
got the novel's 'scenic method' from James via Edith Wharton.
In the New York World, Laurence Stallings compared Gatsby to
the work of another writer whom Fitzgerald acknowledged as an
influence: Willa Cather. Stallings felt that Cather's A Lost Lady
and Gatsby both combined a mature viewpoint and a central
character who lacked depth.
As well as the review response to Gatsby, another significant
aspect of its contemporary reception comprised the letters of
praise that Fitzgerald received from writers whom he admired.
One of these came from Cather, and another from the author
whose influence on Gatsby Seldes had detected: Edith Wharton.
While Wharton commended the 'seedy orgy' at Myrtle's apart-
ment and the characterization of Wilson and Wolfshiem (though
her remarks on the latter sound anti-Semitic today), she felt that
Fitzgerald would have increased the impact of Gatsby's downfall
if he had presented a fuller picture of his earlier career; she
acknowledged, however, that this would have been an old-
fashioned way to do it, which was not Fitzgerald's way.
The highly experimental Modernist writer Gertrude Stein
(1874-1946), however, made a comparison that might have
seemed to make Fitzgerald look very old-fashioned in early-
twentieth-century terms when she told him he was 'creating the
contemporary world' in much the same way that the Victorian
writer William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) did in his novels
Vanity Fair (1847-8) and The History of Pendennis (1848-50).
But Fitzgerald, who much admired Thackeray, took this as a
compliment, and Stein's comment was insightful in that it recog-
nized the extent to which Gatsby was not simply reflecting 1920s
America but creatively constructing a version of it which, nearly
a century later, continues to shape our perceptions of that
decade. T. S. Eliot, in his letter from England, said that he had
78
CRITICAL RECEPTION AND PUBLISHING HISTORY
read the novel three times and that it had 'interested and excited'
him more than any new English or American novel he had seen
for some years; he told Fitzgerald that he would like to write to
him more fully when he had time and explain exactly why it
seemed to him such a remarkable book, 'the first step that
American fiction has taken since Henry James'. Eliot appears
never to have provided a full explanation of his reasons for
admiring Gatsby, however, and his analysis of the novel remains
one of the most tantalizing pieces of unwritten criticism of the
twentieth century. But the comments he did make provided excel-
lent copy for future paperback editions of the novel.
Like its American counterpart, the first British edition of
Gatsby, in 1926, had a mixed response from reviewers. T. S. Eliot
acted as a kind of US ambassador in England for the novel, com-
missioning two reviews for his magazine The Criterion from
American writers. Gilbert Seldes, who had already reviewed the
book in the USA, praised the book again in the January 1926
issue, while in the October 1926 issue the American poet, novelist
and short-story writer Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) applauded
Gatsb/s formal excellence and, like Seldes, van Vechten and
Clark, suggested Henry James as a possible influence, particularly
'the flash-backs and close-ups and parallel themes' of The
Awkward Age (1889). Aiken's use of cinematic terms, however,
indicates what he saw as the primary influence on Gatsby: film.
The anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement (18
February 1926) praised Fitzgerald's novel as an undoubted work
of art 'of great promise' - though this last phrase implies 'could
do better' - and made a significant comparison not with Henry
James, the favoured choice of reviewers so far, but with a writer
who would come to loom much larger than James in later critical
considerations of Fitzgerald: Joseph Conrad. It saw Gatsby as 'a
Conradian hero' like the eponymous protagonist of Almayer's
Folly (1895) or 'the hero' - presumably Kurtz - of Heart of
Darkness (1902). This suggested a depth in Gatsby which the
writer L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) did not perceive. In The Saturday
Review, he took the novel as an example of 'an unmistakable
talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view' (that is,
making a fool of itself) and dismissed the story as 'absurd'.
79
In its first French translation, Gatsby le magnifique (1926),

Fitzgerald's novel received a splendid though belated endorse-
ment from the well-known writer and artist (and later film direc-
tor) Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). In a 1928 letter to the translator
Victor Llona, which Llona passed on to Fitzgerald, Cocteau
called Gatsby le magnifique 'un livre celeste: chose la plus rare du
monde' ('a heavenly book: the rarest thing in the world'). Llona
remarked to Fitzgerald, however, that it was too bad that
Cocteau had not written this in the papers when the translation
came out in 1926, as it would have increased its sales.
As Llona's remark suggests, the initial interest aroused by
Gatsby had subsided by 1928, in the USA and UK as well as in
France. The novel sometimes received brief mentions in the
reviews of the three subsequent Fitzgerald books published in his
lifetime, with the publication of Tender is the Night, in particu-
lar, stimulating comparisons with Gatsby. The 1934 reissue of
Gatsby in a Modern Library edition with an introduction by
Fitzgerald seemed to offer readers the chance to check out the
respective merits of the two novels for themselves; but relatively
few appear to have seized this opportunity. Fitzgerald's intro-
duction is a fascinating piece of work, especially for its remarks
on the process of writing Gatsby, but it was too unfocused and
tangential to stimulate people to buy or read the book. He
wanted to rewrite the introduction for a second impression, but
sales were too low to justify its reprinting.
For the rest of the 1930s, Gatsby received little critical atten-
tion; the novel only started to get mentioned again when
Fitzgerald died in December 1940. Several obituaries referred to
it, but with varying judgements. For instance, The New York
Herald Tribune called it 'compact and brilliant' and The New
Yorker affirmed that it was 'one of the most scrupulously
observed and beautifully written of American novels'; The New
York Times, however, felt that while Gatsby 'caught superbly the
spirit of a decade', it was 'not a book for the ages'. This view
raised one of the most fundamental questions about Gatsby at
this stage: would it last?
Two essays which appeared in the 1940s began to suggest that
it might. William Troy's 'Scott Fitzgerald - The Authority of
80
Failure' (1945) saw Fitzgerald in Gatsby as using the technique of

the 'intelligent but sympathetic observer' which he had derived
from Conrad and James to split himself into two: the responsi-
ble Nick and the romantic Gatsby. Freed of a responsible self in
this way, Gatsby can take off and become 'one of the few truly
mythological creations in our recent literature'; endowed with a
responsible self, Nick has to confront the painful experiences
which arise through his friendship with Gatsby. Gatsby's story is
finally one of failure; Nick's story is one of success as he tran-
scends his pain and grows in moral perception. This positive view
of Nick proved influential in the 1950s and still has its adherents
today.
Like Troy, Arthur Mizener, in 'F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Poet of
Borrowed Time' (1946), finds a split within Gatsby, but in his
view the division is not primarily between the romantic Gatsby
and the responsible Nick, but between East and West: the East
represents urban sophistication and corruption; and the West,
rural simplicity and virtue. Seen in this way, the novel becomes 'a
kind of tragic pastoral' - pastoral being that literary form which
celebrates an idealized version of rural life and, in European
culture, goes back to the idylls of the ancient Greek poet
Theocritus (c. 300-C.260 BC), continues into the eighteenth
century, and still has some residual life in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Thus Mizener places Gatsby in a distin-
guished lineage and provides an interpretation which will be the
subject of future debate.
The most influential interpretation of the novel in the 1950s,
however, would be that it was about 'the American Dream'. The
first important expression of this view came in Lionel Trilling's
The Liberal Imagination (1951), in an essay which claimed that
'Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to
stand for America itself. The idea that Gatsby stands for America
is further developed in Edwin S. Fussell's essay 'Fitzgerald's Brave
New World' (1952), where Gatsby is 'a very representative
American' who is '[d]riven by forces that compel him towards the
realization of romantic wonder' but is 'destroyed by the materials
which the American experience offers as objects of passion'. But
it was Marius Bewley's 'Scott Fitzgerald's criticism of America'
81
(1954) which offered the most developed 'American Dream' inter-

pretation of the novel: 'Gatsby, the "mythic" embodiment of the
American dream, is shown to us in all his immature romanticism
. . . And yet the very grounding of [his] deficiencies is [his] good-
ness and faith in life, his compelling desire to realize all the possi-
bilities of existence.' In 'The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald'
(1954), however, John W. Bicknell takes a much more demeaning
view of Gatsby and, by implication, of modern America; he sees
Gatsby's dreams as 'essentially infantile' and his death as pathetic,
not tragic: 'he is a victim, not a hero.'
The 'American Dream' interpretations of Gatsby, though pow-
erful and persuasive in many ways, risked losing sight of the
energy of Fitzgerald's novel; in the attempt to establish its status
as serious literature, they were in danger of turning it into a
sombre and moralistic work. R. W. Stallman's 'Gatsby and the
hole in time' (1955) challenged this perspective and is possibly
the liveliest and most observant essay on the novel to emerge in
the 1950s. Stallman accepts that Gatsby is about 'the American
dream' but argues that the novel is transformed into greatness by
its 'intricately patterned idea . . . of a myth-hero . . . a modern
Icarus . . . who . . . belongs not exclusively to one epoch of
American civilization but rather to all history inasmuch as all
history repeats in cycle form what Gatsby represents - America
itself. In contrast to critics such as Troy who saw Nick as an
exemplar of moral growth, Stallman attacks him as 'a prig with
holier-than-thou airs'; against Mizener's view of the novel as 'a
tragic pastoral' which sets a good rural West against a corrupt
urban East, Stallman argues that this division, like all the others
in Gatsby, breaks down on closer attention: 'Nothing in the novel
is not confused . . . Everyone's identity overlaps another's.' As
well as being of great interest in its own right, Stallman's essay
anticipates later interpretations of Gatsby which focus on its con-
tradictions and ambiguities.
In 1957 the first book-length critical study of Fitzgerald
appeared: The Fictional Technique of F. Scott Fitzgerald by James
E. Miller Jr., which, among much else, carefully analysed two of
the key narrative devices in Gatsby which we discussed in
Chapter 2: the modified first-person narrator and the rearrange-
82
ment of chronological order. Miller offers a helpful diagram of

this rearrangement:
Allowing X to stand for the straight chronological account of

the summer of 1922, and A, B, C, D and E to represent the
significant events of Gatsby's past, the nine chapters of The
Great Gatsby may be charted: X, X, X, XCX, X, XBXCX, X,
XCXDX, XEXAX (Miller (1964), p. 114).
This remains a helpful chart which can be checked against the

text of the novel and used as a stimulus to consider the possible
effects of the chronological rearrangement in relation both to
specific sections and to the novel as a whole.
Miller's book completed the process, which had begun in the
mid-1940s, of establishing Gatsby's status as a work of consider-
able thematic and technical interest. This meant that critics in the
1960s could start to look more closely at specific aspects of it -
as J. S. Westbrook did in 'Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby'
(1960-1). Westbrook affirms that the primary subject of the
novel is 'the growth of an awareness' - Nick Carraway's - and
that the narrative offers an account of Nick's initiation into the
difficulties of seeing in a world which has become estranged from
nature and offers only technological and commercial parodies of
the natural. In this perspective it is Nick - rather than Gatsby -
who becomes an image of America passing from youth into
middle age and, more generally, an image of a phase of human
life. Victor A. Doyno's 'Patterns in The Great Gatsby (1966)
focused on another aspect of the novel, the parallels and con-
trasts set up by its formal structure and rhetorical devices - for
example, 'the repetition of dialogue, gesture, and detail', such as
Gatsby's 'reaching' gesture which occurs at the end of Chapter 1
(p. 27) when he stretches out his arms towards the green light at
the end of Daisy's dock, and in Chapter 8 (p. 159) when, leaving
Louisville after his brief and lonely post-war return to the city,
he stretches out his hand as if to grasp an airy memento of the
place that Daisy irradiated.
Essays like those of Doyno and Westbrook demonstrated that
Gatsby could sustain and reward close critical scrutiny but they
83
tended to disconnect Fitzgerald's novel from the intense political

and social debates of the 1960s. In the 1970s, however, as the fall-
out from the 1960s began to be measured, attention began to
turn again to the broader implications of Gatsby for questions of
American national identity, and the 'American Dream' aspect of
the novel started to be freshly explored, though in two contra-
dictory directions, one of which led towards myth, the other
towards history. Milton R. Stern's The Golden Moment: The
Novels ofF Scott Fitzgerald (1970) affirms that Gatsby 'sums up
our American desire to believe in a release from history', to
believe in a redemption and realization that has already hap-
pened at that founding moment evoked at the end of the novel.
That moment is not primarily historical, however: it is 'sign and
metaphor for human youth itself. In this perspective, 'America
is the golden moment in the history of the human race'; and
Gatsby's life re-enacts 'that instant of history . . . in modern
dress and in all its complex modifications'. Here Stern could be
charged with perpetrating the kind of mystification in which,
according to John F. Callahan's The Illusions of a Nation: Myth
and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1972), Nick
Carraway is engaged in the famous concluding passage of
Gatsby: putting 'a historical event in a metaphysical category.'
Callahan argues that this may mean excluding uncomfortable
aspects of history: 'Carraway forgets or does not regard as
central the fact that this republic owed its life as much to its insti-
tution of slavery and its colonial policy (really, a policy of exter-
mination) toward the [Native Americans] as it did to the courage
and democratic institutions of its citizens.'
The elimination of Native Americans from Nick's vision of
the founding moment of the USA links up with the more general
issue explored in Peter Gregg Slater's 'Ethnicity in The Great
Gatsby' (1973). Ethnic questions had not been wholly absent
from Fitzgerald criticism; the matter of Fitzgerald's representa-
tion of Jews had been raised back in 1947 by Milton Hindus's
'F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism', which argued
that 'something important had been omitted' in all the praise for
Gatsby - 'that viewed in a certain light the novel reads very much
like an anti-Semitic document'. Discussion had been revived by
84
William Goldhurst's 'Literary Anti-Semitism in the 20V (1962)

and his F Scott Fitzgerald and his contemporaries (1963) and con-
tinued through the 1960s, in, for example, Josephine Kopf's
'Meyer Wolfshiem and Robert Cohen: A study of Jewish type
and stereotype' (1969). With regard to Fitzgerald's representa-
tion of African Americans, Keith Forrey's 'Negroes in the
Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald' (1967) had charged that '[d]arker
skinned individuals, when they do appear in Fitzgerald's fiction,
are generally relegated to clownish and inferior roles' and that
'[r]ich Negroes are almost by definition ludicrous' - to illustrate
this latter point, he quotes Nick's description in Chapter 3 of
Gatsby of the African Americans in the limousine. Slater,
however, argues that Gatsby not only targets specific ethnic
groups but also declares a much wider exclusion zone in its
representation of Nick's 'ethnocentric interpretation of the
American Dream' which casts out 'a whole section of the nation,
the East, as well as those with intense ethnicity of a different sort
than his own [Old American type]'.
As well as being ethnocentric, Nick's version of the American
Dream, and perhaps Fitzgerald's, could be indicted with being
androcentric, male-centred - it was 'man* (my italics) who 'must
have held his breath' at his first sight of the New World. While
writing Gatsby, Fitzgerald himself had said that the novel had no
important women characters and after its publication he sug-
gested that its poor sales might be due to the aversion of female
readers to its emotionally passive women figures. In the rapid
development of feminism and feminist literary criticism in the
1970s, Gatsby's representation of women came under closer
scrutiny. For example, in '"Only her hairdresser . . .": another
look at Daisy Buchanan', Joan S. Korenman homed in on what
might seem a relatively small matter - the inconsistency in the
text of Gatsby whereby Daisy's hair sometimes seems to be
blonde and sometimes dark. Korenman suggests that the incon-
sistency partly 'reflects a fundamental duality in Daisy herself,
her simultaneous embodiment of traits associated with the fair
and the dark women of romantic literature . . . [she] is both cool
innocent princess and sensuous femme fatale\ Korenman is pri-
marily concerned with Daisy as a cultural signifier, but Leland
85
Person, Jr., in ' "Herstory" and Daisy Buchanan' (1978) uses the
text to try to see Daisy as a human being with 'her own complex
story, her own desires and needs'. Daisy, Person suggests, is
'more victim than victimizer' and she is 'victimized by a male ten-
dency to project a self-satisfying, yet ultimately dehumanizing,
image on woman'. In Fitzgerald's new women: harbingers of
change (1988), Sarah Beebe Fryer similarly contends that Daisy
is 'a victim of a complex network of needs and desires' who
'deserves more pity than blame' and whose 'confusion over her
relationships with the two principal men in her life' is not simply
a personal weakness but 'reflects the gender confusion that was
rampant during Fitzgerald's era'.
That gender confusion may also relate to Nick's sexuality. The
sense that there were homoerotic subtexts in Gatsby goes back at
least to Lionel Trilling, who in his Liberal Imagination essay had
called Jordan Baker 'vaguely homosexual'. Seventeen years later,
the issue resurfaced, not in academic literary criticism, but in the
novel Getting Straight (1967) by Ken Kolb (born 1926) and in the
1970 film based on the book. But the essay that put the matter on
the critical map was the disarmingly entitled 'Another reading of
The Great Gatsby' (1979) by Keath Fraser. With close attention
to textual detail and implication, Fraser suggests that there are
homoerotic undertones in the scene between Nick and Chester
McKee, Nick's fascination with Tom's masculine body and the
contrasts the novel establishes between Tom and Gatsby, and
Tom and Wilson. Fraser argues for an acknowledgement of 'the
full play of sexuality' in this erotically anarchic novel of 'potency
and impotency, of jealous sex and Platonic love'.
In Gatsby studies, Fraser's essay was the climax of a pioneer-
ing decade, the 1970s, which had broached the previously taboo
topics of the novel's ethnic, gender and sexual representations
and exclusions. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were, among much
interesting work, four studies which, from the vantage point of
the early twenty-first century, especially stand out for their orig-
inality, continued relevance, and scope for further development.
The landmark critique of the 1980s was Richard Godden's 'The
Great Gatsby. Glamour on the Turn' (1982) which sees Gatsby
as functioning like a Brechtian actor to break the audience's
86
comforting illusions and recall it to material reality - most

notably when he says that Daisy's voice is 'full of money'. For
Gatsby, 'Daisy's glamour is glamour on the turn, and he would
have Nick know it, but Nick will not be distracted from
his simple identifications with "love" . . . Gatsby loves Daisy
because she is his point of access to a dominant class. Marriage
would allow him to harden his liquid assets'. Valuable though
Godden's demystifying approach is, however, it did not anticipate
the way in which, as the 1980s proceeded, money would shake off
its shame, assume its own glamour, and cast the alibi of love aside.
The glamour of money in the 1980s would be bound up, in
complex ways, with the development of postmodernist theory,
but although Gatsby could be seen to anticipate key elements of
postmodernism, there have been surprisingly few postmodernist
readings of the novel. A scintillating exception can, however, be
found in Patty White's Gatsby's Party: The System and the List in
Contemporary Narrative (1992). White sees Gatsby, created from
a concept and inhabiting the hyperspace of West Egg, as an
example of what the postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard
(born 1929) calls a 'simulacrum', a copy with no original; Nick,
like an anthropologist, 'approaches Gatsby as if he were an alien
culture, codifying his relationships, recording the reports of
informants, tracing and translating his creation myths'. The
image of an anthropologist approaching an alien culture could
also apply to Ronald Berman's approach to Gatsby - and to
Gatsby. As he points out in 'The Great Gatsby and the twenties'
(2002), the novel 'was written before most of its readers were
born' and 'inhabits a different world'. It is that world which
Berman seeks to retrieve and reconstruct in two fascinating
books: The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (1994), which sets
the novel in the context of the popular culture of the period, and
The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas (1997), which
sets the novel in the context of contemporary philosophical and
intellectual debates. Berman's work effectively invalidates the
opposition employed by the New York Times 1940 obituary of
Fitzgerald when it claimed that Gatsby 'caught superbly the spirit
of a decade' but was 'not a book for the ages'. It is rather that
Gatsby captures superbly the spirit of a decade and, partly
87
because of that, is also a book for the ages: its durability is

demonstrated by its capacity to go on generating the kind of crit-
icism we have considered in this section and by the sales it now
enjoys. As the next section will show, however, its commercial
success was not always so assured.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Gatsby was published by Scribner's in New York on 10 April 1925

with a print run of 20,870. The book cost $2.00 and had a superb
dust jacket by Francis Cugat which showed a woman's vast eyes
and lips suspended in a darkening blue sky above a brightly lit
amusement park which is tiny by comparison. The blurb sug-
gested both the richness of the novel and the difficulty of defini-
tion it presented, calling it glamorous, ironical, compassionate,
lyrical, brutal, magical and living. This difficulty of defining
Gatsby may have contributed to what Maxwell Perkins, in a wire
to Fitzgerald of 20 April 1925, called its 'doubtful' commercial
fate; the sales crept up comparatively slowly, from 12,000 in early
May to 16,000 in early July, but they had still not quite reached
20,000 by October. Fitzgerald was entitled to a 15 per cent
royalty on each copy sold, and the first printing earned enough -
$6,261 - to cancel his debt of $6,000 to Scribner's, but with only
$261 left over. There was a second printing of 3,000 copies in
August 1925; but some of these were still unsold on Fitzgerald's
death in 1940. A total printing of 23,870 was less than half of the
49,075 copies of This Side of Paradise which had been printed by
the end of 1921, or the 50,000 copies of The Beautiful and
Damned run off in 1922.
William Collins, the British publishers of Fitzgerald's two
earlier novels, had a first-refusal option on Gatsby but turned it
down because they felt the book would be too alien for an
English audience. Chatto and Windus brought it out in 1926 in
a print run of 1,616 copies. The book cost 7s 6d (37.5p) and sold
1,100 copies in 1926; in 1927, the price was reduced to 2s 6d
(12.5p) or 2s (lOp) and 350 more copies found purchasers.
According to these figures, there should have been 166 copies
remaining from the original print run; some of these would have
88
been review copies, but it is unclear what happened to all of

them. The total royalties amounted to £32.15s.2d (£32.76). The
British fiction magazine Argosy published a complete version of
Gatsby in its August 1937 issue, but another edition in book form
did not appear in the UK until 1948.
The first French translation of the novel, Gatsby le magnifique,
also came out in 1926 in the 'Collection europeene' of the Paris
publishing house of Kra, at a price of 13 francs 50, or 20 francs
for an edition on vellum paper. Fitzgerald himself thought the
translation, by Victor Llona, sounded 'wonderful', but his
knowledge of French was poor, and Andre le Vot, a very per-
ceptive Fitzgerald critic and biographer, has pointed out many
errors in Llona's rendition. His translation continued to be used,
however, in subsequent French editions from Sagittaire in 1946,
Le Club Frangais du Livre in 1952 and 1959, Grasset in 1959 and
Livre de Poche in 1962. A new French translation by Jacques
Tournier appeared in 1976.
The French translation was followed by translations into
Norwegian in 1927 and into German in 1932. In the USA, a
Modern Library edition of Gatsby came out in 1934, the year in
which Tender is the Night was published; it was priced at 95 cents
and had an introduction by Fitzgerald. Any hope that this might
revive the commercial and critical fortunes of the book did not
last long, however: it sold poorly and was soon struck off the
Modern Library list. A new edition did not appear again until
after Fitzgerald's death, when Scribner's brought out a volume
edited by Edmund Wilson which contained his version of The
Last Tycoon (Wilson's title for the unfinished novel on which
Fitzgerald had been working when he died), Gatsby, and five
short stories, one of which belongs to the Gatsby group -
'Absolution'. Precise figures do not seem to be available for the
first print run of Wilson's volume, but 3,000 copies has been pro-
posed as a probable total. The volume came out on 27 October
1941 at a price of $2.75. It was reprinted before the end of the
year and then again in 1945,1947 and 1948; the sixth printing, in
1951, left out the short stories, but retained Gatsby. Meanwhile,
in 1942, Scribner's had brought out a small reprint of Gatsby in
an individual volume.
89
The year of 1945 was a bumper one for editions of Gatsby. As

well as appearing in a volume with The Last Tycoon and the five
short stories, it featured, along with Tender and nine short
stories, in two impressions of a Viking Portable Fitzgerald edited
by the well-known writer and critic Dorothy Parker (1893-1967).
It also came out singly as a Bantam paperback costing 25 cents
and in an Armed Services edition of 155,000 copies that were
given away to military personnel for free. The following year, the
volume Great American Short Novels included Gatsby, New
Directions brought out Gatsby in the New Classic series with an
introduction by Lionel Trilling, and the Bantam paperback went
through two reprints. In 1949, a third and fourth impression of
the Portable Fitzgerald appeared and Grosset and Duncan pub-
lished an edition of the novel that would tie in with the Alan
Ladd movie version released in that year.
The later 1940s also saw further translations of the novel, into
Swedish (1946), Dutch and Danish (1948) and Italian (1950);
these suggested that the novel was developing a significant inter-
national presence outside the USA and UK. In the UK, Grey
Walls Press brought out a small hardback edition which had rea-
sonable sales and went through two printings. Penguin published
the first paperback edition in 1950 and it remains in print today.
The first volume of the Bodley Head hardback edition of
Fitzgerald came out in 1958 and consisted of Gatsby and The
Last Tycoon, with an introduction by the well-known if then
rather unfashionable novelist and playwright I B. Priestley
(1894-1984). Cambridge University Press brought out Gatsby as
the first volume of its Fitzgerald critical edition in 1991 and the
galley proof version of the novel, under the title of Trimalchio,
in 2000.
In the USA itself, the sales of Gatsby continued to grow as the
twentieth century advanced, stimulated by the increasingly wide-
spread inclusion of the novel on academic courses, by film and
TV adaptations, by the expanding volume of critical commen-
tary, and by the continuing popular interest in the lives of Scott
and Zelda. Scribner's sales of a book which had lain unsold in
their warehouse at the time of Fitzgerald's death reached 12,000
in 1957, 36,000 in 1958 and over 100,000 annually by 1960. By
90
the end of the 1960s, annual sales were around 300,000 a year
and they have stayed at this level. Fitzgerald once remarked, con-
trasting himself with Ernest Hemingway, that he spoke with the
authority of failure; commercially as well as critically, Gatsby
now speaks with the authority of success.
1. This chapter has explored a range of interpretations of

Gatsby - for example, as a book about the American Dream,
about the growth of an awareness, about American history
and society, about gender, and about money. Which of these
interpretations do you find most convincing, and why?
2. Gatsby is much more accessible than a Modernist text such as
James Joyce's Ulysses, but critical appreciation of Fitzgerald's
novel nonetheless took a long time to develop, not really
getting under way until the 1950s. What do you think were the
reasons for this delay?
3. Why do you think the sales of Gatsby took off after the
Second World War and why does the novel continue to sell
well today? How would you market it to ensure continued
sales in the twenty-first century?
91
CHAPTER 5
ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION AND

INFLUENCE
Gatsby was quick to move onto stage and screen, with both a
theatre production and a silent film in 1926, the year after the
book's publication. There appears to be no published script of
the play, and the print of the silent film seems to have been lost,
but it is possible, from surviving documentation, to gain some
idea of what they were like. There have been two more film adap-
tations: a black-and-white version starring Alan Ladd in 1949,
and a colour version starring Robert Redford in 1974. On US TV,
there was a one-hour NBC adaptation with Robert Montgomery
as Gatsby in the series Robert Montgomery Presents on 9 May
1955 and a 90-minute CBS production with Robert Ryan as
Gatsby in the Playhouse 90 series on 26 June 1958. British TV
showed a 90-minute version with Toby Stephens as Gatsby on
BBC1 on 29 March 2000. Little information about the US TV
versions appears to be available; we shall focus on each of the
other adaptations in date order, and then move on to consider the
Gatsby opera which premiered late in 1999.
THE PLAY (1926)
The script of the stage version of Gatsby was written by Owen

Davis (1874-1956), a dramatist whose play Icebound (1923), a
drama about a repressive, 'icebound' family, had won the Pulitzer
Prize for drama three years earlier. In his adaptation, Davis makes
several significant changes. The most striking is his rearrange-
ment of the chronological structure by inserting a prologue set in
93
the Fays' sitting room in Louisville in 1917 and introducing three

new characters. Mrs Fay, Daisy's mother, is concerned about the
young lieutenant with whom her daughter has sneaked out, and
she talks about him first with Sally, her African-American maid,
and then with Major Carson, who is able to provide her with a
complete biography of Gatsby, supplied by army intelligence,
from his boyhood up to Dan Cody's death. Mrs Fay whets the
audience's appetite for Gatsby by calling him absurd, dangerous,
romantic as a gipsy, handsome, arrogant, ambitious and over-
weeningly proud; after she and Major Carson go out, Gatsby and
Daisy come in. Gatsby talks about his love for her and his
boyhood dreams, and takes a rhapsodic leave; Tom Buchanan
then enters - in the play he, like Gatsby, is in the army, and he has
come from New York especially to see Daisy before he departs for
France - and Daisy receives him flirtatiously.
In this prologue, as in other parts of the play, Davis turns seg-
ments of Nick's narrative of Gatsby's life into direct statements
by Gatsby. He also updates the play from 1922 to 1925; displaces
Nick into little more than a plot device for reuniting Gatsby and
Daisy; replaces Nick's nameless Finn with an English-speaking
and more loquacious Mrs Morton whose conversations with
Nick help with the exposition of the action; fuses Gatsby's
parties into one and pushes them mostly offstage, setting Act 1
in Nick's bungalow and Acts 2 and 3 in Gatsby's library; turns
Gatsby into a man who, as the play proceeds, faces financial ruin
and imminent arrest; cuts out the valley of ashes and the bill-
board; and makes Wilson not a mechanic but a chauffeur who
works first for Tom and then for Gatsby and who, in the end,
shoots both Gatsby and Myrtle. These changes seemed to add up
to an effective play, however.
The director of the Broadway production was George Cukor
(1899-1983), who would later turn from the stage to the screen
and direct a range of well-received films, including some notable
movie adaptations of novels and plays - for instance, Little
Women (1933), David CopperfieId (1934), The Philadelphia Story
(1940, based on Philip Barry's 1939 play of the same title)
and My Fair Lady (1964, based on George Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion, 1916). Cukor knew Fitzgerald's fiction and liked
94
ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION AND INFLUENCE
Davis's script; only minor changes were made in production.

Gatsby was played by James Rennie (1890-1965), a handsome
Canadian with a good voice, and Daisy by the distinguished
actress Florence Eldridge (1901-88). Jordan Baker was played by
Catherine Willard (c. 1900-54), whose performance Cukor
recalled as 'marvellous': stylish, 'rather deadpan' and 'cool';
Eliot Cabot, a scion of the elite Boston family who was, accord-
ing to Cukor, 'very good looking, slightly brutal looking',
took on the role of Tom Buchanan; and Charles Dickson
(c. 1860-1927), a former comedy star, was Wolfshiem - Cukor
recalled him as a very subtle performer who seemed to be rather
than act the part.
The stage version of Gatsby opened at the Ambassador Theatre
on Broadway on Tuesday 2 February 1926, less than nine months
after the publication of the novel. Fitzgerald and Zelda were in
France and never saw the production but Fitzgerald's agent,
Harold Ober, sent him a telegram on 4 February saying that the
audience were 'enthusiastic' about an adaptation which 'carried
[the] glamour of the story'. The critics also enthused; an unidenti-
fied clipping in Fitzgerald's scrapbook has a round-up of
favourable review comments on the play: J. Brooks Atkinson of
The New York Times felt, like Ober, that the 'dramatic version
retains most of the novel's peculiar glamour'; Alexander Woollcott
in The New York World asserted that the 'fine, vivid novel . . . is
carried over on to the stage with almost the minimum of spilling',
and Percy Hammond in The New York Herald Tribune praised
Davis's 'deft shifting of the book's essential episodes' as 'a marvel
of rearrangement and dovetailing', found that the 'speech of char-
acters is retained in much of its clear-cut veracity' and affirmed that
the dramatization was 'so able that it managed to emphasize the
subtle qualities of Mr. Fitzgerald's study of a golden vagabond'.
The play ran for 112 performances and closed only when
James Rennie had to go to England to be with his wife who was
attending on her ailing mother. When he returned to the USA,
he took up the role of Gatsby again and the production, with
some changes in other cast members, went on a successful tour
that included performances in Chicago from 1 August to
2 October. Fitzgerald wrote to Ober that as the play had been
95
'something of a suces d'estirne [a success in terms of critical

appreciation] and put in my pocket seventeen or eighteen thou-
sand . . . I should be, and am, well contented'. The film would
earn him much more: he sold the rights for $45,000.
THE FIRST FILM (1926)
The silent film version of The Great Gatsby was produced by

Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount Pictures and directed by
Herbert Brenon (1880-1958), who had a high reputation in the
1920s and who had just completed his still-remembered movie
version of Beau Geste (1926, based on the best-selling romantic
adventure story of the same title published in 1924, by P. C.
Wren (1885-1941)). Interestingly, two women had a hand in
writing the movie: the treatment was by Elizabeth Meehan
(1894-1967) and the screenplay was by Becky Gardiner
(1806-?). The film apparently stayed fairly close to the plot of
the play, though with some variations; for example, one shot in
Meehan's treatment was a flashback to Daisy in Louisville as a
young married woman and mother holding her child tightly and
feeling apprehensive about Gatsby's return. Although Gatsby
reawakens her love when he comes back, she turns against him
in the Plaza Hotel scene after Tom has exposed him as a boot-
legger - the implication seems to be that she rejects him because
he is a criminal rather than because, as in the novel, he makes the
impossible demand that she should say she never loved Tom.
After Myrtle's death, Daisy wants to confess that she killed her,
but does not do so; when Nick phones to tell her and Tom of
Gatsby's murder, there is no reply and the Buchanans leave New
York unaware of it. They become reconciled and the film ends
with an affirmation of family values: the final shot shows, in the
words of one reviewer, 'Daisy and her husband Tom and their
tot draped beautifully on the porch of their happy home'.
The part of Gatsby was played by Warner Baxter (1891-1951),
a popular figure in silent melodramas who would later success-
fully move into talking pictures and become best known for his
role as the theatre director in 42nd Street (1933). Lois Wilson
(1895-1988), previously typecast, according to one reviewer of
96
the film, as 'the demure heroine of some scores of placid screen

romances', took on the very different role of Daisy. Neil
Hamilton (1899-1984) played Nick Carraway, Hale Hamilton
(1883-1942) was Tom Buchanan, Carmelita Geraghty (1901-66)
played Jordan Baker, Georgia Hale (1903-85) tackled Myrtle,
and Wilson was played by William Powell (1892-1984), who
would later become best known as Nick Charles, the private eye
in the Thin Man film series (1934-47), the first of which was
adapted from the novel of the same title published in 1932 by
Dashiell Hammett (1894—1961). George Nash (1873-1944)
played Charles Wolf, the film's version of Wolfshiem, and there
were two extra characters, whose functions remain obscure -
'Lord Digby', played by Eric Blore (1887-1959) and 'Bert',
played by 'Gunboat' Smith (1887-1974).
The eight-reel, 80-minute, 7,296-foot-long silent film of Gatsby
opened at the Rivoli Theatre in New York in 1926. The review
clippings pasted in Fitzgerald's scrapbook, none of which indi-
cates a source, reveal a mixed response. 'Mae Tinee' gave it a rave:
'a picture that grips every step of the way . . . Its people are real
and their actions and reactions wholly comprehensible . . . The
entire cast . . . is irreproachable.' An anonymous review called it
'mighty good' and said that the 'picturization' had 'changed the
novel a bit but; not enough to hurt' and had left 'plenty of the
Fitzgerald touch'; it generally praised the cast but found Lois
Wilson much better than Warner Baxter. Eileen Creelman,
however, applauded the 'understanding and courage' of Baxter's
performance and particularly referred to the scene in which
Gatsby displays his shirts; but she did acknowledge that Lois
Wilson stole the show and caused 'a sensation' in the audience,
especially in a scene 'with a bobbed-haired Lois quite hopelessly
drunk in a bathtub' - presumably the film's version of the scene
in Chapter 4 of the novel, in Jordan Baker's narrative, when the
drunken Daisy is put in a cold bath (pp. 82-3). Creelman did crit-
icize some aspects of the film, however; for example, she felt that
it sometimes followed the novel almost too closely and that the
intertitles could seem 'unnecessary and annoying'. The complaint
about the titles was echoed more eloquently by John S. Cohen Jr,
who found these 'wordy interruptions', with their 'generally
97
bad English, inappropriate wording, length, and cheap fictional

rubber stamping', stopped the visual flow, making the film 'about
as smooth pictorially as sandpaper'. He did concede, however,
that Gatsby had one claim to uniqueness: it 'boasts of the longest
bit of reading matter in the history of the cinema' with an inter-
title that 'stretches from the top of the screen to the bottom'.
Cohen's negative response seems to have been shared by the
cinema public, if not necessarily for the same reasons. The film
lasted only two weeks at the Rivoli Theatre and had no success
elsewhere. It did, however, have one significant admirer: the nov-
elist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-70), who knew
and deeply appreciated Fitzgerald's fiction. O'Hara later recalled
his 'exultation at the end of the picture when I saw that
Paramount had done an honest job, true to the book, true to
what Fitzgerald had intended'. After talking pictures arrived,
O'Hara hoped to script a sound remake of the silent film; the
actor Clark Gable (1901-60) had discussed the possibility of
another film of Gatsby with Fitzgerald himself and encouraged
O'Hara in his attempt to buy the screen rights of the novel. But
nothing came of this; 23 years elapsed between the silent Gatsby
and the first sound version, and by then Fitzgerald was dead.
THE SECOND FILM (1949)
The second film of The Great Gatsby is probably best known as

'the Alan Ladd version', after its leading man. Ladd (1913-64)
was especially famous at this time for his 'tough guy' roles - or,
more precisely, with roles that combined toughness of words and
actions with a physical delicacy and frailty that suggested vulner-
ability. He had established his image by acting with Veronica Lake
(1919-73) in two films of 1942 - This Gun for Hire (based on the
novel This Gun for Sale (1936), by Graham Greene (1904^91))
and The Glass Key (1942) - and consolidated it in The Blue Dahlia
(1946), where he portrayed a heroic ex-bomber pilot suspected of
killing his wife. In Gatsby, however, he was paired with the char-
acter actress Betty Field (1918-73). Among other members of the
cast were Barry Sullivan (1912-94) as Tom; Macdonald Carey
(1913-94) as Nick; Ruth Hussey (1911-2005) as Jordan; Shelley
98
Winters (1920-2006) as Myrtle; Howard da Silva (1909-86) as

Wilson; Elisha Cook Jr. (1903-95) as Klipspringer; Ed Begley
(1901-70) as Myron Lupus (this film's version of Wolfshiem);
Henry Hull (1890-1977) as Dan Cody, Carole Mathews (born
1920) as Ella Cody, Nicholas Joy (1894-1964) as the Owl Man
and Tito Vuolo (1893-1962) as Mavromichaelis.
As this cast list suggests, the 1949 film tried to get in more of
the novel than the Owen Davis stage play or the 1926 silent
movie: Dan Cody, Ella, Michaelis and Klipspringer are all
included. The writers were the British screenwriter and novelist
Cyril Hume (1900-66) and the American screenwriter who
would later script ten James Bond movies, Richard Maibaum
(1909-91), and in some ways they do stay closer to the novel,
especially in their use of flashbacks to tell the backstory of
Gatsby's life - this is where Dan Cody comes in - and in their
deployment of the eyes of Dr T. J. Eckleburg at the start and end
of the film. But there were also considerable changes. As
Fitzgerald's novel, in Maibaum's words, 'dealt with unpunished
adultery, unpunished manslaughter, and an unpunished moral
accessory to a murder', it was necessary, in order to comply with
the Hollywood production code, to make the film more moralis-
tic, so that even the apparently less moral or amoral characters -
Jordan Baker, Gatsby himself - show contrition. Most strikingly,
in a motif familiar from 1930s gangster movies such as Angels
with Dirty Faces (1938), the importance of not setting a bad
example to boys who might be impressed by the glamour of
gangsterism is stressed when Gatsby, without realizing Wilson is
about to kill him, decides to turn himself in to the police and says
to Nick: 'What's going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys
like me don't tell them we're wrong?' In a paradox also familiar
from those 1930s movies, however, the importance of setting a
good example is contradicted by the visual excitement of the
gangster in action, an excitement which the film stresses with
added scenes that are not from the novel, such as the opening
montage of hijackings and shoot-outs in which Gatsby is seen to
play a key role. The closeness of the film to the movies of the
previous decade is emphasized not only by generic features but
also by the updating of the action from 1922 to 1928.
99
The director of the film was Elliott Nugent (1896-1980), a

stage actor, producer and dramatist whose excursions into direc-
tion were relatively infrequent and who had been most success-
ful directing comic movies, particularly the comedy thriller The
Cat and the Canary (1939), starring Bob Hope (1903-2003).
Nugent thought Gatsby 'Fitzgerald's best novel and perhaps the
best of all American novels' and the prospect of shooting it made
him so anxious that, the day before filming was scheduled to
start, he went to the tenth-floor fire escape of the Roosevelt Hotel
on Hollywood Boulevard with the intention of leaping off. The
moment passed, however, and he went ahead with thefilmand
finished it. Perhaps his close encounter with mortal despair fed
fruitfully into the picture, which has been regarded as his best.
Nugent felt that his Gatsby got good reviews and this is borne
out to some extent by the critical response. For example, Jesse
Zunser in Cue (16 July 1949) felt that the picture caught much of
the atmosphere of the 1920s, even if it failed to develop its cen-
tral characters, espeaially Gatsby. On the other hand, Bosley
Crowther in The New York Times (14 July 1949) charged that it
'barely reflected' the Prohibition epoch and suggested that
Paramount's primary motive for making the film was to provide
'a standard conveyance for the image of its charm boy, Alan
Ladd' - a comment that does not quite take into account the fact
that Gatsby himself could be seen, in part, as a 'charm boy' and
that in that respect Ladd might be seen as the right choice for the
role. In the New Yorker (23 July 1949), John McCarten also went
for Ladd, claiming that his acting was as stiff as that of a pall-
bearer, and deprecating the 'jittery carryings-on' of Betty Field's
Daisy - although again it might be said that in the novel stiffness
is one of Gatsby's characteristics and jitteriness is one of Daisy's.
Clearly, however, reviewers were not overwhelmed by the film
and there was scope for another one. This would not, however,
appear for another quarter of a century.
THE THIRD FILM (1974)
If the second Gatsby film had been seen as a vehicle for its male
lead, The Great Gatsby film of 1974 could be seen as a vehicle for
100
both its leading co-stars, Robert Redford (born 1937) and Mia
Farrow (born 1945), both of whom were already famous when
the film was made. The casting of each of them, however, raised
doubts in some quarters. One of the shrewdest remarks on
Redford came from Howard da Silva, who had played Wilson in
the 1949 Gatsby and who, in an interesting piece of casting, was
given the role of Wolfshiem in this one; da Silva greatly admired
Redford's acting abilities but felt that 'he could never play a man
from the opposite side of the tracks'. In contrast, Ladd, who, in
actual life, really was from the other side of the tracks, 'could and
did'. A crucial criticism of Mia Farrow's Daisy came from
Fitzgerald's daughter, Scottie, who thought Farrow a 'fine
actress' but felt she had been unable to convey the 'intensely
Southern' nature of Daisy's character.
The director was Jack Clayton (1921-95), whose best-known
previous credit was Room at the Top (1958), a taut, effective
adaptation of the 1957 novel of the same title by John Braine
(1922-86) about a poor boy who eventually gets the rich girl only
to realize that he really wants another woman. In a curious col-
laboration, however, the film was scripted by a figure who was
already a bigger directorial name than Clayton: Francis Ford
Coppola (born 1939), whose second Godfather film came out in
the same year as The Great Gatsby. There was some explicit dis-
agreement over which scenes to include - for instance, Clayton
put in the scene at Gatsby's funeral while Coppola had wanted
the film to end at the point where Gatsby's father, in his son's
mansion for the first time, sees the photograph of Daisy and says
'Who's the girl?' The final film was a long one - about 2 hours
and 20 minutes - and would have been even longer but for some
cuts, one of which was certainly unfortunate in that it removed a
key motif of the book: the scenes with an owl-eyed man, played
by Tom Ewell (1905-94), were seen by some early cinema audi-
ences but then removed, and they do not appear to have been
made available yet on DVD.
The 1974 film has a much more straightforward chronological
structure than either the novel or the 1949 movie; there is only
one extended flashback to Gatsby and Daisy's Louisville
romance, and that is visually vague. Sometimes scenes in the
101
novel are altered to questionable effect: for example, the film

eliminates Nick's gaffe on his first visit to a Gatsby party when
he starts talking to a fellow First World War veteran about
Gatsby without realizing that the veteran is Gatsby - an error
that gives Gatsby the opportunity, once he has corrected Nick's
mistake, to confer his smile on him for the first time. In the 1974
film, a minder draws Nick out of the garden and takes him up in
a lift to Gatsby's office, where Redford provides a smile that does
not seem to spring naturally out of the situation and looks like a
low budget toothpaste ad - an ironic impression given that the
film was the most expensive Gatsby to date, costing around $6.5
million, a large sum for a movie at the time.
Thefilmhad a poor critical reception. For instance, The New
York Times (31 March 1974) declared 'They've turned Gatsby
to Goo', while Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic (13
April 1974) found it a 'long, slow, sickening bore'. Penelope
Gilliat in The New Yorker (1974) was less dismissive, calling it a
'stately' film with 'much kindness and beauty' but she also felt
it was 'mistakenly long', with too many repeated or extended
shots and superfluous voice-over commentary which reiterated
points that had already been made visually. As well as com-
plaints of sentimentality and tedium, there was also a sense that
the film failed to engage with the novel's critique of the
American Dream - a critique that could have seemed particu-
larly relevant in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and
Watergate. Although the film was commercially successful, it
seemed to lose too much of the book to be critically satisfying.
Another quarter of a century would elapse, however, before a
further Gatsby film appeared, and this time it would have an
English actor in the lead role.
THE TV FILM (2000)
The 2000 made-for-TV film was jointly produced by Granada

Entertainment in the UK and A and E Cable Network in the US,
and brought together the English actor Toby Stephens (born
1969) and the American actress Mira Sorvino (born 1967) in the
lead roles of Gatsby and Daisy. Paul Rudd (born 1969) played
102
Nick Carraway and Martin Donovan (born 1957) was Tom

Buchanan. The screenplay was by John McLaughlin. Elements
eliminated from the 1974filmare restored here: for example, the
owl-eyed man appears in the library, where he explicitly draws
attention to his resemblance to Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, recurs in a
later party scene, and appears at Gatsby's funeral to deliver the
'son-of-a-bitch' epitaph.
There are also new departures, however. As if to stress that
this narrative will play with time, the beginning of thefilmpro-
vides an almost immediate flash-forward to Gatsby's death; we
see Nick and hear his voice-over delivering a very much short-
ened and edited version of the novel's opening paragraphs and
we then see Gatsby floating on his mattress in his swimming
pool and being shot. The image of the body in, or, in this case,
on the swimming pool recalls the opening of Sunset Boulevard
(1950), directed by Billy Wilder (1906-2002). In contrast to the
graphic violence of the shooting scene in the 1974 The Great
Gatsby, where several bullets puncture Gatsby's mattress and he
sinks into a swirl of his own blood, the 2000filmis more faith-
ful to the novel's image of the laden mattress staying on the
surface. It does, however, add an extra detail, showing Gatsby's
hand opening and letting a pair of cuff buttons fall into the
water and sink to the bottom of the pool. This is a curious
transposition of the motif of cuff buttons which, in the novel,
sets up a sinister link between Wolfshiem's 'finest specimens of
human molars' (p. 78) and the cuff buttons that Nick thinks
Tom may be going to buy when he meets him in Fifth Avenue
near the end of the novel (p. 186); here, it is Daisy who gives
Gatsby the cuff buttons during their Louisville romance and his
relinquishment of them in death symbolizes the end of his
dream. It could be said, however, that the sinister associations
remain; it is, after all, Gatsby's love for Daisy which will prove
lethal to him. Made on a relatively low budget, and much less
widely hyped than the 1974 film, the 2000 version stays closer
to the novel and the changes that it does make seem intelligible
and interesting rather than arbitrary, as they often do in the
Redford/Farrow version.
103
THE OPERA (2000)
On 20 December 1999, 11 days before the start of the new millen-

nium, the world premiere of the opera of The Great Gatsby by John
Harbison (born 1938) was held at the Metropolitan Opera House
in New York. The Met had commissioned the opera to commem-
orate the 25th anniversary of the debut of the conductor James
Levine. Harbison had long been interested in writing an opera
based on Gatsby but had found it difficult to obtain the rights to do
so; he was able to go ahead, however, once the novel came out of
copyright and entered the public domain. Harbison knew the text
of Gatsby well and wrote not only the music, but also his own
libretto, apart from the 1920s-style pop song lyrics which were pro-
vided by Murray Horwitz (born 1949). In writing the libretto,
Harbison recalled, he 'found most of what I required somewhere in
Fitzgerald's novel, coming to the surface when I needed it'.
Harbison's score for the opera draws on traditional classical
music, employing harmony, polyphony and counterpoint, and
on 1920s popular music - foxtrots, two-steps, tangos, rumbas
and torch songs. This corresponds to his sense that 'the charac-
ters in Gatsby live in a world of the sounds of their time - radio
music, dance bands, car horns, fog horns on Long Island sound,
the beat of the popular music of the mid-20s'. The opera was well
received by reviewers, who sometimes praised it in terms that
resemble the ways in which literary critics had praised the novel
(no dates are available for these reviews as they were taken from
a website - see Chapter 6 for details). For example, Richard Dyer
in The Boston Globe echoed those critics who had commended
the intricate patterning of Fitzgerald's Gatsby when he affirmed
that Harbison's score had not only 'immediate appeal' but also 'a
network of internal reference so intricate it will take years of
repeated hearings to understand'. Similarly, Peter G. Davis in the
New York Magazine called Harbison's adaptation 'a cunningly
organized structure of dramatic parallels and musical inter-
connections'. In contrast, Mark Swed, in the Los Angeles Times,
suggested that the opera had, in a sense, simplified Fitzgerald's
novel, but in a way that retained rather than removed its crucial
dynamic elements and brought out the operatic quality that was
104
in the novel already: he felt that Harbison 'has succeeded in cre-

ating a straightforward dramatic narrative, with all the properly
operatic elements of languid love, hot sex, jealousy, murder,
party scenes and a funeral'. For Swed, however, the opera's great-
est achievement was to dramatize 'the subversive nature of the
novel, eroding the forced roaring '20s gaiety and emptiness with
dark currents'. Reviewers singled out various parts of the opera
for praise: Davis homed in on 'Carraway's rhapsodic eulogy over
Gatsby's coffin', calling it 'a gorgeous piece of vocal writing';
Dyer found Gatsby and Daisy's love duet 'glorious'; Joshua
Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle found a 'heart-wrenching
. . . power' in the 'tender lyricism of . . . Daisy's first soliloquy,
Gatsby's final reverie recalling the magic of their first love, and
even Nick's oddly minimalist evocation of a winter train ride
through Wisconsin'; and Heidi Waleson in The Wall Street
Journal called the 'languid duets' between Daisy and Jordan
'masterpieces of vocal loveliness and character painting' and
described how, in the premiere, the 'astonishing mezzo Lorraine
Hunt Lieberson filled the Met with Myrtle's earthy desires. Her
two arias, one in each act, were the hottest moments in the show.
Her rhythmic taunting cry of "Daisy! Daisy!", which makes Tom
slug her and break her nose, is electric'.
It seems that the opera of Gatsby, written and composed by
a figure who has a deep understanding and knowledge of
Fitzgerald's novel and who combines literary and musical talent,
could be the most complete creative adaptation of that novel into
another medium which we have so far seen. Peter Davis felt the
opera has 'definite survival potential' and if it does endure it could
take its place alongside Fitzgerald's Gatsby as Verdi's operas have
taken their place alongside the Shakespeare plays which they com-
plement and sometimes even surpass. In the meantime - that telling
phrase from 'Ain't we got fun' - the opera demonstrates Gatsby's
continuing power to inform, shape and inspire American culture.
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE
As a novel, Gatsby is a hard, perhaps impossible act to follow.

Few people who have tried their hand at creative writing will fail
105
to recognize that, when it comes to fictional prose, Fitzgerald can

cut it - that his style has a grace, a power, a delicate strength, a
resourcefulness of rhythm, image and diction that reaches its
highest pitch of achievement in Gatsby and that is intimidating
for would-be imitators. Hemingway developed a prose technique
that seemed transferable and he has had many self-elected disci-
ples, those who have tried to go and do likewise. Fitzgerald
teaches a different lesson: that each writer should develop their
own, unique style to the fullest. If this lesson is true, the most
fitting response to Gatsby would be to strike out for something
quite different; and American writers have done this. Looking at
the range, energy and variety of current American fiction, we
could say of Fitzgerald's influence on literature what was said of
Sir Christopher Wren's influence on London: if it's his monu-
ment you want, look around you.
But there are more evident traces of Gatsby to be found in
modern American fiction, and George Garrett (1985) points to
some of these:
The signs and portents of Joan Didion, for example, or of

Renata Adler, are rooted in Fitzgerald's acres of ashes in
Gatsby, as are the economic minimalism of Raymond Carver,
the half-stoned nihilism that pervades the stories of Ann
Beattie, the lyrical ambience of the novels and stories of
Richard Yates. Gore Vidal, not deeply sympathetic to
Fitzgerald, is nevertheless clearly admiring of the 'small but
perfect operation' of Gatsby (p. 103).
Further detective work on Gatsby's influence has been under-

taken by Richard Anderson (1985), who points to explicit men-
tions of Gatsby - and/or Gatsby - in Charles Jackson's Lost
Weekend (1944), Lois Battle's Southern Women (1984), J. D.
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1953), Jack Finney's Marions Wall
(1973), Robert B. Parker's A Savage Place (1981), and John
Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). We might also add
here the novel we mentioned in the previous chapter, Ken Kolb's
Getting Straight (1967), in which there is a scene where the pro-
tagonist, Harry, has to attend an oral exam for his Literature MA
106
and reacts with homophobic disgust when one of the examiners

suggests that, as Harry puts it, 'Nick Carraway is queer for Jay
Gatsby' - 'It was like something you'd find written in a public
toilet in a bad neighbourhood' (p. 179). An adapted version of
this scene was to become the hilarious climax of the 1970filmof
the book which starred Elliot Gould.
Gatsb/s presence in British fiction has been less strong and
explicit but there is one novel that is worth mentioning in this
context, both because of its intrinsic quality and because its sim-
ilarities to Gatsby could easily be overlooked. This is a novel in
which there is no Gatsby, and in which the retrospective narra-
tor is looking back from the age of 65 at a decisively traumatic
set of experiences which occurred when he was 12 going on 13;
but, like Nick, those experiences caused him to withdraw from
life. Like Nick, he acts as a pander, if less wittingly, between two
lovers divided by class and financial barriers, during a summer
of intense heat which seems to melt down the proprieties; like
Nick, he is overawed by a powerful male body; like Nick, he is
divided, and finally crushed, between realism and idealism; like
Nick, his birthday coincides with the climax of the events in
which he is involved; and, like Nick, his trauma is deepened by
a lethal gunshot. As well as these similarities, there is phrasing
that would not be out of place in Fitzgerald's novel: 'I was cross-
ing the rainbow bridge from reality to dream' (p. 77); 'I was in
love with the exceptional, and ready to sacrifice all normal hap-
penings to it' (p. 94). The novel in question is The Go-Between
(1953) and its author was the same person who, 28 years earlier,
had dismissed the story of Gatsby as absurd: L. P. Hartley.
Perhaps his dismissal was proportionate to the effect that
Fitzgerald's novel had on him and it may be that elements of it
stayed in his subconscious and fed into the making of his most
accomplished work.
A less extensive but more evident allusion to Gatsby occurs at
the beginning of Graham Swift's novel Waterland (1983):
'And don't forget,' my father would say, as if he expected me

at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide
world, 'whatever you learn about people, however bad they
107
turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them
was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk . . .' (p. 1)
The differences between this paternal advice and the paternal

advice with which Gatsby opens, and the relation of each opening
to the text which follows, each of which seeks to understand
trauma by turning it into a story, are worth pondering.
Doubtless other traces of Gatsby, both explicit and implicit,
can be found in English fiction and it is interesting to keep alert
for them. Most modern British writers, like most modern
American writers, will have read Gatsby and have learned from it
about style and narrative technique, even if it does not show
directly in their work. In the last year of his life, on 20 May 1940,
Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins asking about the fate of
what would become his most famous and enduring novel:
Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the
book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular
reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its
admirers - 1 can maybe pick one - make it a favourite with class
rooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody. But to die, so
completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now
there is little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly
have my stamp - in a small way I was an original.
The modest adverb and adjective - 'slightly' and 'small' - show

the chastened state of the middle-aged man who had once
believed that 'life was something you dominated if you were any
good'. But even in his reduced circumstances he could see that
his work had had its effect on American fiction; he might not
have been able to foresee, however, how large and lasting that
effect on both American fiction and American culture would be.
1. How might you adapt Gatsby for the stage today? What scenes
and characters would you include, what would you leave out,
and what, if anything, might you add?
108
2. If you had to turn Gatsby into a film today, how would you go
about the task and what actors would you choose for the key
roles? If you are familiar with one or more of the existing
Gatsby films, explain how your adaptation would compare
and contrast with these.
3. Gatsby has been made into a successful opera, and it was
adapted for a musical at Yale University in 1956, but how
would you transform it into a popular musical today which
would attract twenty-first-century audiences but preserve the
essential qualities of the novel? What would your key songs
be, what kinds of lyrics/music would they have, and what
kinds of dance routines might you want to include?
109
CHAPTER 6
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
EDITIONS OF THE GREAT GATSBY
Cambridge edition. Bruccoli, M. J. (ed.), The Great Gatsby.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). This critical
edition from the world's leading Fitzgerald scholar is an indis-
pensable text to consult for the reader and student who wish
to explore Gatsby in depth. It includes a chronology of com-
position and publication, an introduction, a definitive text
of the novel, textual and explanatory notes, and appendices
on: the short story 'Absolution'; the title; the original dust
jacket; the relationship between Fitzgerald's fictional geogra-
phy and the real geography of Queens and Nassau County on
Long Island; and the chronological inconsistencies and
difficulties of the novel. A sixth appendix is a manuscript draft
of the Gatsby-Tom confrontation scene, and the seventh is
Fitzgerald's introduction to the 1934 Modern Library reprint.
Everyman edition. The Great Gatsby (London: Everyman's
Library, 1991). Especially valuable for its introduction by
Malcolm Bradbury, a distinguished critic with a special inter-
est in American literature and a practising novelist with a keen
interest both in technique and in the representation of social
reality. The introduction succeeds in being both reader-
friendly and critically sophisticated. Also includes a helpful
bibliography and chronology.
Oxford World's Classics edition. Prigozy, R. (ed.), The Great
Gatsby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). An
111
informative and accessible introduction, a sound bibliography,

an informed chronology of Fitzgerald's life, a map of Long
Island, and helpful notes.
Penguin edition. Introduction and notes by Tanner, T. The
Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 2000). Tanner provides not
so much an introduction as an original essay, but, given that,
the essay is very insightful and wide-ranging - for example,
on the relationship between Gatsby and Trimalchio, the fab-
ulously wealthy, hugely vulgar and wildly extravagant party
giver in the Latin novel Satyricon (CAD 54—68) by Petronius
(active first century AD). Useful notes.
EDITION OF THE GALLEY PROOF VERSION OF

THE GREAT GATSBY
Cambridge edition of Trimalchio. West, J. L. W, III, Trimalchio:

An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby' (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). Like the Cambridge crit-
ical edition of Gatsby itself, this critical edition of the galley
proof version of what finally became The Great Gatsby is an
indispensable text to consult for the reader and critic who
wants to explore Gatsby in depth. By reading this text and
comparing and contrasting it with thefinalpublished version,
it is possible to gain unparalleled insights into the ways in
which a good novel became a masterpiece. Contains a
chronology of composition and publication, an introduction,
the text which West has entitled 'Trimalchio', explanatory
notes, four illustrations (two of them are of the realfigureson
whom Fitzgerald based Tom Buchanan and Jordan Baker),
and appendices on Maxwell Perkins' letters of criticism to
Fitzgerald, on Trimalchio, and on the possibility that the
words 'on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light' may
have been left out of the famous description in Chapter 1 of
Gatsby of the room in which Daisy and Jordan are sitting.
FACSIMILE OF GATSBY MANUSCRIPT
Bruccoli, M. J. (ed.), E Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby': A

Facsimile of the Manuscript (Washington, DC: Microcard
112
Editions Books, 1973). With this facsimile of the manuscript

and the edition of Trimalchio noted above, the student of
Gatsby can trace the genesis of the novel and compare and
contrast specific passages. Tantalizingly, however, one stage of
the process - the typescript which bridged the gap between
manuscript and galley proof - is lost.
CONCORDANCE TO GATSBY
Crosland, A., A Concordance to The Great Gatsby (Detroit,

Michigan: Bruccoli Clark/Gale Research, 1975). Although
concordances in book form are likely to be replaced in the
twenty-first century by searchable electronic versions, this
remains very helpful at present to the student of Gatsby
because it indicates the frequency and location of every word
in the novel.
FITZGERALD'S OTHER WORKS (INCLUDES DETAILS OF US AND

UK FIRST EDITIONS OF GATSBY)
This lists original American and English editions. A variety of

paperback editions is currently available.
Novels
This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner's, 1920; London:
Collins, 1922.
The Beautiful and Damned. New York: Scribner's, 1922; London:
Collins, 1923.
The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1925; London: Chatto
andWindus, 1926.
Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner's, 1934; London: Chatto
andWindus, 1934.
The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel. Together with The Great
Gatsby and selected stories ['May Day', T h e Diamond as Big
as the Ritz', T h e Rich Boy', Absolution', 'Crazy Sunday'], ed.
E. Wilson. New York: Scribner's, 1941; London: Grey Walls
Press, 1949.
The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, ed. M. J. Bruccoli.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993). A critical
113
edition of the novel which aims to remove the questionable

editorial changes of Edmund Wilson (including the title he
chose) and to retrieve the text as it existed at Fitzgerald's
death. The result is fascinating and the copious secondary
material Bruccoli provides is very interesting. This edition
gives insights into Fitzgerald's working methods which have
implications for the whole of his oeuvre, including Gatsby.
Short stories
Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories in all. While his shortfictionis
always intrinsically interesting, and illuminating, in one way or
another, in relation to his novels, there are four stories that
have particular relevance to Gatsby - the three stories of the
Gatsby group and The Rich Boy'.
The Gatsby group

The Gatsby group consists of three short stories which
appeared during the genesis of Gatsby and seem especially
associated with it. The stories are 'Winter Dreams',
'Absolution' and ' "The Sensible Thing"'. These were origi-
nally collected in All the Sad Young Men and are now avail-
able in the Penguin Collected Short Stories.
'The Rich Bo/

'The Rich Boy', also originally collected in All the Sad Young
Men, includes, at the start of its third paragraph, the famous
claim that 'the very rich . . . are different from you and me'.
'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' (1936) by Ernest Hemingway
contains the equally famous riposte: 'Yes, they have more
money' 'The Rich Boy' is now also available in the Penguin
Collected Short Stories and in a separate edition with an
introduction by the novelist and short-story writer John
Updike (born 1932); 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' is collected
in Hemingway's The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944).
Short story collections

Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Scribner's, 1920; London:
Collins, 1922.
114
Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Scribner's, 1922; London:

Collins, 1923.
All the Sad Young Men. New York: Scribner's, 1926.
Taps at Reveille. New York: Scribner's, 1935.
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. M. Cowley. New York:
Scribner's, 1951.
Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories
and Essays. With introduction and notes by A. Mizener.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Library, 1957;
New York: Scribner's, 1958; London: Bodley Head, 1958.
The Pat Hobby Stories, ed. A. Gingrich. New York: Scribner's,
1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
The Apprentice Fiction of F Scott Fitzgerald, ed. J. Kuehl. New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965.
The Basil and Josephine Stories, eds J. R. Bryer and J. Kuehl. New
York: Scribner's, 1973.
Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories by F Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald, eds M. J. Bruccoli and S. F. Smith [Fitzgerald's
daughter]. London: Bodley Head, 1973; New York: Scribner's,
1974.
The Price was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F Scott
Fitzgerald, ed. M. J. Bruccoli. Quartet Books: London,
Melbourne, New York: Quartet Books, 1979.
The Short Stories ofF Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, ed. M.
J. Bruccoli. New York and London: Scribner's, 1989. Contains
the Gatsby group stories and T h e Rich Boy'.
The Collected Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzerald. London:
Penguin, 2000.
The Rich Boy (The Rich Boy', T h e Bridal Party', The Last of
the Belles') with foreword by John Updike. London: Hesperus,
2003.
Essays
The Crack-Up, ed. E. Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945.
Includes T h e Crack-Up' and seven other essays, and an
abridged version of Fitzgerald's notebooks, letters to and from
Fitzgerald, three critical essays and an obituary poem. For the
student of Gatsby, the most important material consists of
115
Fitzgerald's letters of 1925 to Edmund Wilson and John Peale

Bishop and three letters on the novel from T. S. Eliot, Gertrude
Stein and Edith Wharton.
Letters
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. A. Turnbull. New York:
Scribner's, 1963; London: Bodley Head, 1964.
Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald/Perkins Correspondence,
eds J. Kuehl and J. R. Bryer. New York: Scribner's, 1971;
London: Cassell, 1973. Especially important and interesting
for the student of Gatsby, in view of the role Perkins' letters
seem to have played in the revision of Gatsby.
As Ever, Scott Fitz ~ Letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his
Literary Agent Harold Ober, eds M. J. Bruccoli and J. M.
Atkinson. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1972;
London: Woburn Press, 1973.
Corresponence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, eds M. J. Bruccoli and M.
M. Duggan, with S. Walker. New York: Random House, 1980.
Notebooks and Ledger

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger: A Facsimile, ed. M. J. Bruccoli.
Washington, DC: Bruccoli Clark/NCR Microcard, 1973.
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. M. J. Bruccoli. New
York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli
Clark, 1978.
BIOGRAPHIES
The field of Fitzgerald biography is a fraught one because of the

intense passions and imaginary identifications that both Scott
and Zelda continue to arouse. In particular, recent years have
seen something like a state of war between Scottophiles and
Zeldaites, and considerable hostility from some scholarly
Fitzgerald loyalists towards the ongoing popular interest in
the couple. The student of Gatsby who wishes to learn more
about Fitzgerald's life in order to increase their understanding
and appreciation of the novel should tread carefully and
remain sceptical of biographical claims unsupported by evi-
116
dence or of biographical facts unilluminated by insight. Key

biographies are:
Bruccoli, M. J., Smith S. E, Ker, J. P., The Romantic Egoists
(New York: Scribner's, 1974). This is not a standard biogra-
phy but a richly illustrated large-format record of Fitzgerald's
work and life which reproduces many items from his scrap-
books and adds photographs, extracts from the writings of
both Scott and Zelda, and relevant biographical details. It is
well worth trying to obtain from a library because it does give
a vivid sense of the wider culture out of which Gatsby
emerged and because it does have specific Gatsby material
of great interest, including clippings of reviews of the novel,
play and silent film, and intriguing still photos of scenes from
the play and film.
Bruccoli, M. J., Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott

Fitzgerald, with a genealogical afterword by Scottie Fitzgerald
Smith (USA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; London: Hodder and
Stoughton, revised edition, 1991). An indispensable biography
and reference source, valuable for its careful details of
Fitzgerald's finances and its faithful transcriptions from his
letters, ledgers and notebooks, but sometimes unthinkingly pos-
itivist in its approach and not without its own unacknowledged
quirks and prejudices.
Le Vot, A., F Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, trans. William

Byron (New York: Doubleday, 1983). Of all the Fitzgerald
biographies, this is the one which perhaps achieves the best
balance of responsibility to evidence, sympathy for its subject
and perceptive literary criticism; Le Vot had already produced
an excellent analysis in French of Gatsby (see below) and his
discussion of the novel in this biography - for example, of its
colour symbolism - is a distinguished piece of interpretation
in its own right.
Meyers, J., Scott Fitzgerald (New York: HarperCollins, 1994;

London: Macmillan, 1994). This biography has been strongly
criticized by scholarly Fitzgerald loyalists and Scottophiles -
117
in particular, Meyers' suggestion that Fitzgerald was a foot

fetishist has aroused outrage in some quarters - but, provided
that the book is treated with the scepticism proper to all biog-
raphy, it is a lively and accessible account with some stimulat-
ing perspectives.
Mizener, A., The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott

Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951; London: Eyre
and Spottiswoode, 1951; revised edition, New York: Vintage,
1959; London: Heinemann, 1969). The first Fitzgerald biog-
raphy and a major contribution to the Fitzgerald revival by
one of Fitzgerald's pioneering critics; it remains readable and
useful. Its discussion of Gatsby incorporates Mizener's 'tragic
pastoral' interpretation, which is discussed in Chapter 4 of this
guide.
Mizener, A., Scott Fitzgerald and his World (London: Thames

and Hudson, 1972). Especially interesting for its illustrations,
which help to give a sense of the wider cultural world out of
which Gatsby emerged.
Turnbull, A., Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribner's, 1962;

London: The Bodley Head, 1962). The second Fitzgerald
biography; like Mizener's, it remains readable and useful. Its
author was 11 years old when hefirstmet Fitzgerald, who was
a tenant on his family's country place in Baltimore, and his
personal recollections of his subject add an evocative extra
dimension to his account.
CRITICISM
This section is subdivided to match the chapters and sections in
the guide. Where a critical book or essay has been mentioned
in Chapter 4, the bibliographical details are provided below,
but the entry is not annotated. Where a critical book or essay
is included here for the first time, annotation assessing its
value and identifying its main topic(s) is supplied.
118
Language, Style and Form

Doyno, V. A., 'Patterns in The Great Gatsby\ Modern Fiction
Studies, 12 (1966), 415-26. Reprinted in Piper (1970),
pp. 160-7; Donaldson (1984), pp. 94-105. Extract and
comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 81-93.
Le Vot, A., 'The Great Gatsby, in B. Poli (ed.) Francis Scott
Fitzgerald, (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1969), pp. 21-212.
Concise and insightful account, in French, which covers
genesis, sources, revisions, structure, language, character,
themes, critical fortunes and the French translation. The
analysis of Fitzgerald's language and style is especially impres-
sive. Some of the analysis is reiterated and developed in Le
Vot's biography of Fitzgerald (see 'Biographies' above).
Miller, J. E., Jr., The Fictional Technique off. Scott Fitzgerald(The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). Revised edition, under new
title: F Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique (New York:
New York University Press, 1964). Extract and comment in
Tredell (1997), pp. 65-72.
Reading: Themes
Romanticism
Gunn, G., 'F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby and the imagination of
wonder', Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 41
(June 1973), 171-83. Contends that the theme of Gatsby is 'the
energy and quality of the imagination which propels both
Gatsby and his vision, and which endures, if at all, only in
the narrative strategies of Fitzgerald's art'. Reprinted in
Donaldson (1984), pp. 228-42 - this quote is from p. 230.
McCall, D., 'The self-same song that found a path': Keats and
The Great Gatsby, American Literature, 42 (1970-1), 521-30.
Argues that the influence of Keats on Gatsby 'should not be
understood exclusively in the terms of "literary imitation"' but
that the 'distinguishing and complicated similarity is in a real-
ization of the ambivalence of beauty'; the 'romantic desire for
mystical union with the beautiful drives both Keats and
Fitzgerald back into legends of "vast obscurity", visionary
dreams and loves surrendered to time' (pp. 521-2, 530).
Mizener, A., ' F Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940: The Poet of
119
Borrowed Time', in Lives of Eighteen from Princeton

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). Reprinted in
Kazin (1962), pp. 23-45. Extract and comment in Tredell
(1997), pp. 45-9.
Troy, W., 'Scott Fitzgerald - the authority of failure', Accent, 6
(Autumn 1945), 56-60. Reprinted in Hoffman (1962),
pp. 224-31; Kazin (1962), pp. 188-94; Mizener (1963),
pp. 20-4. Extract and comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 43-5.
America: Dream and History

Barbour, B. M., 'The Great Gatsby and the American Past', The
Southern Review, 9 (Spring 1973), 288-99. Complicates and
enriches the American Dream' interpretation of Gatsby by
arguing that the novel 'dramatizes the conflict between the
two American dreams' - a materialist one, articulated by
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and a mystical one, articulated
by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) (p. 298).
Bewley, M., 'Scott Fitzgerald's criticism of America'. Sewanee
Review, 62 (Spring 1954), 223-46. Reprinted in Hoifmann
(1962), pp. 263-85; Lockridge (1968), pp. 37-53; Bloom
(1986), pp. 11-27. Extract and comment in Tredell (1997),
pp. 57-61.
Bicknell, J. W., 'The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald'. Virginia
Quarterly Review, 30 (Autumn 1954), 556-72. Reprinted in
Eble (1973), pp. 67-80. Comment in Tredell (1997), p. 61.
Callahan, J. F , The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the
Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1972). Extract and comment in Tredell (1997),
pp. 107-11.
Fussell, E. S., 'Fitzgerald's Brave New World'. ELH: A Journal
of English Literary History, 19: 4 (December 1952), 291-306.
Reprinted in revised form in Hoffman (1962), pp. 244-62;
Mizener (1963), pp. 43-56. Comment in Tredell (1997),
pp. 56-7.
Moyer, K. W, 'The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's meditation
on American history', Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1972
(Washington, DC: NCR Microcard Editions, 1973), 43-57.
Argues that Gatsby is characterized by a circularity of form (it
120
starts at the end, moves back to the beginning and comes back
to the end) and a series of circular movements (e.g. from West
to East to West) which reiterate 'the novel's perspective upon
American history' as circular. Reprinted in Donaldson (1984),
pp. 215-28 - this quote is from p. 217.
Slater, P. G , 'Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby\ Twentieth Century
Literature, 19 (1973), pp. 53-62. Extract and comment in
Tredell(1997),pp. 111-12.
Stern, M. R., The Golden Moment: The Novels of E Scott
Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
Trilling, L., 'F. Scott Fitzgerald', in The Liberal Imagination:
Essays on Literature and Society (London: Seeker and
Warburg, 1951), pp. 243-54. Reprinted in Hoffman (1962),
pp. 232-^3; Kazin (1962), pp. 195-205; Mizener (1963),
pp. 11-19; Donaldson (1984), pp. 13-20. Extract and
America: The 1920s

Berman, R., 'The Great Gatsby' and Modern Times (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994). Extract and comment in
Tredell (1997), pp. 151-7.
'The Great Gatsby and the twenties', in, R. Prigozy (ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to E Scott Fitzgerald (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 79-94.
Forrey, K. 'Negroes in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald'. Phylon:
The Atalanta University Review of Race and Culture, 48 (1967),
293-8. Extract and comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 9 3 ^ .
Goldhurst, W., 'Literary anti-semitism in the 2O's\ American
Jewish Congress Bi-Weekly, 29 (24 December 1962), 10-12.
E Scott Fitzgerald and his contemporaries (Cleveland:
Cleveland World Publishing, 1963) pp. 176-87.
Hindus, M., 'F. Scott Fitzgerald and literary anti-semitism: a
footnote on the mind of the 2O's\ Commentary, 3 (June 1947),
508-16.
Kopf, J. Z., 'Meyer Wolfshiem and Robert Cohn: a study of
Jewish type and stereotype'. Tradition, 10 (Spring 1969),
93-104.
Lhamon, W. T, Jr., 'The Essential Houses of The Great Gatsby9.
121
Markham Review, 6 (Spring 1977), 56-60. Argues that the

different 'houses' in Gatsby - the Buchanan mansion, Gatsby's
mansion and Myrtle's apartment - are essential structurally
and thematically to the novel's representation of modern
America: each of the three houses represents a different social
group but all three groups subscribe across social divisions to
the same unsatisfying, destructive set of values. Reprinted in
Donaldson (1984), pp. 166-75.
Westbrook, I S., 'Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby'.
American Literature, 32 (March 1960), 79-84. Extract and
Money
Friedrich, O., 'F. Scott Fitzgerald: Money, money, money',
American Scholar, 29 (Summer 1960), 392-405. Interesting
though critically unsophisticated essay which uses impression-
istic biography and sociology to argue that Nick's final judge-
ment on the Buchanans is 'an explosion of hatred against all
the things [Fitzgerald] had once admired' - the things that sup-
posedly made the very rich 'different' - and that this judgement
extends, at the end of the novel, 'through Gatsby's passionate
illusion to the national illusion' (p. 399).
Godden, R., 'The Great Gatsby: Glamour on the turn'. Journal
of American Studies, 16:3 (1982), 343-71. Collected in
Godden, Fictions of capital: The American novelfrom James to
Mailer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.
78-203. Extract and comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 137-41.
Also discussed in Tanner's introduction to Penguin edition of
Gatsby.
Hemingway, E., 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' in The First Forty-
Nine Stories (London: Arrow Books, Random House, 2004).
Lewis, R., 'Money, love, and aspiration in The Great Gatsby', in
Bruccoli (1985), pp. 41-57. Argues that the 'unique contribu-
tion' of Gatsby is 'the identification' of money and love - the
'acquisition of money and love are both part of the same
dream, the will to return to the quintessential unity that exists
only at birth and at death' (p. 56).
Shrubb, E. P., 'The girls and the money: reflections on The Great
122
Gatsby. Sydney Studies in English 11 (1985), 95-102. Provides

an interesting and lively if sometimes sketchy contrast to the
'return to the tomb/womb' interpretation which Lewis offers or
the 'pessimism' reading of Bicknell. Stresses the hopefulness
and forward thrust of the novel in whichfightingtowards the
future is at least a way of getting a past: 'what the tale tells us
[presumably men] at its end, as so often throughout, is to row
like hell after the girls and the money' (p. 102).
Sexuality and Gender

Corrigan, R. A., 'Somewhere West of Laramie, on the road
to West Egg: automobiles, fillies, and the West in The
Great Gatsby9. Journal of Popular Culture, 7 (1973), 152-8.
According to Corrigan, Jordan Baker's name is a compound
of the brand names of two cars: the Baker Electric, which
appeared around the turn of the century but did not survive
long (but see entry for MacPhee below), and the Jordan, a
widely advertised car of the 1920s. Corrigan offers a very
interesting exploration of the ads for different Jordan car
models of the period and links them with the characteriza-
tion of Jordan Baker. For example, one ad claimed the
Jordan car had 'a savor of [golf] links about it' (p. 156), and
in Gatsby Nick associates Jordan with golf links on two occa-
sions (pp. 57, 161), while another, aimed at women drivers,
said the Jordan Playboy was built for 'a bronco-busting,
steer-roping girl' who lived '[s]omewhere West of Laramie' (p.
154). Jordan Baker is not as far west as this reincarnation of
Calamity Jane for the auto age, but she does come originally
from the Midwest, and she is an active and successful sports-
woman on the links if not in the rodeo.
Fraser, K., 'Another reading of The Great Gatsby'. English
Studies in Canada, 5 (Autumn 1979), 330-43. Reprinted in
Bloom (1986), pp. 57-70; Donaldson (1984), pp. 140-53.
Discussion and extract in Tredell (1997), pp. 130-5. See also
Wasiolek below.
Fryer, S. B., Fitzgerald's new women: harbingers of change (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). Comment in Tredell
(1997), p. 137.
123
Korenman, J. S., '"Only her hairdresser . . . ": another look at

Daisy Buchanan'. American Literature, 46 (January 1974),
574-8. Extract and comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 112-15.
MacPhee, L. E., 'The Great Gatsby's "romance of motoring":
Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker'. Modern Fiction Studies, 18
(Summer 1972), 207-12. Like Corrigan (see above), MacPhee
associates Jordan Baker's forename with Jordan cars, but con-
tends that her surname alludes to Baker 'Fastex' Velvet, made
by A. T. Baker, a company which, like Jordan cars, ran a series
of ads in the 1920s, one of which claimed that 'the natural
human craving for luxury is more than satisfied by the beauty
and soft touch of Baker velours and velvets. On your furniture
- Baker cut velour. In your motor car - Baker Fastex Velvet'
(p. 211). MacPhee's overall argument is that Nick, in throwing
over the girl whose name spells automobiles, 'also repudiates
very pointedly what the automobile has represented in the
book . . . the restless and potentially destructive impulses of
our culture' (pp. 207, 212).
Person, L. S., Jr., ' "Herstory" and Daisy Buchanan', American
Literature, 50 (May 1978), 250-7. Extract and comment in
Tredell (1997), pp. 116-22.
Wasiolek, E., 'The sexual drama of Nick and Gatsby'. The
International Fiction Review, 19 (1992), 14-22. Argues
provocatively that Nick's support for Gatsby confronts us
'with the sympathy of one homosexual for another' and
accuses Fraser (see above), despite his 'excellent perceptions',
of ignoring 'the central issues of the novel' - 'Nick and
Gatsby's relationship and Gatsby and Daisy's love' - and of
being 'too timid . . . in making firm and definite Nick's homo-
sexual proclivities' by his refusal to read the Nick/McKee scene
as a definitely gay one (pp. 18, 19).
Appearance and Reality

Berman, R., 'The Great Gatsby' and Fitzgerald's world of ideas
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).
Dessner, L. I , 'Photography and The Great Gatsby'. Essays in
Literature, 6 (1979), 79-89. Points out that Gatsby 'surveys and
evaluates many uses of photography' and that photography,
124
because it is 'a mode of perception', 'carries implicit philo-

sophic assumptions' - it 'is a way people . . . reinforce their
assumptions about the nature of reality and time'. Also in
Donaldson (1984), pp. 175-86-this quote is from p. 175.
Lockridge, E., 'F. Scott Fitzgerald's trompe I'oeil and The Great
Gatsby's buried plot'. Journal of Narrative Technique, 17:2
(1987), 163-83. An ingenious interpretation which finds a con-
cealed thriller/detective story plot in Gatsby that ultimately
has philosophical implications. According to Lockridge,
Fitzgerald's technique reveals Nick as an unreliable narrator
whose 'own "testimony" resembles that of a Doctor Watson
[in the Sherlock Holmes stories], deftly managing whenever
humanly possible to miss the point'. As there is no equivalent
of Holmes in the text, Lockridge steps into the role, and makes
intriguing suggestions about the deaths of Myrtle and Gatsby.
Myrtle's death, he claims, is murder; Daisy is aware of who
Myrtle is, deliberately uses her relationship with Gatsby to
make Tom jealous and try to save her marriage, and seizes the
chance to kill Myrtle when she runs in front of the car.
Gatsby's death is also murder, but Wilson may not be the killer.
An alternative scenario is that Wolfshiem wants Gatsby out of
the way because he has outlived his usefulness and become
unreliable due to his obsession with Daisy; he therefore orders
his henchmen, who are already installed in Gatsby's mansion,
to bump him off, and just after they have done so, Wilson
arrives - and can conveniently be killed as well and take the rap
for Gatsby's murder. Lockridge acknowledges that this is spec-
ulative, that there is no way to be sure of what did happen, but
sees this uncertainty as an example of a process evident
throughout Gatsby: 'the closer the gaze and the sharper the
focus, the greater the mystery flowering in the place of seeming
certainty, as though the entire novel were a masterly trompe
I'oeil [an illusion that deceives the eye]'. In this way, the novel
'embodies a modern predicament', an existential and philo-
sophical predicament: 'the belief that it is impossible to see or
know anything absolutely' (pp. 178-9).
Stallman, R. W., 'Gatsby and the hole in time'. Modern Fiction
Studies, 1:4 (November 1955), 2-16. Reprinted in Stallman,
125
The Houses that James Built and Other Literary Studies

(Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1961), pp. 150-7.
Extract and comment in Tredell (1997), pp. 61-5.
White, P., Gatshy's Party: The System and the List in
Contemporary Narrative (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue
University Press, 1992). Extract and comment in Tredell
(1997), pp. 145-50.
Critical Reception and Publishing History

Bloom, H. (ed.), Modern Critical Interpretations of 'The Great
Gatsby' (New York: Chelsea House, 1986).
Bruccoli, M. J. (ed.), New Essays on 'The Great Gatsby'
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Bryer, J. R. (ed.), F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (New
York: Butt Franklin, 1978).
Donaldson, S. (ed.), Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The
Great Gatsby' (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).
Eble, K. (ed.), Scott Fitzgerald: a Collection of Criticism (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
Hoffman, F. J. (ed.), 'The Great Gatsby': A Study (New York:
Scribner's, 1962).
Kazin, A. (ed.), F Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and his Work (New
York: Collier, 1962).
Lockridge, E. H. (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'The
Great Gatsby (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1968).
Mizener, A. (ed.), Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical
Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
Piper, H. D. (ed.), Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby: The Novel, The
Critics, The Background (New York: Scribner's, 1970).
Tredell, N. (ed.), F Scott Fitzgerald: 'The Great Gatsby': A
Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (London and
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).
Adaptation, interpretation and influence

Play and/or film adaptations: books and essays
Dixon, W. W, The Cinematic Vision of F Scott Fitzgerald (Ann
Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 20-32.
126
T h e Three Film Versions of The Great Gatsby: A Vision

Deferred'. Literature Film Quarterly, 31:4 (2004), 287-94.
Margolies, A., 'Novel to Play to Film: Four Versions of The
Great Gatsby\ in Donaldson (1984), pp. 187-200.
Morsberger, R., Trimalchio in West Egg: The Great Gatsby
Onstage'. Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural
Studies, 5 (1980), 489-506.
Phillips, G. (S. J.) Fiction, Film and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Chicago:
Loyola University Press, 1986), pp. 101-24.
DVDs
DVDs of the 1974 and 2000 TV film are available, but a DVD or
video version of the 1949 film has been difficult to obtain for
some time. It is to be hoped that a DVD version can be brought
out soon.
The Great Gatsby (1974). Paramount Home Entertainment. 135
mins.
The Great Gatsby (2000), with Scott Fitzgerald episode of A &
E's Biography. A & E Home Video. 100 mins.
Opera
www.schirmer.com/composers/harbison_gatsby.html
Literature
Anderson, R., 'Gatsby's Long Shadow: Influence and
Endurance', in Bruccoli (1985), pp. 15^0.
Garrett, G., 'Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great
Gatsby\ in Bruccoli (1985), pp. 101-16.
Hartley, L. P., The Go-Between (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975).
Kolb, K., Getting Straight (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1968).
Swift, G., Waterland (London: Picador, 1984).
127
INDEX
The Great Gatsby has an entry of its own. Fitzgerald's other works are
indexed under his surname.
Adam, James 47 'baby vamp' 11
Adam, Robert 47 Barbour, B. M. 120
Adler, Renata 106 Barry, Philip 94
advertising 4, 9, 11, 17, 18, 19, Battle, Lois 106
24,31,123-4 Baudrillard, Jean 87
Aiken, Conrad 79 Baxter, Warner 96, 97
America Beattie, Ann 106
American Dream 21,38, Begley, Ed 99
39-43, 44,46, 47, 52, 73, Berman, Ronald 87, 121, 124
81-2,84,85,91,102, 120 Bewley, Marius 81-2, 120
American Revolution 42 Bicknell, John W 82,120,123
Civil War 42,43,44, 59 Bishop, John Peale 3, 115
Declaration of Independence 42 Blake, William 18
economic boom 10-11 Blore, Eric 97
Eighteenth Amendment 10,11 Boone, Daniel 42-3
history 9-12, 33, 38, 39-43, Bradbury, Malcolm 111
44, 73, 82, 84, 120-1 Bradley, F. H. 75
immigration 9, 10 Braine, John 101
nineteen-twenties (1920s) 1, Brenon, Herbert 96
9-12,34,43,44-8,59-60, Bruccoli, Matthew J. 111,112,
73, 78, 100, 121-2 113-14, 117
Nineteenth Amendment 11 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 18
Anderson, Richard 106, 127
aposiopesis 30-1, 56 Cabot, Eliot 95
Atkinson, J. Brooks 95 Callahan, John F. 84, 120
automobiles 9, 11, 19, 23, 40, 46, Capone, Al 10
55, 64, 67, 70, 104, 123, Carey, Macdonald 98
124 Carlyle, Thomas 53
129
Carver, Raymond 106 Doyno, Victor A. 83, 119

Cather, Willa 14,30,31 Dyer, Richard 104
A Lost Lady 14,78
My Antonia 78 Einstein, Albert 12
Chaucer, Geoffrey 41 Eldridge, Florence 95
Christianity 17,20-2,38,58,69, Eliot, T. S. 13-14, 17,18,31,
71 78-9,116
Clark, Edwin 77,79 The Waste Land 13, 18, 24, 31,
class 5, 23, 58-9, 65, 87,107 51,73,75
Clay, Henry 56 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 120
Clayton, Jack 101 ethnicity 10,44-6,67,84-5,86,
Cocteau, Jean 80 121
Cody, William F. ('Buffalo Bill') Ewell,Tom 101
43 existentialism 66, 72
Cohen, John S., Jr. 97-8
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18 Farrow, Mia 101, 103
Collins, William 49 Fay, Cyril Sigourney Webster, Fr
Conrad, Joseph 13-14,15,25, 3
31,81 Field, Betty 98, 100
Almayer's Folly 79 Finney, Jack 106
Heart of Darkness 15, 25-6, Fitzgerald, Annabel 1
41,79 Fitzgerald, Edward 2
The Nigger of the Narcissus Fitzgerald, F Scott
14 Absolution' 7,89,111,114
conspicuous consumption 9, 47 All the Sad Young Men 114,
consumerism 9, 11, 19, 55 115
Cook, Elisha, Jr. 99 Author's House' 1
Coppola, Francis Ford 101 'Babes in the Wood' 4
Corrigan, R. A. 123 The Beautiful and Damned 6,
Creelman, Eileen 97 88
Crosland, A. 113 The Crack-Up 3, 8, 9, 57, 73,
Crowther, Bosley 100 74,115
Cugat, Francis 88 Flappers and Philosophers 6
Cukor, George 94-5 'Gatsby group' (short stories)
Curtis, William 77 7,89,114
'Head and Shoulders' 5
Da Silva, Howard 99, 101 'I Didn't Get Over' 4
Davis, Owen 93,94,95,99 The Last Tycoon 89, 90, 113
Davis, Peter G. 104,105 The Love of the Last Tycoon
Dessner, L. J. 121-2 8-9,113
Dickson, Charles 95 The Mystery of the Raymond
Didion, Joan 106 Mortage' 2
Donne, John 49 'The Rich Boy' 74, 114, 115
Donovan, Martin 103 'The Romantic Egotist' 3-4
Dos Passos, John 8 "The Sensible Thing"' 7,114
130
INDEX
Tender is the Night 8, 35, 54, film versions 93, 96-8, 109,
80, 89, 90 126-7
This Side of Paradise 3, 4-5, 6, form 25-31
88 galley proof version
The Vegetable 1 {Trimalchio) 90, 112
'Winter Dreams' 7, 114 literary influence 105-7
see also The Great Gatsby musical elements 49-50, 104
Fitzgerald, Scottie 6, 8, 101 narrator 14,25-6,28,29,32,
Fitzgerald, Zelda {nee Sayre) 1, 37,59,68-9,70,71,82,125
3-4,5-8,90,95, 116-17 operatic version 93, 104-5, 127
flapper 11 publication 8, 88
Ford, Henry 55 reviews 77-9
Forrey, Keith 85, 121 sales 80,88-91
Fragonard, Jean-Honore 47 stage musical 109
Franklin, Benjamin 120 stage play 93-6, 108
Fraser, Keath 86, 123 style 17-25,35-8,39^1,
Freud, Sigmund 12 48-51,56-8,69-72,119
Friedrich, Otto 122 symbolism 22-5,31,40,51,
Fryer, Sarah Beebe 86, 123 58,61,66,71, 117
Fussell, Edwin S. 81, 120 translations 80, 89, 90, 119
windows 67-8
Gable, Clark 98 Greene, Graham 98
gangsters 9, 10,44,99 Gunn, G F . 119
Gardiner, Becky 96
Garrett, George 106, 127 Hale, Georgia 97
gender 11-12,33,58-65,74-5, Hamilton, Hale 97
85-6,91,123-4 Hamilton, Neil 97
Geraghty, Carmelita 97 Hammett, Dashiel 97
Gilliat, Penelope 102 Hammond, Percy 95
Godden, Richard 86-7, 122 Harbison, John 104
Goldhurst, William 85,121 Hartley, L. P. 79, 127
Gould, Elliot 107 The Go-Between 107
The Great Gatsby Hemingway, Ernest 8, 18, 74, 91,
Biblical references 20,21,58, 106,114,122
71 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'
bonds 52-3 74,114, 122
chronology 26-9, 42-3, 82-3 Hill, James J. 2, 7
colours 22-3,31,40,49-50, Hindus, Milton 84, 121
53, 117 homosexuality 58-63, 65, 86, 124
composition 6-8 Hope, Bob 100
critical reception 77-88 Horace 54
editions 80, 88-91 Horwitz, Murray 104
eyes 22,23-5,40,46,51,56, Hull, Henry 99
66,67,68,77,99,101, Hume, Cyril 99
103 Hussey, Ruth 98
131
imagination 18, 19, 34, 38, 55, Maecenas, Gaius

68-9,71,119 Maibaum, Richard 99
Irving, John 106 Maintenon, Madame de 43
masculinity 12, 58-65, 74, 85-6,
Jackson, Charles 106 98,123-4
James, Henry 12,14,30,31, Matthew, Carole 99
77-8,79,81 Meehan, Elizabeth 96
The Awkward Age 79 metonymy 42, 50, 66
Daisy Miller 78 Meyers, J. 116
The Turn of the Screw 78 Miller, James E., Jr. 82-3,119
James, William 12-13,72 Mizener, Arthur 81, 82, 118,
Joy, Nicholas 99 119-20
Joyce, James 17 Modernism 13, 17, 18, 19, 34,
Ulysses 13,62,91 49, 59, 69
money 2, 4, 5-6, 7, 23, 27, 33, 44,
Kant, Immanuel 65 47,51-8,67,70,74,87,107,
Kauffmann, Stanley 102 114,122-3
Keats, John 18,119 Montgomery, Robert 93
'Ode to a Nightingale' 34-6, Morgan, John Pierpoint 53-4
72 Morris, William 57
Key, Francis Scott 1 Mount, Gretchen 77
King, Ginevra 3 movies 9,11, 12,18, 19,43,79,
knowledge 67-9,77,125 99,102
Kolb, Ken 86, 106-7, 127 Mover, K.W 120-1
Kopf, Josephine 85, 121 myth 1,13,43,51,54,58,81,82,
Korenman, Joan S. 85, 124 84,87
Kosman, Joshua 105
Nash, George 97
Ladd, Alan 90, 93, 98, 100, 101 Newton, Isaac 12
Lake, Veronica 98 Nugent, Elliott 100
Levine, James 104
LeVot, Andre 89, 117, 119 Ober, Harold 95,116
Lewis, Roger 122 O'Hara, John 98
Lieberson, Lorraine Hunt 105
Liebniz, Gottfried 68 Parker, Dorothy 90
Lhamon,W.T. 121-2 Parker, Robert B. 106
Llona, Victor 80, 89 pastoral 81,82, 118
Lockridge, Ernest 125 perception 67, 68-9, 81, 124-5
Louis XIV 43 Perkins, Maxwell 4, 6-7, 8, 73,
Lowell, Robert 8 88,108,112, 116
Person, Leland S., Jr. 86, 124
MacPhee, Laurence 123, 124 Petronius 112
McCall, D. 119 philosophy 13,21,65-72,75,87,
McCarten, John 100 124-5
McLaughlin, John 103 photography 66-7, 68, 124-5
132
INDEX
Picasso, Pablo 13 Sorvino, Mira 102

Plath, Sylvia 8 Stallings, Laurence 78
Plato 21,66,86 Stallman, R. W 82, 125-6
postmodernism 69, 87 Stein, Gertrude 78, 116
Powell, William 97 Stephens, Toby 93, 102
pragmatism 13,72 Stern, Milton R. 84, 121
Pre-Raphaelites 57 stream of consciousness 12-13
Priestley, J. B. 90 Styron, William 8
Prigozy, R. Ill Swed, Mark 104-5
Prohibition 9, 10, 100 Swift, Graham 107-8, 127
Propertius 54 synaesthesia 49-50
racism 10,44-6,67,84-5,121 Tanner, Tony 112

Redford, Robert 93, 101,102, telephones 9, 11, 23, 30, 53, 69
103 'telling' and 'showing' 30,48
relativism 69 Thackeray, William Makepeace
Rennie, James 95 78
retail therapy 55 Theocritus 81
Roman Catholicism 7 time 12,26-9,30,41,82,103,
Romanticism 17-20,33,34-8, 118,124-5
39,49, 56, 57, 70, 72-3, 75, Tournier, Jacques 89
81-2,119-20 Trilling, Lionel 81, 86, 90, 121
'Romantic Modernism' 17-20, Troy, William 80-1,120
34 Turnbull, Andrew 118
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 57 Turner,! M. W 49
Rothstein, Arnold 10
Rudd,Paul 102-3 Updike, John 114
Ryan, Robert 93 USA
see America
Salinger, J. D. 106 van Vechten, Carl 78,79
scenic method 14, 29-30, 32, 78 Verdi, Guiseppe 105
Schwinn, Walter K. 77 Vidal,Gore 106
Seldes, Gilbert 78, 79 Virgil 54
sexuality 9,11,12,24,33,36, Vuolo, Tito 99
40-1,58-65,74-5,85-6,
123-4 Waleson, Heidi 105
Shakespeare, William 39, 49, 105 Wasiolek, E. 124
Hamlet 59 Welles, Orson 14
The Tempest 50-1 West, J. L. W, III 112
Shaw, George Bernard 94 Westbrook, J. S. 83,122
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 18,38 Wharton, Edith 14,30,31,78,
Shrubb, E. P 122-3 116
Sinclair, Upton 54 White, Patti 87, 126
Slater, Peter Gregg 84-5, 121 Wilder, Billy 103
Smith, 'Gunboat' 97 Willard, Catherine 95
133
Wilson, Edmund 3, 6, 89, 114, World War One 3-4, 27, 28, 43,
115-16 44,102
Wilson, Lois 96-7 Wren, Sir Christopher 106
Winters, Shelley 99 Wren, P. C. 96
women 9, 11-12,44, 50, 58-65,
74, 85-6, 123-4 Yates, Richard 106
Woollcott, Alexander 95
Wordsworth, William 18 Zunser, Jesse 100
134

Fitzgerald''s The Great Gatsby

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What is the book about based on the context provided?

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FITZGERALD'S

THE GREAT GATSBY

Achebe's Things Fall Apart - Ode Ogede

First published 2007

© Nicolas Tredell 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester

Gatsby page references are to the 2000 Penguin Classics

Definitions are from the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford

experience at Newman, however, was his friendship with Father

judge, at a country club dance in Montgomery in Alabama, and

Paradise - in September 1919. While waiting for the novel to

phrase that Fitzgerald uses in The Crack-Up' - the 'jingle of

statement of intent which seems to anticipate his achievement in

summer and autumn of 1924 and sent it to Scribner's; Maxwell

on 21 December 1940 - is, even in its incomplete form, a remark-

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The multiple, intertwining causes of this great and gaudy spree

social dislocation, it also stimulated the American economy and

to $450 million in 1929. This economic boom was fuelled by new

THE INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

'stream of consciousness', used by literary critics to describe a

THE LITERARY CONTEXT

In terms of literature, the most immediate Modernist influence

(1857-1924). From Conrad, Fitzgerald learned more about how

STUDY QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 1

task of the writer as defined by Joseph Conrad - 'before all,

LANGUAGE, STYLE AND FORM

LANGUAGE AND STYLE

spread into the new popular culture of newspapers, magazines,

the antithesis of Fitzgerald's and the most radical challenge to it,

might be said that the use of such imagery, particularly in the

The most extended and significant use of Christian language

The first sentence refers to the ancient Greek philosopher

green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Jordan Baker's voice

and in New York, he exemplifies 'the restless eye', satisfied, like a

because of the distance in time which separates him from the

southern Minnesota, intending to study and support himself by

truth about the novel's protagonist will be thwarted: Gatsby will

developed by Henry James and taken up by Edith Wharton and

STUDY QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 2

1. In its discussion of colour terms in Gatsby, this chapter has

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a first-

READING THE TEXT

As our examination of the language, style and form of Gatsby

These themes are interwoven in Gatsby and cannot easily be sepa-

(See discussion of Mizener and Troy in Chapter 4, and

comparison between an intense founding vision and a vapid

of the stairs - and it is reflected from below - presumably from

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of

This passage provides a good example of the way in which Nick,

disappointment. Nick makes it clear, however, that Daisy is not

AMERICA: DREAM AND HISTORY

(See discussion of Bewley, Bicknell, Callahan, Fussell and