Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0125/01255.txt

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$Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Character Analyses, Critical Commentary and Essay Questions}
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$Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott}
$Affiliation{Department Of English, Simon Fraser University}
$Subject{gatsby
fitzgerald
daisy
own
moral
american
literary
work
nick
buchanan}
$Date{}
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Title:       Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book:        Great Gatsby, The
Author:      Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Critic:      Cooperman, Stanley
Affiliation: Department Of English, Simon Fraser University

Character Analyses, Critical Commentary and Essay Questions

Character Analyses

Nick Carroway:

     The narrator of the novel, Nick, represents the traditional moral codes
of America. Himself from the Midwest (which contrasts to the East of Long
Island and the world of the Buchanans), Nick is attracted by the beauty, the
wealth, and the sophistication of "The Wasteland" - but comes to understand
the essential emptiness, the gaudy display of "nothingness" which
characterizes the Wasteland itself. As the critic Arthur Mizener remarks, the
novel is, in a basic sense, Nick's story as well as Gatsby's, for it is Nick
who at last achieves a "gradual penetration of the charm and grace of Tom and
Daisy's world. What he penetrates to is corruption, grossness, and cowardice."

     It is Nick too who perceives the essential pathos of Jay Gatsby, the
romantic idealism which shapes his very materialism, and so sets him off
sharply from the gross and fleshly Tom Buchanan. Nick, indeed, who says that
he wishes the world "to stand at moral attention forever," understands that
Gatsby is motivated not by selfishness, but rather by devotion-devotion to an
ideal rendered false by the appetites and moral vacuum of the Wasteland. Alone
among all of Gatsby's "friends" (with the exception of the character called
"Owl-Eyes") to pay a final tribute to the pathetic bootlegger-Idealist, Nick
sees Gatsby as being a symbol of the American Dream gone sour, an "innocent"
destroyed by a corrupt world. And when Nick leaves the East, he does so with
the hope of finding some remnant of a moral and personal reality "back home."

Jay Gatsby:

     The "subject" of the novel, Jay Gatsby is a dramatic symbol of the
Idealism which makes of materialism itself a type of romantic expectation-a
uniquely American "non-material materialism." Gatsby, indeed, is a kind of
pathetic "Don Quixote" tilting at non-existent windmills and counting his silk
shirts as though they were rosaries; attempting to achieve a glow of vague
spiritual "enchantment" through material acquisition, Gatsby represents the
paradox - and the pathos - of spiritual values reduced to vulgarity and
futility in the moral Wasteland.

     The essential tragedy of Gatsby is, in a profound sense, the tragedy of
American Idealism itself: the waste of enormous energies, even self-sacrifice,
to self-illusion and (as Nick remarks) the service of a "vast, vulgar
meretricious beauty." Gatsby, furthermore, has no means to communicate his
Idealism, or fulfill it, aside from the false standards of the Buchanan world
itself.

     Perhaps the chief element in Gatsby's inevitable destruction is the fact
that his romanticism, his misplaced "faith" in material success (as a kind of
spiritual rite and proof of identity), is so intense, that he ultimately
believes that he can indeed recreate reality according to his heart's desire.
A "magician" in a world of sordid appetite and cowardice, Gatsby's "dream"
is-by the conditions of its own existence-doomed to failure. For he cannot
"regain" Daisy simply because he pursues her not really as a woman, but as an
Ideal. And as an Ideal, Daisy Buchanan - and all she represents - must vanish
like spiritual cotton-candy at the first eruption of crisis.

Tom Buchanan:

     The husband of Daisy and lover of the gross and fleshly Myrtle Wilson,
Tom is both ruler and representative of the moral Wasteland which has replaced
American Idealism. Tom is a creature of brute appetite and direct "action"
based on self-preservation and self-interest rather than any idealism
whatsoever. He is "strong" because in the moral Wasteland idealism itself is a
source of weakness rather than strength; devoted to nothing but the impulses
of his own flesh and the demands of his own ego, completely without any
concept of either a moral code or personal loyalty.

     For Tom and Daisy Buchanan there is no moral responsibility whatsoever;
they "retreat into their money" at any crisis, and "leave other people to
clean up the mess."

Daisy Buchanan:

     Gatsby's "Golden Girl," the dream and "Cause" of his wasted idealism,
Daisy falls into a familiar pattern of Fitzgerald women. These women are
lovely, delicate, and "romantic" - but essentially parasitic, and emotionally
frigid despite (or because of) their sentimentality. Critics, indeed, have
noted that Fitzgerald's attitude toward women is very ambivalent; perhaps
because of his traumatic experience with Zelda, he combined an extremely
romantic "worship" of them (much like Gatsby's) with an equally extreme
distrust of them-a distrust which approaches actual fear.

     Arthur Mizener, for example, notes that Fitzgerald "never loved merely
the particular woman; what he loved was her embodiment for him of all the
splendid possibilities of life he could, in his romantic hopefulness,
imagine." On the other hand, a critic like Charles E. Shain notes the
procession of "mercenary" and "fatally irresponsible" women in Fitzgerald's
work-women who are "as dangerous to men as classical sorceresses." So too
William Goldhurst notes that Fitzgerald imaged the American woman as
"physically attractive," but having a "destructive influence on the man with
whom she is associated."

     Daisy Buchanan, motivated by weakness rather than passion, and by
sentiment rather than emotion, is simply impelled by any force ready to
determine her direction, and to protect her from either emotional discomfort
or emotional commitment. The basic fact of Daisy is her lack of substance, and
The Great Gatsby is filled with images which reinforce this emptiness, images
which follow Daisy Buchanan through Fitzgerald's pages like the gossamer cloth
"floating" around her face. Loyal only to sentiment and the gesture of love,
she deserts Gatsby at the eruption of crisis like a sorority girl in white
lace avoiding a puddle of grease.

Jordan Baker:

     Jordan is no less a creature of the moral Wasteland than is Daisy or Tom
Buchanan. A "lovely" girl who (like Daisy) dresses in "white" and always seems
to be "cool," Jordan is an opportunist in her own way. Nick is attracted to
her, but ultimately breaks with her because he sees in Jordan that same
ability for irresponsible exploitation that he sees in Daisy and Tom.

Myrtle Wilson:

     Myrtle is one of the "users" of the Wasteland-just as her husband is one
of the used. A creature of impulse (she met Tom on a train and just "had" to
have him), she is blood-rich and full, loud and sentimental-with ludicrous
mannerisms of borrowed "refinement." Myrtle too is a kind of parasite on the
misplaced idealism of George Wilson, who appears and reappears in the novel
like a man being slowly eaten by a vampire. It is symbolically fitting that
Myrtle Wilson dies as she had lived: violently, with a gush of blood, killed
by a car driven by Daisy Buchanan.

George Wilson:

     Myrtle's husband, a hapless shadow of what once had been a handsome man,
George-like Gatsby himself-is destroyed by the fact that he holds to ideals
of honor, and actually loves his wife. In the moral Wasteland, those with
ideals and those who truly love are alike vulnerable, and it is ironically apt
that it is George Wilson who shoots Gatsby before taking his own life. Like
Gatsby, Wilson is, in his own way, a romanticist.

Meyer Wolfsheim:

     Wolfsheim is a memorable figure, and his very "sentiment" creates a kind
of absurd horror-like modern "syndicate" gangsters who are "nice" citizens in
their own community, and who contribute to boy-scout troops while controlling
the sale of narcotics.

Pammy:

     When Daisy calls her daughter a "dream" she is indeed defining her own
incapacity for any sort of real emotion.

Henry G. Gatz:

     Gatsby's father, who comes to New York for the funeral, and shows Nick
the pathetic excerpt from Gatsby's diary - an excerpt replete with laudable
virtues and Franklin-like resolutions. It is Mr. Gatz who remarks that his son
could have been "a great man" - and indeed the waste of the resources of
energy and idealism is a basic theme of the novel.

Doctor J. Eckleburg:

     Eckleburg's face, indeed, is taken by George Wilson as being "the eyes of
God" - and this is one of the most memorable absurdities of the book. As an
image, Doctor Eckleburg is extraordinarily effective; the monstrous face and
yellow eyes become a parody of Divinity.

Essay Questions And Answers

     1. Discuss the meaning of Idealistic or "non-material" materialism in
The Great Gatsby.

     Answer: Idealistic or "non-material" materialism refers to the fact that
for Jay Gatsby, materialism is raised to a romantic ideal, a kind of glowing
expectation of some vague and magic "happiness" to be obtained through
materialism itself. The paradox, of course, is that idealized materialism
"promises" what it can never provide: that is, a spiritual glory. In the
person of Jay Gatsby we have a dramatic representation of the uniquely
romantic materialism of America, a king of innocence according to which men
attempt to create a glowing Ideal from material acquisition, and attempt to
convince themselves that desire can define reality, that gesture can define
action, and that sentiment can define emotion.

     2. Explain The Great Gatsby as a novel with a "dual hero."

     Answer: The Great Gatsby is a novel with a "dual hero" because Nick
Carroway, the narrator, is in many respects no less important to the book than
is Jay Gatsby himself. Nick, indeed, represents at least an awareness of the
traditional values and moral codes that made America great. A spectator rather
than inhabitant of the moral Wasteland of the Buchanan world, Nick provides a
definition-through-contrast of the wasteland itself. He also serves as a means
of defining the essential idealism of Jay Gatsby, and the waste of energy and
devotion which Gatsby's "worship" of Daisy represents.

     3. In what way does Daisy Buchanan represent "the Fitzgerald woman?"

     Answer: Daisy Buchanan, whose voice "is full of money," is one of a long
line of Fitzgerald women who are both idealized for their beauty, and feared
because of their fatal irresponsibility, their parasitism, their lack of any
personal substance, and their destructively "romantic" commitment to mere
gesture. Daisy, indeed, is a kind of gorgeous "balloon" of loveliness - but a
balloon, after all, is a charming surface surrounding empty space. Just so
does Daisy "drift" in and out of "love"; lacking any authentic impulse of her
own, Daisy is essentially frigid despite (or because of) "her romanticism,"
She moves, or rather is impelled, in the direction of whatever force-whether
of personality or money - seems "in control" at the moment. A creature without
loyalty or moral responsibility she is indeed a "Fairy Princess" who belongs
to anyone with the proper magic wand.

     4. What is the significance of the billboard face of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg?

     Answer: The huge face of Doctor Eckleburg is a kind of presiding deity of
the Wasteland. Doctor Eckleburg's stating yellow eyes, indeed, are mistaken
for "the eyes of God" by the hapless George Wilson. The billboard is a basic -
and extraordinarily provocative-image, a dramatic parody of a moral and
spiritual Wasteland lost both to the affirmation of God and the affirmation of
man.

     5. Discuss the significance of Gatsby's "diary."

     Answer: The excerpt from the diary of Jay Gatsby-written while he was
still a boy named Jimmy Gatz-is a dramatization of the decay of the American
Dream. For the excerpt, shown to Nick by Gatsby's father, is filled with
Franklin-like plans for earnest "self-improvement" and hard work. The diary,
in short, reinforces a basic theme of the novel: the theme of wasted devotion,
wasted power, and wasted potential.

     6. The Great Gatsby has often been considered a parody of "The American
Dream." Discuss this concept.

     Answer: The "American Dream" is a kind of romantic expectation, a belief
in the possibility of achieving some sort of glowing future with hard work
and sincere devotion. Fitzgerald's novel is a "parody" of this dream, because
in the person of Jay Gatsby we have the corruption of the Dream itself: that
is, the traditional devotions wasted on spiritual gum-drops and material
trivialities.

     The American Dream, in short, becomes corrupted into the moral Wasteland
of the Buchanans on one hand (a wasteland where impulse and appetite replace
moral code and spiritual value), and diluted into the unfocused romanticism of
Jay Gatsby on the other. The parody, in other words, is created by the fact
that Gatsby serves the "vast, vulgar, meretricious beauty" represented by
Daisy Buchanan through the modes, and even the gestures, of the American Dream
itself. It is for this reason that Nick, at the end of the novel, makes an
implicit comparison between Gatsby and the early explorers of the New World.
Gatsby too is a man of ideals and self-sacrifice; both the ideals and the
sacrifice, however, in the Wasteland lead only to absurd illusion: the worship
of Daisy Buchanan, the silver "balloon" of surface without substance.

Critical Review

     "I talk with the authority of failure," F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote in
his notebooks, soon after his break with Ernest Hemingway, "Ernest with the
authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again." Whether
or not Fitzgerald considered himself a "failure" in his own lifetime, however,
one thing is clear: during the last decade, his reputation among literary
critics and non-specialized readers has grown to the point where no study of
American literature - and certainly no anthology of American literature - is
complete without either a discussion or representation of his work.

The Question Of Fitzgerald's "Failure":

     The question of Fitzgerald's "failure" has been to a great extent the
result of two elements in Fitzgerald's career: first, the fact that he did
produce an enormous number of "slick" stories for the high-priced magazines,
while two of his four novels (This Side of Paradise in 1920, and The Beautiful
and the Damned in 1922) were "best sellers" from a financial, if not literary
point of view.

     Fitzgerald, in short, was preoccupied with financial success throughout
his career, and much of his work was indeed produced with the market rather
than the muse foremost in his mind. As Arthur Mizener points out, most of the
160 stories that Fitzgerald wrote between 1920 and (approximately) 1940 were
frankly written for money. For this reason, if for no other, Fitzgerald's
critical reputation was indeed vulnerable; literary critics have always tended
to look askance at undue financial success (or preoccupation) on the part of
literary artists, a fact which is obvious enough in the careers of such
writers as John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway among many others.

     The fact that Fitzgerald did produce a great deal of semi-hack writing,
and the fact that he became a literary celebrity too early and too richly in
his career, undoubtedly shaped critical attitudes toward his work. In addition
to this aspect of the Fitzgerald career, however, there was also the fact that
he became so thoroughly identified with the glittering world of flappers,
disillusions, and "early sorrows" romantically a part of the mythology of the
American twenties, that critics often seemed to be rendering a judgment not on
Fitzgerald's work, but rather on the cultural environment which provided its
raw material. The news-columnist Westbrook Pegler, for example, summed up this
sort of blanket dismissal by referring to Fitzgerald as being both spokesman
for and representative of a "group or cult of juvenile crying-drunks."

     It is always dangerous, however, to confuse the theme which a writer uses
for his work, with the status or value of the work itself. A novelist like
Virginia Woolf, for example, is not to be considered aesthetically "sterile"
merely because psychological and emotional sterility is a basic theme of her
books. And if "failure" is a basic theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one must
remember that he was attempting to render a society which had indeed "failed"
precisely because of its universal preoccupation with "success."

     That Fitzgerald himself illustrated this paradox-a worship of "success"
so intense that it virtually insures a conviction of personal failure-in no
way invalidates his artistic vision. On the contrary, the fact that Fitzgerald
was so completely a man of his own time and own culture, explains to no small
degree his ability to render cultural reality in his stories and novels.

     Fitzgerald was not invulnerable to the American Dream of "success without
sweat"; ironically (and sometimes bitterly) aware of his own "mixed motives"
as an artist, he saw in himself precisely those moral and intellectual flaws
which were shaping the direction of America as a nation. Granted that he was
extremely sensitive to his times, one must remember that such a sensitivity is
hardly a disadvantage to a literary artist. That Fitzgerald possessed this
sensitivity enabled him to use in his work what the critic Glenway Wescott has
called an "extreme environmental sense."

Early Work:

     In his early work, however, Fitzgerald seemed to have the "environmental
sense" without the aesthetic objectivity which alone serves to shape
literature into something more than a reflection of prevailing intellectual or
social modes. Quite aside from the financial and personal necessities which
drove him to "selling big" to the "big markets," one might almost say that
Fitzgerald had been too close to "his times"; that he had not yet succeeded
in viewing the times themselves - and the tensions within himself so vitally
characteristic of them - through a structuring of fiction which would stand
alone, independent of fashionable literary posture, or current intellectual
preoccupations, or personal anticipations in which the writer almost seems to
view his own achievement before the work itself has been achieved.

     This Side of Paradise, for example, which made Fitzgerald something of a
literary celebrity in 1920 (and which, of course, enabled him to "earn" Zelda
and build his own Golden Palace of "success") was attacked by literary critics
on precisely these grounds: that it was far too completely a "mixed bag" of
assorted literary modes, prevailing intellectual "smartness," moral exposes
which themselves indicated a certain naivete on the part of the author, and a
certain sophomoric anxiety to "shock" as well as please. As Heywood Broun
rather dyspeptically remarked of the book: "There is too much footwork and too
much feinting for anything solid and substantial being accomplished. You can't
expect to have blood drawn in any such exhibition as that."

The Need For Objectivity:

     Critics were generally agreed that Fitzgerald's own enthusiasm as a
story-teller, his own romanticism as a person, his own delight in the "smart"
and topical, his own view of literature as a kind of "key" to the "good life,"
and his obvious debt to those writers (such as Tarkington, Wells, and others)
who had been fashionable among Princeton undergraduates, resulted in a kind of
grab-bag of literary mannerisms. There was, in short, general agreement that
while Fitzgerald might be a brilliant addition to the American literary scene,
he was as yet what Frederick Hoffman called a genius manque-a rather
precocious young man who seemed to be playing a "brilliant" role in some
drama of his own creation, a drama in which the novel itself was merely an
episode.

     The need for objectivity in Fitzgerald's work, the need for less
self-conscious play-acting at literature and "being in the know," was a
criticism reiterated by literary commentators such as Edmund Wilson, Paul
Rosenfeld, and many others. Certainly Fitzgerald's first two novels are marked
by a lack of what James E. Miller, Jr. calls the principle of selectivity;
still very much the bright young author, Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise
and The Beautiful and the Damned (although to a somewhat lesser extent in the
latter work) tends to sacrifice control and structure to a kind of pyrotechnic
display of random witticisms, social observations, fashionable comment (or
condescension), irrelevant "self-expression" - all the flaws, in short, of a
young writer impressed with himself and with the need to be "successful" at
least as much as he is impressed with the art of literature.

The Critics And Gatsby:

     With The Great Gatsby in 1925, however, this structural control was
achieved-achieved through both the dual narrative we have already discussed
(the technique, partly influenced by the novelist Joseph Conrad, of filtering
action and meaning through a narrator at once involved with the action and
commenting upon it), and through the use of "natural" symbols growing out of
the action and situation of the story: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, for
example, or the "green light" of Daisy Buchanan, or the "ritual of the silk
shirts" in Gatsby's mansion. The book, in short, was praised by critics as a
profound definition of the loss of American values-the loss of "The American
Dream" - and a work of literary art in which ironic drama was all the more
powerful for being controlled and absorbed within the substance of the work
itself.

     It was not so much that The Great Gatsby was (as Andrew Turnbull remarks)
"less autobiographical" than Fitzgerald's earlier works, as it was that the
autobiography had been used more relevantly to the fiction. In posing the "Jay
Gatsby" part of his own vision against the "Nick Carroway" part, Fitzgerald
had achieved the sort of objectivity which makes it possible for a novelist to
"stay out of his book" - or rather, to let the book say what it has to say
without intrusive explication. There is less of Fitzgerald "talking" to his
readers as Fitzgerald than in either of his earlier novels, and this is also
true of what most critics consider to be the novel ranking next to Gatsby:
Tender is the Night, which appeared in 1934.

     The Great Gatsby, at any rate, was highly praised; William Rose Benet,
for example, in a Saturday Review essay, remarked that "for the first time
Fitzgerald surveys the Babylonian captivity of this era unblinded by the
bright lights," and commentators such as Malcolm Cowley, Dennis Hardy, James
Thurber, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, and many others sensed a new
substance in Fitzgerald's work.

     This is not to say that Fitzgerald had achieved any sort of literary
apotheosis or Sainthood. The critical voices were by no means unanimous, even
on the subject of The Great Gatsby; H. L. Mencken, for example, attacked both
the novel (which he considered little more than an "anecdote") and its chief
character, whom he considered so "vague" as to be a sort of disembodied shadow
of a literary protagonist. Tender is the Night received mixed reviews, and
there remained much critical feeling that F. Scott Fitzgerald had indeed
"wasted" too much of his talent on unworthy projects, while personal
difficulties (his own and Zelda's) had wasted too much of him. Arthur Mizener
remarks that as late as 1939, The Great Gatsby was dropped from the Modern
Library because it "failed to sell."

Fitzgerald's Growing Reputation:

     After Fitzgerald's death, however, the tide shifted, and by the time
Edmund Wilson had edited and published The Crack-Up in 1945, with serious
critical essays, interest in Fitzgerald both as an individual and as a
literary artist reached considerable proportions. Gatsby was reissued with a
laudatory introduction by Lionel Trilling, and full-length studies soon were
appearing, together with critical anthologies and many articles in both the
scholarly and "middlebrow" magazines. Most of the significant criticism on
Fitzgerald, indeed, is a product of the last two decades; his works have been
reprinted in both softback and hard-cover editions; his stories and
novels-specially The Great Gatsby-have been "rediscoverered" by academic and
non-academic readers throughout the United States and many other countries.

     Wherever there is an interest in American literature, the work of F.
Scott Fitzgerald has at last "come into its own," and the process is by no
means completed. For if a writer like Ernest Hemingway achieved his literary
success by eliminating social complexities and "confronting" only those
experiences which could be mastered through direct action and ritualized
response, one might say that F. Scott Fitzgerald made a success out of
"failure" itself. And in the last analysis, we may well wonder which of these
two writers has more to tell us of our culture, and our heritage.