F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby an Analysis of the Novel as a Tragic Romance (original) (raw)
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Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Critical Reception and Visual Interpretation
The thesis explores how the literary status of Fitzgerald’s novel published in 1925 evolved from being dismissed to becoming a canonical work of American Literature after the death of its author. The role of criticism and adaptations and how they intertwined to popularize the novel among the academic elite and the general public is examined. Four critical studies in different decades of recent history are analyzed to show the different approaches to the novel as well as its relation to the American Dream. The thesis suggests that the four critical studies discussed reflect viewpoints impacted by the cultural and socio-economic factors that marked the decade of their appearance: Kermit Moyer (1973), Ross Posnock (1984), Ray Canterbery (1999), and Benjamin Shreier (2007). Their approaches demonstrate the many ways The Great Gatsby can be viewed and thus its richness as a text. The three film adaptations of the novel in turn depict directors’ take on the novel as well as exhibiting the limitations, predilections, and technical possibilities of the time of their production: Nugent’s (1949), Clayton’s (1974), and Luhrmann’s (2013). The controversial aspects of these adaptations as indicated by reviews and articles, which evaluate them as to how they present Gatsby and the American Dream, have increased the debate and the interest in the novel. Though the novel is located in the U.S. in the Roaring Twenties associated with the Jazz Age, it continues to speak to present audience by evoking issues related to class, mobility, ethics, and romance.
A Study of The Great Gatsby: Devices of Inspiring Imagination
2018
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate Fitzgerald's greatness as a fiction writer and accordingly the value of his novel, The Great Gatsby. The secret of his creating fiction is not the detailed description, but the empty space which he left in the novel. The unidentified elements are what Fitzgerald intended to make, and as a result, the novel holds some ambiguity. However, a lack of detailed description never decreases the quality as a fiction, but rather elicits a fascinating effect on the novel. The author paid attention to this mysterious phenomenon, and tried to reveal it by considering his sense of creation as a fiction writer.
A Penny for the Old Guy: Exploring The Mythological Framework of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age was turbulent. The sobering “Death of God” in Nietzsche’s philosophical wake, the Great War, a suddenly roaring economy and the infamous prohibition all contributed to The Great Gatsby, a novel which centers on the American subject’s autopoiesis amidst drifting continents of categorical reality. The beginning of the Modernist age was fraught with a fragmented, spiritual ennui, and many thinkers, instead of aspiring to Christian-influenced transcendental philosophy, plunged the dark depths of the subconscious frontier. Notably, Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Subconscious, which bravely spelunked the mythical heart of human thought and culture, was published in English in 1916. The publication of Fitzgerald’s novel introduced a new species of man, one with a “heightened sensitivity” (Fitzgerald, 49) to complexified life. As Robert Berman intuits, “Fitzgerald relies on a montage for the same reasons as modernist painters. There is no innate principle of composition” (The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, 90). Although there existed no innate principle, all paintings require raw material. Fitzgerald’s Modernist writing describes and arranges a fragmented reality, but in those fragments is retained a deep mythical significance.
Alterity and Tragicality in Shakespeare and Fitzgerald: From Macbeth to The Great Gatsby
Critical Survey, 2024
In this essay, we attempt to trace the themes of alterity and tragic sensation in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We offer a parallel study of the two works with an emphasis on the (anti)heroes’ struggles with time and the other human as metaphors of “alterity.” We present a thematic reading and discuss that as Macbeth is preoccupied with his imaginatively fabricated future (time) and tries to execute anyone (the other) who jeopardizes the totality of that ideal space, Gatsby is also preoccupied with his past (time) and tries to retrieve Daisy (the other). Tragedy, we argue, is a result of these struggles. We suggest that Fitzgerald’s work generally shares the similar theme of alterity with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and somehow modernizes the similar tragic sensation we witness in the latter.
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, 2021
This research explores the interlocked notions of friendship, community, gift, and commodity culture in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It seeks to demonstrate that Fitzgerald's ethical vision of friendship, community, the Bad, and the Good are deeply shaped by Aristotle's works The Nicomachean Ethics, The Politics, and The Metaphysics. The extent to which Aristotle has shaped the form and contents of The Great Gatsby, a novel rightly described as a classic of its genre and how far the contentious aspect of its gendered and orientalized characterization can be traced to Fitzgerald's dialogic relation with the Greek philosopher are among certain questions that this research addresses. The approach to the issue and the related questions stated above is eclectic. It draws its paradigms, partly from Bakhtin's dialogical theory, partly from economic and cultural anthropology, and partly from postcolonial, historical theory of the type elaborated by Said and Fanon.
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
The American Novel from Hawthorne to Heller:Cultural Contexts and Critical Perspectives, eds. Ashok K Mohapatra, Pritha Chakraborty, Sharbani Banerjee Mukherjee, 2020
It is apparent that Fitzgerald had not only represented the commercialism, consumerism and carelessness of the Jazz Age in the best fashion, he had himself become the Age by moulding his life in an equally careless way. The “gaudy spree” of the age is not better represented in any other work than The Great Gatsby. The melancholy tone of jazz music can best be heard in Gatsby’s parties in their opulent consumerism, violent drinking and dispirited humanity: yet the hollowness of it all becomes apparent when the reader learns that Gatsby himself is not interested in all this because he hosts the parties to attract only one woman, Daisy. The superficiality of the motive of the disinterested host can only be redeemed with the full understanding of the symbolic significance of the quest; till then the noise is only of decadence.