Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896, a descendent of the author of "The Star Spangled Banner," hence the name "Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald." Fitzgerald attended Princeton University and began his writing career by contributing to student newspapers and other publications at the university. The author left school and joined the U.S. Army in 1917; he was released two years later; he then got experience working for an advertising agency in New York City. After returning to his home state of Minnesota in 1920 he fine-tuned and published his first novel ("This Side of Paradise").

The money and fame that rolled in from his first novel was Fitzgerald's launch into the career he had coveted. He married Zelda and wrote a number of shorts stories ("Flappers and Philosophers") plus novels ("The Beautiful and Damned" and "Tales of the Jazz Age"), and then moved to Europe where he wrote his classic and most famous novel, "The Great Gatsby." The novel is considered one of the more brilliant works of literature in American history, because it is an extraordinarily well-crafted book, because it portrays through the characters and setting what America was really like in the 1920s, but also because it uses the American Dream theme both poignantly and tragically.

What are the Origins of the American Dream?

According to the Library of Congress, the most likely source of the American Dream was James Truslow Adams, in whose book (The Epic of America) -- written in 1931 -- the phrase was reportedly coined. In Adams' book he describes the American Dream:

"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position" (Adams, 1931, 214-215).

Theme, Symbols, Mood in the Novel

One of the first symbols in this novel is the green light in Chapter 1. The light is found at the end of Daisy's East Egg doc and it appears to be associated with Daisy's dreams and hopes for a bright future. As for Gatsby, he sees it as reflective of Daisy, and in the darkness he reaches for it as a kind of mysterious guiding light. The American Dream theme comes in here too, vis-a-vis the green light, as Nick makes a comparison -- he compares the green light to how America must have appeared to the pilgrims and other immigrants who first arrived in America.

The pair of eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg is seen on an old billboard that overlooks the valley of ashes; it could be that Fitzgerald used them as imagery, God looking down on the wasteland of America's new and immoral society.

At a Gatsby party -- in the library, an impressive place with multitudes of books -- a man who is "owl-eyed" is stunned that all these books are "real books." It's a great image and in truth is helps to show that Gatsby is a faker and that he isn't the well-read college man he would like people to think he is. The irony here is that owls are symbols of wisdom, and notwithstanding the glossy library packed with books, Gatsby isn't all that wise. The ashes portrayed in the Valley of Ashes are perhaps a symbol of what has gone wrong with the American Dream.

Also, there is a lot of gold colors in the novel; gold of course symbolizes wealth and success. There are also yellow colors (which could be seen also as a symbol of gold).

The color white is prominent when the narrator is describing Daisy and perhaps is a symbol of innocence. She has a white car, her clothes are white and so is the paint on walls in her house. She has a "white neck" and she shows "white girlhood"; but the end of The Great Gatsby portrays her as destructive, self-centered and careless. So, could Fitzgerald painted her white but in the end she is corrupted too and so even the good people can turn bad?

The Setting for The Great Gatsby -- And Themes Reflecting Real Life Then

Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald is certainly respected as a brilliant novelist in the genre of American Literature, but more than that he is said to have captured the tone of the era in which he lived, the "Roaring Twenties," The "Jazz Age," and the era of "the Lost Generation," a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein. The Novels for Students book (p. 64) explains that the novel Gatsby was a "vastly more mature and artistically masterful treatment" of the themes he embraced than in his previous novels. The "Jazz Age" of music, liquor, parties and frivolity -- all in the context of money, success and glamour -- was a time of "false material values" according to Novels for Students. This is not only what Fitzgerald wrote about, this kind of life is the one he dreamed of experiencing, and because of his successful writing career, he was able to live that life.

On page 64 of Novels for Students the author goes to great lengths to point out that America was going through a "cultural and lifestyle revolution" and that revolution was brought on by a booming stock market and the instant economic success of businesses -- both legal and illegal, as the Novels for Students author explains (p. 64). But all that money and success and the excesses that it produced were to come crashing down as the era changed and ushered in "…disillusionment with the American Dream" (p. 64).

The novel depicts that death of the quest for the American Dream -- for everyone except Gatsby -- through these characters and actions: a) the Meyer Wolfsheim's enterprising ways to make money" (albeit they are criminal in nature); b) Jordan Baker's cheating; and c) the Buchanans' victimizing of others "to the point of murder" (Novels for Students, p. 72).

On page 73 (Novels for Students) the author makes clear that the wealthy class in Gatsby is "morally corrupt" and spiritual values have disappeared while money and all its symbols (greed, excesses, arrogance and pettiness) have taken over society -- much like the world of the Roaring Twenties where newly rich people were prosperous but didn't have the grace to handle their financial success. One honest character in the novel is Nick, the narrator, who describes the characters in a romantic and moral way, offering perspective for the reader as though Fitzgerald himself was talking through the book. As the author in Novels for Students aptly points out, "Nick is voicing much of Fitzgerald's own sentiments about life" (p. 73).

In Fitzgerald's life, he saw the Midwest as a place far more innocent and decent (he was of course from Minnesota) than New York. In the novel Nick tires of the East -- "corrupt and materialistic" -- and hence returns to the West. God has died in the East, Nick believes, and hence he returns to the Midwest to find "…thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow" (Novels for Students, p. 73).

Those reading The Great Gatsby for the first time may not realize that it is, according to Novels for Students, a "satire." Certainly the novel pokes fun at the "newly rich" characters found in the society that enjoyed excesses and garish parties; Gatsby is, after all, the "…tale of the irresponsible rich," Novels for Students points out (p. 74). Among the corrupt characters in the novel that were based on real people is Meyer Wolfsheim, who -- representing Arnold Rothstein, a main character in the era of New York's Tammany Hall) made money illegally (bootlegging) and paid off politicians to keep his prostitution and gambling business alive.

Characters in Gatsby and The American Dream

Arnold Weinstein, writing in the journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, writes that Fitzgerald portrays Nick Carraway in such a way that Nick helps readers understand the "moral cost involved in secular achievement" (Weinstein, 1985, p. 23). Nick has seen "…the parade and pretensions of high society" and says, "…After a certain point I don't care what [principals are] founded on…I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever" (Weinstein, 1985, p. 23).

Weinstein suggests that Gatsby had to come to the realization that Daisy ("flesh-and-blood" Daisy) could not live up his concept of the American dream. Gatsby had built up this incredible illusion of what Daisy really was, and had gone off the deep end in throwing himself after her. Weinstein (p. 25) quotes from pages 102-103 of the novel:

"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 is typical of Fitzgerald to use a phrase like "…the colossal vitality of his illusion," a very skillful way of saying the character Gatsby was stuck in a fantasy world, a naive place, and he believed that Daisy was something more than she really was. Weinstein believes that Fitzgerald is "committed to the project of making things from nothing" and in this case he made Daisy up to be more than she really was. Some writers would call that infatuation, or idealizing someone beyond their actual worth. Fitzgerald possibly was making things up from nothing because that would be a reflection of how many new rich people got money from doing nearly nothing, took that money and build mansions out of nothing.