The Great Gatsby: A Critique of the American Dream

1. ENGL1001 – American LiteratureF. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1925) Dr. John Masterson 3rd Lecture July 2012

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4. The Great Gatsby, p.26 • “About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

5. OED Definition • ambivalence • Noun - [mass noun] • the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone

7. Jordan Baker, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1 • “ ‘I’m stiff … I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.’”

8. Exchange between Jordan Baker and Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1 • “We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. • ‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to me helplessly: ‘What do people plan?’

9. The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7 • “We had luncheon in the dining room, darkened too against the heat, and drank down nervous gaiety with the cold ale.” • “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? ... and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ ‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.’ ‘But it’s so hot,’ insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, ‘and everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town.’”

10. The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1 • “Why [the Buchanans] came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it – I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

11. Nick’s comment on Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1 • “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.”

12. The All-American Hero?

13. OED Definition • Irrecoverable • adjective • not able to be recovered, regained, or remedied: his liquid assets had to be written off as irrecoverable

14. The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9 (the final chapter) • “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, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

15. Image of the American Prairie

16. Lionel Trilling, ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (1945) • “Gatsby is said by some to be not quite credible, but the question of any literal credibility he may or may not have becomes trivial before the large significance he implies. For Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, “the American dream.”

17. Marius Bewley, ‘Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America’ (1954) • “The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience ... The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream ... The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than the reality itself.”