F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
By
Denise Stuckle
Genre
 According
to the Oxford Desk
Dictionary and Thesaurus Genre
“is a kind or style of art” (323).
 Early art forms included the Epic
tale, a tale of mythology or legend
in rhyme and verse form that was
memorized and recited.
Novel
The novel is a fictional prose work of over
one hundred pages, with character
development, character motivation, and
intricate plots.
 Some Scholars consider a work by “Shikibu
Murasaki, a Japanese court lady, for her
Tale of Genji (c. 1000 A. D.)” to be the first
novel (Murfin 246).

Plato probably would not appreciate the
modern novel as he “banned Homer for
what he called his ‘lies’” (Seymour-Smith
9).
Aristotle argued “that literature is superior to
history (real facts) because it imitates not
what is but what ought to be” (SeymourSmith 10).
Over time as prose was developed the works
were recorded or written by hand, which
was time consuming.
The first novels were of romance,
adventure, and ghost stories (SeymourSmith 11).
 The Egyptians recorded novels and short
stories on ostracon, or limestone (SeymourSmith 12).
 With the advent of the printing press it was
possible to produce more copies of a given
work
 Demand for the novel grew as more people
became literate

Types of Novels
Picaresque – recount a series of events
linked by the presence of a single
protagonist (Murfin 246)
 Bildungsroman – German for ‘development
novel’ – childhood to maturity (Morner 22)
 Epistolary – letters
 Gothic – mystery and horror

Cont.
Historical – protagonist may be
based on fact or fiction involved
in real events or real people
(Morner 99)
Problem – Social injustice
Psychological – focuses on the
characters mental states and
emotions (Morner 177)
 During
the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the novel increasingly “took
on the characteristics of the countries
where it was being produced”
(Seymour-Smith 37)
Mid-eighteenth century Europe the
“middle class wanted books to uplift
them, and novels gratified the
bourgeois reader’s expectations for an
educational and moralizing literature”
(Bishop 315)
American Modernism
Naturalism – animal instinct and
symbolism
Expressionism – anti-realistic to
achieve a greater overall realism
Realism
Focused on the American Dream
Novels of the 1920’s
1920 – The Mysterious Affair at Styles by
Agatha Christie
 1922 - Ulysses by James Joyce
 1924 – A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
 1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald
 1928 – Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H.
Lawrence

The Great Gatsby
 F.
Scott Fitzgerald “exposed the
crudity and yet purity of the American
Dream of Innocence . . . in The Great
Gatsby (1925). His technique is
realistic, but his symbols arise
naturally from his descriptions, his
selections of events” (Seymour-Smith
45).
Is The Great Gatsby a novel?
It is over one-hundred pages
 The protagonist and other characters are
well developed
 There is character motivation – Gatsby is
motivated by his love for Daisy
 Intricate plots – there are several plots and
subplots within the story

Critical Essay: Reading a Novel
The Great Gatsby
 The
essayist Norman Holmes Pearson
quoted Fitzgerald, “My whole theory
of writing,” he once said, “I can sum
up in one sentence. An author ought to
write for the youth of his own
generation, the critics of the next, and
the schoolmasters of ever afterward”
(Nagel 21).
The Great Gatsby

The following is a
clip from the 1974
version of The
Great Gatsby
starring Robert
Redford, Mia
Farrow, Bruce
Dern, and Sam
Waterston
(Paramount Pictures)
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway the protagonist/narrator
moves from Minnesota to N.Y. and lives
next door to Jay Gatsby
 Gatsby wants to become reacquainted with
Daisy Buchanan whom he had known years
earlier
 Tom is Daisy’s wealthy husband who is a
philanderer

(Savill)
Early Criticism



May 9th, 1925, the Kansas City Star “declared that
the novel was ‘so sordid and depressing that if the
cleverness is there it is obscured by the details of
[the] story’” (Lehan 16)
The “Milwaukee Journal dismissed it as too
‘contemporary’” (Lehan 16)
H.L Mencken “declared Gatsby no more than ‘a
glorified anecdote’ . . . he continued it ‘does not
go below the surface’” (Lehan 17)
(Savill)
New Criticism
 Focuses
on “the text itself—apart from
the history, biography, and society—
there has emerged a wide variety of
critical methods” (Bruccoli vii)
 In the New Essays on The Great
Gatsby Richard Anderson states in his
critical essay that Gatsby is “both a
benchmark of quality and a popular
literary landmark” (Bruccoli 16)
Continued
 Bruccoli
goes on to say in the
introduction “Fitzgerald’s primary
concern was with rhythms, the colors,
the tones associated with time and
place – often expressed through
synesthesia, as in ‘yellow cocktail
music (p. 49)’” (p. 9)
Con’t
 In
critical essays collected by Harold
Bloom, Kenneth Eble reflects on
“Fitzgerald’s highly polished style”
 Many of these “changes are in
individual words: ‘silhouette’ for
‘shadow,’ ‘vanished’ for ‘gone,’
‘soiled’ for ‘spotted’ (Bloom 8)
(Savill)
Fitzgerald
Born Sept. 24, 1897 in St. Paul, Mn.
 Named after ancestor Francis Scott Key
 Was an intelligent, dramatic child but was a
mediocre student
 Second Lieutenant
 Married – Zelda Sayre
 Daughter – Frances Fitzgerald

(Phillips)
Fitzgerald
once said of
himself that he was “a
first-rate writer who had
never written anything
but second-rate books”
(Mizener 112)
F. Scott and Zelda



(Savill)
March 26th, 1920 This
Side of Paradise is
published
April 3rd, 1920 marries
Zelda Sayre
Honeymoon – New
York: at parties he
introduces her as
mistress and she
dances on tables
Publication
 At
his death in December 1940 “all
of his books were out of print”
(Lehan 16)
 Today “The Great Gatsby sells
over three hundred thousand copies
a year” (Lehan 16)
Time Period




Fitzgerald “described and criticized: the Jazz Age”
(Seymour-Smith 136)
The 1920’s was a time of hedonism and
extravagance
The Great Gatsby paralleled in many ways the
authors own romance with his wife
Some of his later work was not as well received
because it was published in the 1930’s and the
focus was on the Jazz Age.
Women’s Fashions






Flapper
Bobbed Hair
Simple makeup
Hats – helmet like
Dresses – straight sheath,
hem-lines rose to the
bottom of knee
Silk stocking with a back
seam
(Savill)
Helmet like Hats
(Savill)
Slang








(Savill)
All wet
Big cheese
Blotto
Main drag
Cat’s Pajamas
Cheaters – eye glasses
Flick
Lounge Lizard
– “Courts in America rule
that Lawrence’s Women in Love
is not obscene” (SeymourSmith 276)
 1926 – “Book of the Month
Club launched in America”
(Seymour-Smith 276)
 1929 – the stock market crashed
 1920
Near the End
Fitzgerald wrote screen plays in
Hollywood in order to provide for
his family
Did not finish his last book The Last
Tycoon
Died at the age of forty-four
Works Cited



Bishop, Philip E., Adventures in the Human
Spirit. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1994.
Bloom, Harold., ed. Modern Critical
Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1986.
Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. New Essays On The
Great Gatsby. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
Con’t

“Genre.” The Oxford Desk Dictionary and
Thesaurus: American Edition. 1997.

The Great Gatsby. Dir. Jack Clayton.
With Robert Redford, Mia Farrow,
Bruce Dern, and Sam Waterston.
Paramount Pictures, 1974.
Con’t

Lehan, Richard. The Great Gatsby: The Limits of
Wonder. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Lockridge, Ernest H., ed. Twentieth
Century Interpretations of The
Great Gatsby. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.
Con’t.


Mizener, Arthur. Scott Fitzgerald and his
World. New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Son’s, 1972.
Morner, Kathleen, and Ralph Rausch.
NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms:
The Comprehensive, Easy-toUnderstand Reference to Critical and
Literary Terms. Lincolnwood, Ill.:
NTC Publishing Group, 1995.
Con’t.



Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford
Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.
Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.
Nagel, James. Critical Essays on American
Literature. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.,
1984.
Phillips, Brian. The Great Gatsby Sparknotes. 1999-2000.
<http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gatsby/cover.html>.
Con’t


Savill, Richard R. Jazz Age Echoes. 1 Oct.
1999. 25 April 2001. <http://www.geocities.
com/broadway/orchestra/1993/events.html>.
Seymour-Smith, Martin. ed. Novels and
Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1980.
That’s all folks
(Savill)