The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald summary and critical analysis

 

 

 Characters

Jay Gatsby: Nick's wealthy neighbor in West Egg. Gatsby owns a huge mansion and well known for hosting large parties every Saturday night. Gatsby's lust for wealth is remarkably represented in the novel.

He met and fell in love with Daisy Buchanan while in military training in Louisville, Kentucky before WW I. Gatsby is a self-made man who achieved the American Dream of rising up from the lower classes to the top of society. But according to Gatsby, the desire for love proves more powerful than the lust for money. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby's downfall as a critique of the unwise and careless extravagance of Roaring Twenties in America.

Gatsby in fact is an enigmatic character as there were several rumours associated to his great fortune like it came from the illegal alcohol sales.

Nick Carraway: A young man from Minnesota who has come
to New York after graduating Yale University and fighting in World War I. Nick is the neighbor of Jay Gatsby and the cousin of Daisy Buchanan. The narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick views himself as a man of "infinite hope" who can see the best side of everyone he encountered. In watching Gatsby's story unfold, Nick becomes a critic of the Roaring Twenties excess and carelessness that carries on all around him.

Daisy Buchanan: The lady love of Jay Gatsby's life, the cousin of Nick Carraway, and the wife of Tom Buchanan. She grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where she met and fell in love with Gatsby. She lacks conviction and sincerity and values material things over all else. She was a loving woman who has been corrupted by greed. She chooses the comfort and security of money over real love.

Jordan Baker: A friend of Daisy's who becomes Nick's girlfriend. A successful  golf player, Jordan is beautiful and pleasant. There is some suggestion in the novel that she loves Nick.

Tom Buchanan : A former football player and Yale graduate who marries Daisy Buchanan. The oldest son of an extremely wealthy and successful family.

Myrtle Wilson: The wife of George Wilson and the mistress of Tom Buchanan.

George Wilson: The husband of Myrtle Wilson and the owner of an auto garage in the Valley of Ashes. Wilson is a beaten- down man, who nevertheless loves and adores his wife. Her affair with Tom drives Wilson to extreme disappointment, and her death destructs him and leads to revenge.

 

 A brief summary

The story begins when Nick Carraway the narrator moves to West Egg in New York, where he rents a house adjacent to Jay Gatsby, a wealthy businessman known for his luxurious celebrations. Gatsby seems to be well-liked and popular among the people, although his origin and how he made this sudden fortune remain a matters of mystery.

Nick settles in his new surroundings, he visits his cousin Daisy and her husband, a well-to-do couple living in East Egg. They and their friend Jordan Baker, a young and wealthy professional golfer, introduce Nick to their life in the East, which is characterized by abundant free time, massive flowing of money and luxury in all forms. Nick is fascinated by this lifestyle even as he begins to consider its hollowness. Especially when he happens to understand that Daisy's husband Tom has some woman in New York and that Daisy is aware of it. Tom takes Nick to meet Myrtle Wilson who owns a gas station in the valley of ashes with her husband George.

Nick and Gatsby soon become friends. Even after Nick realizes the fact that Gatsby’s real intention is to rebuild his bygone relation with Daisy.  

She was the lady he had fallen in love with before the war. At Gatsby's request Nick arranges for Daisy and Gatsby to reunite at his home.  After that Gatsby and Daisy continue to see each other secretly.

Tom immediately dislikes Gatsby and later senses there is something going on between Daisy and Gatsby. Meanwhile, in the valley of ashes, George Wilson learns of his wife's infidelity but he does not discover her lover's identity. George locks Myrtle upstairs in their home. When Myrtle escapes she is struck and killed by Gatsby's car, which Daisy is driving back from New York. Instead of stopping to help, Daisy drives away from the scene of the accident.

Devastated, George is determined to find the driver of the car. This presents an opportunity for Tom to tell George that the car belongs to Jay Gatsby. George sets out to find Gatsby in West Egg, eventually locating Gatsby's mansion and murdering him in his pool before taking his own life.

Nick learns of Gatsby's death and becomes a contact point for the details of wrapping up Jay Gatsby's life. He tries to contact Gatsby's many friends and is saddened to discover that no one seems to care. When Gatsby's father turns up, Nick learns the true story of James Gatz, the young man from the Midwest and his rise to become the great Jay Gatsby, all in pursuit of wealth and his vision of the American dream. At the conclusion, Nick becomes disillusioned about the tragic ending of Gatsby.

 

Critical analysis

 “The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence  can never retract". - The Waste Land by TS Eliot

 

The Great Gatsby captures the spirit of the Jazz Age, a post-World War I era in upper-class America that Fitzgerald himself gave this name. However, Gatsby expresses more than the exuberance of the times. It depicts the restlessness of what Gertrude Stein called a "lost generation." Recalling T. S. Eliot's landmark poem "The Wasteland" (1922), then, Gatsby also has its own "valley of ashes" or wasteland where men move about obscurely in the dust, and this imagery of decay, death, and corruption pervades the novel and infects the story and its hero too. Because the novel is not just about one man, James Gatz or Jay Gatsby, but about aspects of the human condition of an era, and themes that transcend time altogether. 

The novel is narrated in retrospection; Nick is writing the account two years after the events of the summer he describes, and this introduces a critical distance and perspective which is conveyed through occasional comments about the story. The tale of Gatsby is framed like an embedded narrative as Nick recounts his experiences just like Marlow does in The Heart of Darkness. The polyphonic aspects of the narrative makes it more complex like every modernist fiction.

Gatsby is a romantic, but he is also made up of romantic stories by other people who speculate and rumor about his unknown past. Nick takes it upon himself to tell the story and thus to tell Gatsby's story as he pieced it together from different sources, and Nick characterizes himself as someone who understands Gatsby better, who wants to set the record straight, and who sides with Gatsby by turning  against the people those cooked up notorious fictitious stories about him . It is Nick alone who arranges Gatsby's funeral and meets with his father. Certainly, Nick is also romanticizing Gatsby.

 

In considering the novel as tragedy, the role of fate (or fortune in its other sense) has a significant role. The novel is conspicuous in its lack of a religious belief system; God is absent from the skies over East and West Egg. Part of the restlessness of a post-war generation.

Daisy is one who lives for the moment, and for whom glimpses of tomorrow and the day after that are completely ignored. She expressed a kind of willful blindness to such matters (and blindness is one of the novel's themes). all characters are noted for their unscrupulous,dishonest,immoral and shameless behaviors. Even Gatsby can be distinguished as a person with goodness of heart with sins of flesh.

 

Jazz Age

The Jazz was a cultural movement existed (1920s and 30s ) in America. Also referred to as the "Roaring 20's," It began in 1918 with the end of World War I, and lasted until 1930, ending with the Stock Market Crash. This period was marked by economic prosperity, liberal behavior, social mobility, bootleg (sales) liquor, and most notably Jazz Music.

What made Jazz so controversial was that it literally broke all the rules.  Traditional musical theory had been established by the Catholic Church during the Renaissance and hadn't changed since. Jazz ignored these rules.

Jazz was not the only art form of this period that reacted to changing times by changing its rules.  Many writers began to deviate from the literary forms and rules that had defined the last generation. For more information see page about Modernism.

  The Jazz Age is defined as a cultural movement. Although it influenced every aspect of the art and literature in the period, the effect that it had on cultural ideals and norms was greater. It  forced people to question the ideas that they had about what was appropriate, normal and to be desired. This step from tradition gave people to opportunity to experience new forms of self expression.

 The Jazz age was epitomized by a new cultural identity; Defined by liberal ideas, radical self expression, and new found wealth, the Jazz age truly was a unique time in American history.

 

 Lost Generation

In literature, the "Lost Generation" refers to a group of writers and poets who were American, but several members emigrated to Europe. The most famous members were Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot.

the significant theme in works of literature by members of the Lost Generation was:

Decadence - Consider the lavish parties of James Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Recall the aimless traveling, drinking, and parties of the circles of expatriates in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. With ideals shattered so thoroughly by the war, for many, hedonism was the result. Lost Generation writers revealed the sordid nature of the shallow, worthless lives of the young and independently wealthy in the aftermath of the war.