Role Of Patriotism In The Great Gatsby
‘The Roaring Twenties’: a decade of unprecedented affluence that shaped America’s consumerist society as it is today. The epoch entailed a plethora of quick money, sparkling appliances and loose morals that reincarnated the ‘American Dream’ to comprise much more than its original pledge for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of land’. Fitzgerald’s infamous stance on the American Dream thematically appears throughout ‘The Great Gatsby’ where a tactful succession of language and characterisation critiques America’s supposed illusory nature of wealth. Ironically, as cousin to the author of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, Fitzgerald’s views followed a far less patriotic route, on one occasion stating; ‘The idea that we 're the greatest people in
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the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous’. This essay shall focus on Fitzgerald’s disparagements: his presentation of corruption within the novel, in relation to culture, outside criticism particularly envisaged through use of hyperbole. As a comparative novel, the essay shall refer to ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury – a novel hyperbolising a dystopian America where the American Dream has been superficially understood.
Beginning on this ‘superficially understood’ concept, Fitzgerald introduces the Valley of Ashes: the epitome of all that invalidates the glorified American Dream. Personally, I understood this area to signify a paradox of the Buchannan, Baker, and Gatsby lifestyles, where not all Americans were prospering in the bountiful boom of the ‘Roaring 20s’. Meeting a smorgasbord of monochromatic imagery, Carraway depicts ‘a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens’, metaphors akin to T.S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, completely contrasting the glamour and splendour glorified in Chapter One. Reading further into the description, Carraway describes the men ‘crumbling’ and moving ‘dimly’, verbs portraying the antithesis of the partying lives of our main characters, which, to me, suggests Fitzgerald portraying the unseen masses – especially as they’re ‘hidden’ from commuters in an ‘impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight’.
However; Roger Starr writing for the ‘City Journal’ has alternative ideas, where he suggests the Valley is America in a post-apocalyptic state, tying in to my discussion of American misinterpreting the ‘American Dream’ where the masses confuse mass-consumerism for reaching their ‘summum bonum’. Starr writes, ‘the verdant country which the discoverers of the American continent saw before them had been destroyed beyond reconstruction’ followed by ‘the American dream of open horizons and limitless possibilities would be reduced to a burned-out, undifferentiated mass’. This interpretation suggests Fitzgerald has included the valley as a pre-requisite of the path America was cascading down where their high-flying stock-selling credit-buying ways would eventually lead to their downfall – an idea not so far-fetched when considering the Wall Street Crash was a mere four years later.
Progressing into Chapter Four, Fitzgerald presents hyperbole, where we read an over-romanticised view of America that may be deemed perverse of reality. Chapter Four sees Gatsby and Nick drive to New York: Nick elaborately describes ‘the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars’ replicating a zoetrope, animating Gatsby’s bug-like car as it speeds down to the cultural hubcap of the world. Meanwhile, Carraway enchants the reader with ‘"Anything can happen now that we 've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . ."’. His repetition stretches the sentence to fairy-tale proportions, while use of caesura and alliteration emphasises an over-idealisation of a city that in fact holds wide scale poverty. The presented passage portrays an ironic stance on the infamous Big Apple; Fitzgerald’s portrayal is so exaggerated it seems pretend, a fictional kingdom. It is as if Nick’s smitten stance represents all that is usually portrayed of the American Dream, a young banker’s dream to make big money in a city that is deemed a playground for millionaires.
Bradbury’s satirical approach to the novel presents a similar magnification of events. For example, Beatty describes the decline of the appreciation of classics with augmented exaggeration, ‘Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.’ This use of hyperbole draws attention to the fact that people do not absorb information the way seen previously, as popular demand has reduced formerly adorned novels to a simple dictionary definition, unused in Bradbury’s dystopian America. Both novels chronicle anomies of `American society by creating hyperboles out of natural situations – whereby a critique forms of underlying issues of the way we play out society.
Both authors’ use of hyperbole extends to colour to suggest ideas of magnification and exaggeration. Sarah Churchwell, writing for the Guardian, describes Fitzgerald as using ‘bright shocks of colour and vivid juxtapositions to create impressions, not facts’, a statement seen most vividly through Carraway’s recurring identification of green. Green, a symbol of hope, fertility, and envy, makes its debut with Daisy’s green dock light, a symbol that becomes a running motif in the novel of the American Dream Gatsby chased so vehemently. However, the green light may be envisaged as palpable in comparison to further references to green. Carraway’s closing elegy highlights ‘the green breast of the new world’, comparing the America that ‘once flourished for Dutch sailor’s eyes’ as fertile and nourishing, with a sense of purity, juxtaposed to the vivid colour we see throughout the novel that encompass materialism.
Bradbury uses a streak of red to thematically illustrate communist ideas that had circulated like wildfire throughout the 1950s in America. The novel describes the firemen destroying books: ‘he flicked the ignite and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow’, while the colour of the Salamander, golden pole and brass nozzle (attributes to the firemen) all are orange. The era of McCarthyism, the decade entailed a string of witch hunts, rooting out any supposed communist sympathisers that stimulated Bradbury’s satirical novel. Bradbury’s recurring infatuation with red throughout the novel ultimately serves to create a political message. Despite celebrity evidently afield in the family, patriotism perhaps did not follow suit: Nick’s closing passage, perhaps an ekphrastic soliloquy, concludes the novel in a melancholic soliloquy of nostalgia connecting to Key.
Reflecting, Nick recounts America’s discovery ‘that flowered once for Dutch sailors ' eyes’ connecting with Key, ‘on the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep’, which prospects Nick despondently notes have been lost to ‘inessential houses’ and ‘vanished trees...that had made way for Gatsby 's house’. Nick ignores Gatsby’s monetary achievements and states ‘his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it’: such a nonchalant attitude in terms of Gatsby’s wealth and status echo views expressed by Fitzgerald, that capital is not the American Dream. This passage is pictured through a sequence of sibilance1 and euphonic adjectives2 using fantastical language that perhaps reflects what Fitzgerald fantasises as the original American Dream opposed to the plastic consumerist society ‘The Great Gatsby’ tells of. The National Anthem may be an archetype for Fitzgerald’s story, yet with Nick’s depiction read with a bite of sarcasm, conveying Fitzgerald’s distaste for the materialistic society that has overtaken principle values envisaged in Key’s
elegy.
Lesley Hawkes form Queensland’s University of Technology recently published a paper entitled, ‘Gatsby, Obama and the resurrection of hope’ which offers valuable insight into the contextual familiarity of the novel in today’s society. He writes, the novel ‘may chronicle the death of the American Dream it also, through its poetic and lyrical writing, rebuilds the dream’ a statement that reflects on Gatsby’s characterisation. A self-made man who ‘sprang from a Platonic conception of himself’ Gatsby personifies all that the American Dream is: the hope and dreams of men who come from nothing and achieve everything. Hawkes continues, ‘Obama offers the same youthful energy and unlimited hope that Gatsby offered and Americans still seek’ a statement that perhaps explains Fitzgerald’s intentions with Gatsby: to represent the men of the 1920’s – idealistic and determined, but shrouded with a cloudy vision of materialistic ethics. Thus, ‘The Great Gatsby’ echoes a haughty significance in today’s society: we mustn’t focus on materials!
A similar effect is created with Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ where his string of red-Russian imagery that once drew sweat from the anti-communist-tyrants hanging the masses in the sixties. Beatty tells Montag, ‘If you don 't want a man unhappy politically, don 't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one’. Bradbury illustrates the ease in which the government filtered information that caused a communistic scare and built grievances. Perhaps we could relate this literary genius unto our own opinions on ‘the war on terror’ – Bush could filter information too. Fitzgerald’s novel confronts ideas of freedom, equal opportunity and happiness and illustrates their replacement with infatuation of material possessions, immorality and bigotry. As infamously quoted in 1927, Fitzgerald once stated, ‘The idea that we 're the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous’, an opinion that I feel encapsulates the entire novel – wealth and monetary success are not the true values to the American Dream, and so convey the corruption of said aspiration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Hawkes, Lesley (2009) "And one fine morning": Gatsby, Obama, and the resurrection of hope.
2. Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby, Daniel J Schneider. Compiled by Morris Dickstein
3. ‘How Fares the Dream?’ Paul Krueman for The New York Times. Published: Jan 15 2012
4. Sarah Churchwell, ‘The Great Gatsby delusion’ and ‘The Great Gatsby and the American dream’ for The Guardian. Published Friday 25 May 2012.
5. Anita Sethi, July 10th 2012, http://litandspoken.southbankcentre.co.uk/2012/07/10/dispatch-from-the-london-literature-festival-the-great-gatsby/
6. Roger Starr for The City Journal
7. Fahrenheit 451: Did Bradbury 's Dystopia Come True? - Chris Taylor: Jun 06, 2012
NOVELS
1. ‘The Great Gatsby’ Scott Fitzgerald
Wordsworth Classics
Publication Date: 1 May 1992
2. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Ray Bradbury
Publication Date: 31 Jan 1991
German Reclaim Edition
3. (with reference to) ‘The Wasteland’ T.S Eliot
Faber 80th Anniversary Edition
Publication Date: 7 May 2009
the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous’. This essay shall focus on Fitzgerald’s disparagements: his presentation of corruption within the novel, in relation to culture, outside criticism particularly envisaged through use of hyperbole. As a comparative novel, the essay shall refer to ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury – a novel hyperbolising a dystopian America where the American Dream has been superficially understood.
Beginning on this ‘superficially understood’ concept, Fitzgerald introduces the Valley of Ashes: the epitome of all that invalidates the glorified American Dream. Personally, I understood this area to signify a paradox of the Buchannan, Baker, and Gatsby lifestyles, where not all Americans were prospering in the bountiful boom of the ‘Roaring 20s’. Meeting a smorgasbord of monochromatic imagery, Carraway depicts ‘a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens’, metaphors akin to T.S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, completely contrasting the glamour and splendour glorified in Chapter One. Reading further into the description, Carraway describes the men ‘crumbling’ and moving ‘dimly’, verbs portraying the antithesis of the partying lives of our main characters, which, to me, suggests Fitzgerald portraying the unseen masses – especially as they’re ‘hidden’ from commuters in an ‘impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight’.
However; Roger Starr writing for the ‘City Journal’ has alternative ideas, where he suggests the Valley is America in a post-apocalyptic state, tying in to my discussion of American misinterpreting the ‘American Dream’ where the masses confuse mass-consumerism for reaching their ‘summum bonum’. Starr writes, ‘the verdant country which the discoverers of the American continent saw before them had been destroyed beyond reconstruction’ followed by ‘the American dream of open horizons and limitless possibilities would be reduced to a burned-out, undifferentiated mass’. This interpretation suggests Fitzgerald has included the valley as a pre-requisite of the path America was cascading down where their high-flying stock-selling credit-buying ways would eventually lead to their downfall – an idea not so far-fetched when considering the Wall Street Crash was a mere four years later.
Progressing into Chapter Four, Fitzgerald presents hyperbole, where we read an over-romanticised view of America that may be deemed perverse of reality. Chapter Four sees Gatsby and Nick drive to New York: Nick elaborately describes ‘the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars’ replicating a zoetrope, animating Gatsby’s bug-like car as it speeds down to the cultural hubcap of the world. Meanwhile, Carraway enchants the reader with ‘"Anything can happen now that we 've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all. . ."’. His repetition stretches the sentence to fairy-tale proportions, while use of caesura and alliteration emphasises an over-idealisation of a city that in fact holds wide scale poverty. The presented passage portrays an ironic stance on the infamous Big Apple; Fitzgerald’s portrayal is so exaggerated it seems pretend, a fictional kingdom. It is as if Nick’s smitten stance represents all that is usually portrayed of the American Dream, a young banker’s dream to make big money in a city that is deemed a playground for millionaires.
Bradbury’s satirical approach to the novel presents a similar magnification of events. For example, Beatty describes the decline of the appreciation of classics with augmented exaggeration, ‘Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.’ This use of hyperbole draws attention to the fact that people do not absorb information the way seen previously, as popular demand has reduced formerly adorned novels to a simple dictionary definition, unused in Bradbury’s dystopian America. Both novels chronicle anomies of `American society by creating hyperboles out of natural situations – whereby a critique forms of underlying issues of the way we play out society.
Both authors’ use of hyperbole extends to colour to suggest ideas of magnification and exaggeration. Sarah Churchwell, writing for the Guardian, describes Fitzgerald as using ‘bright shocks of colour and vivid juxtapositions to create impressions, not facts’, a statement seen most vividly through Carraway’s recurring identification of green. Green, a symbol of hope, fertility, and envy, makes its debut with Daisy’s green dock light, a symbol that becomes a running motif in the novel of the American Dream Gatsby chased so vehemently. However, the green light may be envisaged as palpable in comparison to further references to green. Carraway’s closing elegy highlights ‘the green breast of the new world’, comparing the America that ‘once flourished for Dutch sailor’s eyes’ as fertile and nourishing, with a sense of purity, juxtaposed to the vivid colour we see throughout the novel that encompass materialism.
Bradbury uses a streak of red to thematically illustrate communist ideas that had circulated like wildfire throughout the 1950s in America. The novel describes the firemen destroying books: ‘he flicked the ignite and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow’, while the colour of the Salamander, golden pole and brass nozzle (attributes to the firemen) all are orange. The era of McCarthyism, the decade entailed a string of witch hunts, rooting out any supposed communist sympathisers that stimulated Bradbury’s satirical novel. Bradbury’s recurring infatuation with red throughout the novel ultimately serves to create a political message. Despite celebrity evidently afield in the family, patriotism perhaps did not follow suit: Nick’s closing passage, perhaps an ekphrastic soliloquy, concludes the novel in a melancholic soliloquy of nostalgia connecting to Key.
Reflecting, Nick recounts America’s discovery ‘that flowered once for Dutch sailors ' eyes’ connecting with Key, ‘on the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep’, which prospects Nick despondently notes have been lost to ‘inessential houses’ and ‘vanished trees...that had made way for Gatsby 's house’. Nick ignores Gatsby’s monetary achievements and states ‘his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it’: such a nonchalant attitude in terms of Gatsby’s wealth and status echo views expressed by Fitzgerald, that capital is not the American Dream. This passage is pictured through a sequence of sibilance1 and euphonic adjectives2 using fantastical language that perhaps reflects what Fitzgerald fantasises as the original American Dream opposed to the plastic consumerist society ‘The Great Gatsby’ tells of. The National Anthem may be an archetype for Fitzgerald’s story, yet with Nick’s depiction read with a bite of sarcasm, conveying Fitzgerald’s distaste for the materialistic society that has overtaken principle values envisaged in Key’s
elegy.
Lesley Hawkes form Queensland’s University of Technology recently published a paper entitled, ‘Gatsby, Obama and the resurrection of hope’ which offers valuable insight into the contextual familiarity of the novel in today’s society. He writes, the novel ‘may chronicle the death of the American Dream it also, through its poetic and lyrical writing, rebuilds the dream’ a statement that reflects on Gatsby’s characterisation. A self-made man who ‘sprang from a Platonic conception of himself’ Gatsby personifies all that the American Dream is: the hope and dreams of men who come from nothing and achieve everything. Hawkes continues, ‘Obama offers the same youthful energy and unlimited hope that Gatsby offered and Americans still seek’ a statement that perhaps explains Fitzgerald’s intentions with Gatsby: to represent the men of the 1920’s – idealistic and determined, but shrouded with a cloudy vision of materialistic ethics. Thus, ‘The Great Gatsby’ echoes a haughty significance in today’s society: we mustn’t focus on materials!
A similar effect is created with Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ where his string of red-Russian imagery that once drew sweat from the anti-communist-tyrants hanging the masses in the sixties. Beatty tells Montag, ‘If you don 't want a man unhappy politically, don 't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one’. Bradbury illustrates the ease in which the government filtered information that caused a communistic scare and built grievances. Perhaps we could relate this literary genius unto our own opinions on ‘the war on terror’ – Bush could filter information too. Fitzgerald’s novel confronts ideas of freedom, equal opportunity and happiness and illustrates their replacement with infatuation of material possessions, immorality and bigotry. As infamously quoted in 1927, Fitzgerald once stated, ‘The idea that we 're the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous’, an opinion that I feel encapsulates the entire novel – wealth and monetary success are not the true values to the American Dream, and so convey the corruption of said aspiration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Hawkes, Lesley (2009) "And one fine morning": Gatsby, Obama, and the resurrection of hope.
2. Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby, Daniel J Schneider. Compiled by Morris Dickstein
3. ‘How Fares the Dream?’ Paul Krueman for The New York Times. Published: Jan 15 2012
4. Sarah Churchwell, ‘The Great Gatsby delusion’ and ‘The Great Gatsby and the American dream’ for The Guardian. Published Friday 25 May 2012.
5. Anita Sethi, July 10th 2012, http://litandspoken.southbankcentre.co.uk/2012/07/10/dispatch-from-the-london-literature-festival-the-great-gatsby/
6. Roger Starr for The City Journal
7. Fahrenheit 451: Did Bradbury 's Dystopia Come True? - Chris Taylor: Jun 06, 2012
NOVELS
1. ‘The Great Gatsby’ Scott Fitzgerald
Wordsworth Classics
Publication Date: 1 May 1992
2. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Ray Bradbury
Publication Date: 31 Jan 1991
German Reclaim Edition
3. (with reference to) ‘The Wasteland’ T.S Eliot
Faber 80th Anniversary Edition
Publication Date: 7 May 2009