The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby (Novel)

Author
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Purpose
To show the author’s conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age

Relationship with the Author and the Characters
 Fitzgerald and Carraway
 Thoughtful young man from Minnesota
 Educated at an Ivy League school
 Moves to NYC after the war
 Found the new extravagant lifestyle seductive and exciting

 Fitzgerald and Gatsby
 Idolizes wealth and luxury
 Falls in love with a beautiful young woman while at military camp

Narrator
Nick Carraway; he also implies that he is the book’s author

Point of View
Both first and third person
 Presents only what he himself observes

Tone
 Ambivalent and contradictory; sometimes he seems to disapprove Gatsby, and sometimes he romanticizes and admires Gatsby, describing events in nostalgic and elegiac tone

Background
 Year written: 1925 (the Jazz Age)
 American economy soared; great prosperity for majority
 Prohibition (18th Amendment in 1919)
 ‘bootleggers’
 Money is everything

Plot
 Nick Carraway moves from Minnesota to New York (West Egg) to learn about bond business
 West Egg: wealthy and fashionable area; where the “New Rich” live
 Nick has social connections with East Egg, where the “Old Rich” live
 Nick’s classmate at Yale, Tom Buchanan, lives with Nick’s cousin Daisy in East Egg
 Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, in the Valley of Ashes
 Valley of Ashes is a gray industrial dumping ground
 At one party, Nick breaks Myrtle’s nose because she taunts Tom about Daisy

 At Gatsby’s party, Gatsby tells Jordan that he was in love with Daisy
 Stares at the green light at the end of her dock
 Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle was to impress Daisy
 Nick arranges a reunion for Gatsby and Daisy, and they start an affair.
 Tom is increasingly suspicious about their relationship; realizes what’s going on as he noticed Gatsby’s passionate stare at Daisy.
 They drive into NYC, and Tom confronts Gatsby in