The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

From being a critical and commercial failure to becoming a literary classic and a symbol of the American dream

Essay by Alexis Barroso

Preface

The Great Gatsby is a novel which marked a turning point not only in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life but also in the American nation. When it was first published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, in New York, early reviews were not particularly positive and the book was not a commercial success, especially compared to his earlier works such as The Beautiful and Damned and This Side of Paradise, as no more than 21,000 copies were sold in its first year of publication. However, it is now being considered a classic of American literature and a touchstone across cultures.
How could one explain this?

The story is told by Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel through which Fitzgerald manages to maintain critical distance. He is a young man, originally from Minnesota, in the Mid-West, who has settled in New York as a bond salesman. He is often used as a confidant and becomes involved in the life of Gatsby, who becomes a true friend. In this book, Nick appears as a lucid observer of the society of the time, of the superficiality of the bourgeoisie and of the power of money over human relationships.

Jay Gatsby is a young millionaire living in luxury and debauchery, who likes to show off his wealth to dazzle others. He organizes grandiose parties in his large mansion that attract hundreds of guests, but he often remains unobtrusive during these receptions and seems to be despised by his guests, who spread the wildest rumours about his past. As the novel progresses, we learn that he comes from a poor farming family and that his fortune is likely based on criminal activities, including alcohol smuggling. Gatsby is obsessed with money, but he is most consumed by his feelings for Daisy, whom he met five years earlier, but who escaped him while he was drafted into the war. His love for her is obsessive. Gatsby is ready to do anything to win her back and this passion becomes all-consuming, to the point of making him inconsolable. He will die in the general indifference of those who knew him.

Daisy Buchanan is Tom Buchanan’s wife and a distant cousin of Nick. She is described as beautiful and rich, coming from a wealthy family, courted by many, including Gatsby. She is attached to her life of luxury, but does not seem happy with Tom, her husband. Throughout the novel, she appears cold and distant.

Tom Buchanan is Daisy’s rich husband. He is brutal, arrogant and often hypocritical, racist, sexist and does not hesitate to cheat on his wife with Myrtle. He uses his wealth to control and dominate others. When he learns of the affair between his wife and Gatsby, he reacts with indignation.

Jordan Baker is Daisy’s friend. She is seen by Nick as a beautiful young woman and is a high-level golfer.

The plot, with love passions at its core, does not fully reflect the romantic tone of the text filled with poetry. However, The Great Gatsby is much more than just a candid love story, it is also a social novel. The somewhat innocent Gatsby believes in vain in the “American dream” embodied by Daisy’s beauty, whom he has encountered again, one summer, after years of wait.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald makes use of the “relative point of view”: reality has no existence of its own, only the vision of the characters counts. The dialectical exploration of reality and the imaginary is based on the alternation between narrative and discourse.

Thus, the evolution of the narrator’s point of view on Gatsby constitutes a novel within a novel: Nick Carraway can sympathize with Gatsby and sometimes even share his wonderment and fiery impulse, but at the same time, he is aware that his hopes are illusory and he sharply criticises the narrowness and vulgarity he perceives in the American dream.

This book also serves as a metaphor. Through it, Fitzgerald explores his own contradictions: his fascination for parties and his awareness of the imposture represented by the hustle and bustle of the 1920s, period commonly known as the “roaring twenties” or the Jazz Age.

When Fitzgerald decided to write his third novel, The Great Gatsby, initially named Trimalchio in West Egg and Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, he consciously wanted to make something more artistic and creative that his previous two books. “It took him about two and a half years to write and edit it, in between a failed play production, financial struggles, and a move to France.”[1]

Brought to the stage in 1926 by Owen Davis, then to the screen numerous times ⁠– the most recent and well-known version being Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation ⁠– the novel established itself as a symbol of the period.

Studied sources

Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel was published in 2014 and written by Bob Batchelor, Professor of Communication, founding editor of the Popular Culture Studies Journal and editor of the Contemporary American Literature series published by Rowman & Littlefield. In this book, he provides multi-layered interpretations of Fitzgerald’s piece and explains why it is still relevant today. Here, Batchelor pleas for the importance of literature and the humanities while shedding light on how The Great Gatsby has shaped and reflected certain values over time in American society and the rest of the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context published in 2013 is a collection composed of forty original essays from international scholars and edited by Bryant Mangum, Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and contemporary American literature researcher. Said essays reveal the contexts that have particular relevance for Fitzgerald’s work. Amongst these, the following essays particularly caught my attention:

To better understand Fitzgerald’s character, I read Fitzgerald’s Biography by Cathy W. Barks, the essay on his works’ Contemporary Critical Reception by Jackson R. Bryer, and the one about American literature during the World War I period by James H. Meredith. To get a better grasp of the historical and social contexts as well as the popular culture in the Jazz Age, I have also studied Suzanne del Gizzo’s essay on Ethnic Stereotyping, Peter L. Hays’s essay on Class Differences in Fitzgerald’s Works, Heidi M. Kunz’s analysis on Gender in the Jazz Age, Elizabeth Bouzonviller’s essay on American Expatriates in France and, finally, Christopher Armes’s paper on the part played by Parties at the time, which is an equally important theme explored in Gatsby.

Books and papers above-mentioned already gave me sufficient information about American modernism, the context of the period and insights on the author and his works, but Ronald Berman’s Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway from 2009 contained elements of interest as well.

I initially planned to make use of the book entitled Quand l’Europe retraduit The Great Gatsby : Le corps transfrontalier du texte by Véronique Béghain for a complete part of this essay as I found the subject of retranslation very interesting, but ultimately did not use it due to the topic’s wideness. Same goes for Greg Forter’s Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, published in 2011, which complemented Suzanne del Gizzo and Heidi M. Kunz’s essays on the topic.

Critical reception – from its publication to the present day.
How did The Great Gatsby manage to endear itself to critics?

When published in March 1925, Gatsby received mixed reviews. Many critics in the 1920s thought that The Great Gatsby was not as good as Fitzgerald’s earlier novels, particularly his first novel, This Side of Paradise. While he received private letters of praise from writers such as T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, public reviews were mixed at best.

In his review published in The Chicago Tribune, literary critic H.L. Mencken said the following:

“Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby is in form no more than a glorified anecdote. […] This story is obviously unimportant and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. […] Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.”[2]

In the same way, Ralph Coghlan from the St. Louis Dispatch said “altogether it seems to us this book is a minor performance” and complained about the absence of “youthful sparkle and idealism of This Side of Paradise”, his previous novel.[3]

However, there were some positive reviews. The Los Angeles Times critic said:

“Character could not be more skilfully revealed than it is here.” [4]

The New York Times critic called it:

“A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well – he always has – for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.”[5]

Nowadays, the critics unanimously agree on the fact that Gatsby is a classic of American literature. Although the book is still receiving negative reviews: (“Why is this a classic? Bad writing, long run-on pompous sentences, totally boring characters and very little plot don’t add up to a classic in my opinion.”[6]), most are very positive (“If the Great Gatsby had gone through just one more rewrite, it would be a flawless and poetic novel depicting New York during the early 1920s. Gatsby comes alive on the page through Fitzgerald’s masterful command of dialogue and character development.”[7]; “The Great Gatsby is a recognized classic. [This is] a novel with themes that reach beyond the narrow limits of its time.”[8]) As of April 2021, the book received an overall score of 4.4/5 based on 14,000 reviews on amazon.com and continues to be studied and praised by scholars and readers alike.

“Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby’s story from the very start. Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in 1925, Fitzgerald declared that “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” Fellow writers like Edith Wharton admired it plenty, but as the critic Maureen Corrigan relates in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, popular reviewers read it as crime fiction, and were decidedly underwhelmed by it at that.”[9]

This notion of misunderstanding is also conveyed in Bob Batchelor’s book in which he states the following: “Many simply do not realize that Gatsby is a novel of ideas masked within a novel of action.”[10] This is probably one of the reasons why the book did not receive good reviews at the time of its publication.

Throughout the 1950s, The Great Gatsby started to grow in popularity and became subject of an important literary criticism. Critical attention by professors and graduate students caused The Great Gatsby to be placed on more college syllabi. The book eventually ended up on high schools’ curriculums which caused it to become more and more popular each year.

The prose, symbolism, and relatively short length contributed to making the book popular amongst English teachers and literature professors. In the same manner, the timelessness of the novel’s themes, the broken promise of the American Dream and doomed love made it a valuable source to study.

As time passes by, social and historical context evolves. This change of point of view of Fitzgerald’s work gave a totally new dimension to it. The apparition of a nostalgia of the Jazz Age starts to operates after World War II as critics starts to adopt a new vision of Gatsby. To explain this phenomenon, writer Philip Hensher states:

“When we are confident, and booming, and full of trust in our own splendor, The Great Gatsby seems like a curiosity, an anecdote as it did to its first readers. But when things are going wrong all round, and we are trying to remember what it was like to live within a magnificent dream–to be deceived by what we want–then it speaks to us.”[11]

In other words, what was not perceived yet by most literary critics in the 1920s is that the novel accompanies the reader throughout his or her life and throughout the evolution of morals and of the society we all live in. This variety of possible interpretations is to a large extent what makes its richness.

Undoubtedly, given the terror of the Great War, Gatsby’s reach back into a nostalgic vision of the past makes the novel more interesting, nuanced, and open for interpretation.

With the 1920s firmly in the past, the novel can be appreciated as a reflection of that particular time period. The readers and critics of the 1920s not appreciating the brutally honest description of this decadent era could partly explain the lukewarm reviews the book received at the time.

A keepsake from the Jazz Age? A symbol of the ‘American dream’? How did The Great Gatsby become a literary classic?

In Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, Bob Batchelor coined the term “Meta-Gatsby”, symbolising the way the novel is employed across mass media and in the collective consciousness. But this process of getting into everyone’s minds was long and tumultuous.

There has always been a tight relation between Fidzgerald’s work and American history. It was written in a particular context, during the roaring twenties, not long after World War I and right before the terrible consequences of 1929’s financial crisis.

The first World War is never far from the action in Gatsby, although the events in the novel take place as it creeps into the past, certainly because war is still on people’s minds. We can only imagine what horrors Nick witnessed before coming to New York. He narrates, but his grasp of his own history is not what he wants to serve up.

After underwhelming sales and mixed reviews, the novel’s popularity and sales were dropping each passing day, up to World War II when the Red Cross program sent copies to U.S. soldiers stationed abroad. “By 1945, 123,000 pocket-sized copies of Gatsby had been shipped to American soldiers.”[12] The story resonated with the young men fighting abroad. This paved the way towards making the book part of the American literary tradition.

To better understand the importance of The Great Gatsby’s link to American history and its intertwinement to the notion of American Dream, I will now provide an analysis of symbolism present in the closing passage of the novel, which addresses the many ideals of the time.[13]

Before moving out back to Minnesota, Nick gets lost in his thoughts as he passes by Gatsby’s empty mansion. This passage marks the end of the novel.

After having read this passage, we could wonder what hidden meanings it contains. We will then explore the notions of love, wealth and hope through the analysis of colour symbolism, we will take a look at the symbols of the passage of time, and finally, we will see the notion of American dream resonates through these pages.

There is a reminiscent use of colours throughout the novel, especially green and blue. The mention of trees “the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house” serves as a reminder of both the green colour that appeared in the previous line and of “the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock”. Said green light can hold several meanings: it could be a representation of Gatsby’s hopes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”. The green colour could also be seen as a symbol of wealth and materialism. Moreover, the greenlight could also mean the go-ahead, towards his ultimate goal in marrying Daisy. The colour blue also appears throughout the novel and is mentioned on page 171, “blue lawn”. The use of this cold colour could be a synonym of sadness and emptiness. The word “moonlight” is reminiscent of the times when Gatsby was standing in the moonlight whilst observing Daisy’s green light earlier in the novel. This “moonlight” could be considered as a symbol of hope fading away.

At the beginning of the extract, “Gatsby’s house was still empty” is in opposition to the following sentence “Those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant” and shows the inevitability and fatality of time passing by. Henceforth, these good times solely lives through Nick’s memories. Gatsby had gardeners at his service and even offered Nick to have his lawn mowed, earlier in the novel, in exchange for helping him plan a date with Daisy. However, in the end, his grass had grown as long as Nick’s “the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine”. This shows that despite Gatsby’s wealth, time goes on passing still and that all human being are equal on this regard. “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him” illustrates again the idea of time passing by. The word “dream” is certainly a metaphor for both Daisy and the American Dream, which for Gatsby are complementary. She was so close to him before the war that “he could hardly fail to grasp” her, but unfortunately, when he came back, it was already too late. In this novel–as in real life–even the wealthiest are constrained by the laws of time.

The last sentence of the novel, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” shows again the fatality of time and the importance of looking back to the past to be able to go on. Here, boats are used as an allegory of time, therefore, we could assume that “the shadowy, moving glow of a ferry-boat across the Sound” represents the future or rather someone advancing towards an uncertain future. In a short monologue on page 171, Nick is thinking about the feelings that the pioneers must have felt when discovering the continent. He senses an almost sacred aura in the “vanished trees” that made Gatsby’s house, as they certainly were the first things the pioneers saw of America. This links the notion of the American dream, which appears through Gatsby’s character–who started from a modest childhood and worked as a janitor and later became an extremely wealthy man–to the discovery of America itself, showing that Gatsby’s hope and ways of thinking were the same as those of the first individuals who came to the American continent and were determined to build something new.

Gatsby’s desire for wealth–represented here by Daisy–clearly is intertwined to the notion of American dream. Gatsby’s earnest hope is what made him so special and so different from the other characters. However, his pursuit of happiness quickly evolved into a quest for mere wealth, with Daisy at the centre of his obsession.

Gatsby became an extremely wealthy man, but there were two things he couldn’t control –even with his money–that lead him to his death: the passing of time and Daisy’s love.

As we have seen, in a way, The Great Gatsby’s inherent ambiguity gives to readers a way to weight how they fit into the American Dream. The main themes and ideas coming from the book, ranging from the fulfilment of said dream to the role of wealth in society, resonate with contemporary readers who struggle with similar uncertainties today.

By the 1960s, The Great Gatsby was regarded as a classic of twentieth-century American fiction; in the twenty-first century, Gatsby’s continued popularity–thanks to its faithful rendition of the period that marked a turning point for the United States–has made it a cultural touchstone across the globe.

Sources

Object:

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

Secondary sources:

Books:

BATCHELOR, Bob. Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel. Plymouth: Rowan & Littlefield, 2014

MANGUM, Bryant. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

FORTER, Greg. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

BERMAN, Ronald. Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2009.

BÉGHAIN, Véronique. Quand l’Europe retraduit The Great Gatsby : Le corps transfrontalier du texte. Pessac : Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013.

Essays:

BARKS, Cathy W., Fitzgerald’s Biography.

BRYER, Jackson R., Contemporary Critical Reception.

MEREDITH, James H., American literature during World War I.

HAYS, Peter L., Class Differences in Fitzgerald’s Works.

DEL GIZZO, Suzanne, Ethnic Stereotyping.

KUNZ, Heidi M., Gender in the Jazz Age.

BOUZONVILLER, Elizabeth, American Expatriates in France.

ARMES, Christopher, Parties in the Jazz Age.

Reviews:

MENCKEN, H.L., The Chicago Tribune, 1925.

FORD, Lillian C., The Los Angeles Times, 1925.

COGHLAN, Ralph, St. Louis Dispatch, 1925.

CLARK, Edwin, The New York Times, 1925.

Costumer reviews taken from amazon.com, 2019-2021.

Articles:

GARBER, Megan. To Its Earliest Reviewers, Gatsby Was Anything But Great. The Atlantic, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/to-early-reviewers-the-great-gatsby-was-not-so-great/390252/

GROSS, Terry & CAURRIGAN, Maureen. How ‘Gatsby’ Went From A Moldering Flop To A Great American Novel. NPR, 2014. https://www.npr.org/2014/09/08/346346588/how-gatsby-went-from-a-moldering-flop-to-a-great-american-novel?t=1616942041230

EDWARDS, Halle. Everything You Need to Know: History of The Great Gatsby. Prep Scholar, 2018. https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-great-gatsby-novel-history

ROBSON, Leo. Why Gatsby was not so great. New Statesman, 2020. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/09/why-gatsby-was-not-so-great

ANDERSON, Hephzibah, The World’s Most Misunderstood Novel, BBC, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210209-the-worlds-most-misunderstood-novel

HENSHER, Philip, Great Gatsby: A Story of the Modern Age, The Telegraph (London), 2012. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9284394/Great-Gatsby-a-story-for-the-modern-age.html

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References and notes:

[1] EDWARDS, Halle. Everything You Need to Know: History of The Great Gatsby. Prep Scholar, 2018.

[2] MENCKEN, H.L., The Chicago Tribune, 1925.

[3] COGHLAN, Ralph, St. Louis Dispatch, 1925.

[4] FORD, Lillian C., The Los Angeles Times, 1925.

[5] CLARK, Edwin, The New York Times, 1925.

[6] Review from Amazon user Eric H. Malloy

[7] Review from Amazon user warnovelist

[8] Review from Amazon user Michael George

[9] ANDERSON, Hephzibah, The World’s Most Misunderstood Novel, BBC, 2021.

[10] BATCHELOR, Bob. Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel. Plymouth: Rowan & Littlefield, 2014 – Preface xiii

[11] HENSHER, Philip, Great Gatsby: A Story of the Modern Age, The Telegraph (London), 2012.

[12] EDWARDS, Halle. Everything You Need to Know: History of The Great Gatsby. Prep Scholar, 2018.

[13] FITZGERALD, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, Penguin Books Modern Classics edition, 2000, Pages 170-172