F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940)

- he had announced the lost generation with This Side of Paradise (1920). He represented then the American youth. He spoke for all those who felt that the old generation hadruined this world before passing it on to us.

The Great Gatsby (1925) - the book appeared in the same year with Dreisers An American Tragedy. Both are about young men of humble origins who make their way upward in the world in different degrees and come in contact with a rich girl whom they aspire to possess.

Jay Gatsby - Daisy Buchanan

Clyde Griffith - Sondra Finchley

The conception of both heroes has been conditioned by the Horatio Alger (1832-1899) [chaplain, philantropist, Unitariam minister] literary series Ragged Dick, the Luck and Pluck, Tattered Tom, of popular books for boys, fiction based on the concept that a struggle against poverty and temptation inevitably leads a boy to wealth and fame. In an exemplary manner the two novelists protagonists end by death and a denial of the success dream. Free will appears to be just an illusion. Gatsby and Griffith are pawns in a chain of occurences over which they have no control.

- Gatsbys longing for Daisy and success are perverted versions of the American dream, in agreement to the economic and social ideals of the 1920s in America. He, in the tradition of American 19th century romance derives his values (Daisy as beauty and innocence) from an early pastoral ideal. However, the Fitzgerald protagonist lives and rises within a definite restrictive social framework and his dreams render him a tragical and slightly ridiculous Don Quixote.

- A symbolic illustration of this nostalgic anachronistic position is the picture of Dan Cody (the famous frontier scout, William Frederick Cody, 1846-1917, called Buffalo Bill), found by Nick Carraway in Gatsbys office. It represented all the beauty and glamour in the world , a pioneer debauchee with a hard, empty face. In associating Gatsbys experience with the frontier experience, Fitzgerald identifies the source of American values in the twenties illustrated by Gatsbys career.

- The novel can be perceived in the context of the intellectual and literary movements in America during the early twenties as an extraordinary consciousness of the failing ideals and myths in a pragmatic society after the First World War.

- The darkness of the postwar world for Fitzgerald is felt at the exact social middle - within a context of manners. Unlike Hemingways isolates Fitzgeralds characters always belong to a social unit and function in a context of social differences, are socially defined. Thus the American dream, in The Great Gatsby is the middle class dream, the dream at the center, a degraded, debased version of the Puritan and Transcendental dream. Nick Carraways narrative voice is a normal voice, suggesting a norm, solidly middle class, sensitive within limits. Gatsby himself comes out of the middle class imagination converting romance into wealth, mythicizing money value.

- In Tender is the Night (1934), another naive quester in the world of the rich American upper middle class, Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, is the sacrificed hero eaten by the Monster of Matter, the intricate mechanism of the leisure class represented by Nicole Warren his former wealthy schizophrenic patient and later wife, and her tough sister, Baby.