The Disillusionment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dreams and Ideals in The Great Gatsby

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1295
Author(s):  
Fahimeh Keshmiri

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the American economy ascended, bringing unprecedented levels of affluence to the nation. The chaos of World War I left America in a state of distress, and the generation that fought the war turned to profligate living to recompense. In this novel, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. In this era, unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, which ends to the collapse of all characters and society. This novel represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Here we analyze major characters, symbols, themes and plot of this masterpiece as a tragedy, and a social novel. This creative work has been identified as one of the greatest novels of all time with Fitzgerald's incredible use of realism and symbolism. Moreover; there are some elements that make this work a modernistic and existential one. These key elements that made this work a success are obvious in the development of characters, plot, themes and setting throughout the novel. It is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Jenison Alisson dos Santos ◽  
Caio Antônio de Medeiros Nóbrega Nunes Gomes ◽  
Elisa Mariana de Medeiros Nóbrega

Fitzgerald is considered by many to be the spokesperson of the 1920’s post-World War I, offering his readers a distinctive look into the Golden Age of the U.S.A.. This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The great Gatsby (2001) and its representation and criticism of the historical context in which author and novel are inserted: the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties of the United States of America. For this purpose, our critical framework is based on Bloom’s (2006) and Heise’s (2001) studies on the subject, targeting a pertinent dialogue with Fitzgerald’ s work. As a result of our articulation between the critical framework and the corpus, we were able to recognize how the American author managed to express in his work a keen perception of the social conventions and the morals of the Jazz Age, of both the overt (the parties and the ostentation) and the covert aspects (the emptiness of that society and the unspoken post-war dread) of his time.


Author(s):  
David A. Rennie

This chapter overviews how Fitzgerald’s war writing was refracted through his evolution as a writer, from The Side of Paradise—his chaotic and immature debut novel—through his experimentations with naturalism in The Beautiful and Damned, to the ambiguous portrayal he gives of World War I in The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night, while more stylistically mature than Fitzgerald’s first novel, I argue, revisits many of the representational strategies explored in his debut. Like Boyd, Fitzgerald’s World War I-related projects were caught up in his commercially necessitated magazine fiction and spells in Hollywood.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
A. Diadechko

The article deals with the portraying “Roaring Twenties” which marked a legendary and unprecedented period in the history of American society. Though this era goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, it has never stopped arousing deep common interest because of its uniqueness. Having been abundantly reflected in numerous pieces of art and literature, “Roaring Twenties”, synonymously named “The Jazz Age”, go on provoking public discussion and reevaluation. If viewed in literary terms, this epoch is certainly linked with the name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and with his best known novel “The Great Gatsby” filmed five times. The writer is considered to be one of the best chronicler of the American 1920s. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece had embodied many symbols and icons of America which travelled though one hundred years and still feature contemporary society. The articles attempts to outline extra-lingual information and data that shape the temporal and cultural background of the novel. It aims at providing the readers with sufficient additional information that may significantly enlarge on the novel context grasping. It proposes a detailed description and interpretation of symbols and markers of the American 1920s which typically feature “Roaring Twenties” and the ways they are projected onto Fitzgerald’s story. In particular, the focus is made on American Dream doctrine, New York of the 1920s, the conflict between “the old money” and “the new money”, feminism and fashion, alcohol and crime, music, cars. Some parallels between the author’s life story and his characters are also specified.


Author(s):  
Jackson R. Bryer

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (b. 1896–d. 1940), named after his distant relative, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at private schools there and in the East. He attended Princeton University, dropping out to join the army after the United States entered World War I. While in the service, he began his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which he revised twice before its publication in 1920. It is a highly autobiographical account of its author’s teenage and college years; its frank descriptions of adolescent behavior and its unique literary form brought Fitzgerald literary success and made him and his glamorous young wife, Zelda, celebrities as the prototypical couple of the 1920s and its Jazz Age culture. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which, again partially autobiographically, follows the lives of a young couple through the tumultuous early years of their marriage, was not nearly as successful with the critics and the public as his first had been, but after a failed attempt at writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), he produced in The Great Gatsby (1925) the intricately patterned, poetic, and concise novel that is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American works of fiction. Thereafter, he struggled to complete his fourth novel, continuing to write short stories to offset his constant money problems, which were increased in the early 1930s by his wife’s mental illness. When Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934, its focus on wealthy young Americans on the Riviera was not received well by an America struggling through the Great Depression, but increasingly it has come to be regarded as, if not equal to The Great Gatsby, certainly a major literary work. Similarly, some of Fitzgerald’s short stories, which he tended to dismiss as potboilers written to support his often-extravagant lifestyle, are now thought to be among the best of that genre. Fitzgerald is admired for the skill and accuracy with which he depicted his era, for the beauty and artistry of his style, and for what his first biographer, Arthur Mizener, described in the introduction to Afternoon of an Author (Fitzgerald 1958, cited under Selected Works: Reprinted Material) as “the curious way in which he combined the innocence of complete involvement with an almost scientific coolness of observation” (p. 3).


1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic S. Lee

In recent years we have witnessed a revival of interest in the National Resources Committee (NRC) and its work on national planning. The research shows that the roots of national planning at the NRC are found in the Progressive Era, when individuals sought, through city, regional, and economic planning, to bring order to American society, in the government's management of the economy during World War I, and in Hoover's attempt at macromanagement of the economy. The research also shows that national economic planning, as distinct from other forms of planning, was an important component of the committee's work. In regard to this, researchers have acknowledged that Gardiner Means, as director of the Industrial Section of the Industrial Committee and author of The Structure of the American Economy, Part I: Basic Characteristics, was an important and outspoken advocate of economic planning within the NRC, but they have been less clear as to his specific contributions to economic planning. Moreover, the researchers have not extensively investigated the NRC position toward national economic planning, the economic models from which national economic plans would be developed, and the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the NRC approach to national economic planning. These omissions are not surprising inasmuch as neither Warken's (1979) nor Clawson's (1981) general coverage of the NRC provided much more than a brief and superficial description of the Industrial Section and a listing of its most important publications. Kalish (1963), on the other hand, discussed Means and the Industrial Section in more depth but in such a disjointed manner that it is impossible to grasp the movement toward economic planning that took place in the NRC and the important role Means played in the process. Finally, neither Chapman's (1981 and 1983) nor Jeffries's (1987) discussions of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the activities of the NRC dealt specifically with its impact on Means's work on economic planning.


Author(s):  
Rasmus Navntoft

The German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) perceived World War I as a moral battle against the civilization project rooted in the European enlightenment. Like many other German intellectuals of that time, Mann stresses an opposition between the concept of culture and that of civilization – this conflict is seen as inherent in the European soul – and defends Germany’s right to remain a culture that does not evolve into a civilization. The concept of culture can contain irrational features such as mystical, bloody and terrifying teachings, whereas civilization is characterized by reason, enlightenment, skepticism and hostility towards passion and emotion. In his major work The Magic Mountain (1924) however, Mann tries to overcome this opposition and displays, through the metaphors of the text, that a new humanism is dependent upon a mystical and completely illogical balance between culture and civilization. The main character of the novel does not succeed in finding this balance. But, nonetheless, Mann continues to see the possibilities of a new humanism through this perspective in order to point out a humanistic hope in the shadesof two European world wars.


2022 ◽  
pp. 096394702110481
Author(s):  
Raksangob Wijitsopon

The present study adopts a corpus stylistic approach to: (1) examine a relationship between textual patterns of colour words in The Great Gatsby and their symbolic interpretations and (2) investigate the ways those patterns are handled in Thai translations. Distribution and co-occurrence patterns were analysed for colour words that are key in the novel: white, grey, yellow and lavender. The density and frequent patterns of each word are argued to foreground an association between the colour word and particular concepts, pointing to symbolic meaning potentials related to the novel’s themes of socioeconomic inequality and destructive wealth. The textual patterns are compared with what occurs in three Thai translations of the novel. While most of the colour images are directly translated, non-equivalents tend to be applied to figurative uses of the colour terms. This results in some changes in textual patterns of the colour words in the translated texts, which can in turn affect readers’ interpretations of colour symbolism in the novel.


2020 ◽  
pp. 209-230

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.


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