SCOTT FITZGERALD
Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896. He studied in a Catholic boarding school in
New Jersey and in 1913 he went to Princeton University, where he began to write.
In 1917 he left to join the army and started to work on his first novel, This side of paradise,
which he published in 1920. The book portrayed the lifestyle of young people in the Roaring
Twenties and the sense of loss and emptiness hiding behind the cult of money and
materialism.
The novel was very successful and made him rich and famous.
In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre.
They settled in New York, where they lived in luxury spending money on amusements,
parties, alcohol and drugs. Fitzgerald had to work hard to keep up with their expensive
lifestyle.
In 1922 he published Tales of the Jazz Age and the novel The beautiful and damned.
In the same year the Fitzgerald family went to Europe and spent some time in Paris on the
French Riviera, where Scott finished his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby, published in
1925. It was not a commercial success and marked the beginning of the decline of the
author's popularity.
Back in the United States, Fitzgerald started to write film scripts to pay his debts. He was by
now and alcoholic, and his wife suffered from mental instability.
In 1934 he published Tender is the night, where he dealt with the failure of the dreams and
ideals of the Twenties. In 1939 he began The last tycoon, a novel about Hollywood and the
American dream, but he died of a heart attack in 1940 before it was finished.
THE GREAT GATSBY
PLOT
Nick Carraway, moves from the midwest to New York in 1922. He rents a house in the West
Egg district of Long Island. His next-door neighbour is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man who
gives extravagant parties every Saturday night, hoping to meet his former lover Daisy.
Daisy is Nick's cousin, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, a former classmate of Nick's at
Yale. They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom he
begins a romantic relationship. Jordan tells Nick that Tom has a lover, Myrtle Wilson, who
lives in the "valley of ashes", an industrial area.
Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties. There he meets Gatsby himself, who is
still in love with Daisy and asks Nick to help him see her again.
Nick invites both of them at his house and they begin an affair.
Tom grows suspicious of the relationship between Gatsby and his wife and confronts them at
the Plaza Hotel in New York.
He reveals that Gatsby made his fortune through bootlegging and other illegal activities.
While driving back to Gatsby's house in his car, Daisy runs over Tom's mistress but does not
stop. Gatsby hides the car but Myrtle's husband finds out that Gatsby's car killed his wife.
To defend Daisy, Gatsby does not protest his innocence but Daisy deserts him and
reconciles with her husband.
Gatsby is finally shot in his garden by Tom. Nick arranges his funeral but nobody comes. At
the end he breaks up his relationship with Jordan and moves back to the Midwest.
THE DECAY OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald portrays and criticises the American way of life in the Jazz
Age.
The novel is very American in the choice of themes: the relationship between Gatsby's
material achievements and the myth of going from rags to riches; the confrontation between
the ideals of honour and beauty, and the corrupted world of greed and money; the
destructive effects of prohibition; happiness and individualism; East versus West. Fitzgerald
develops the idea that the American dream has been corrupted by the desire for
materialism.
GATSBY AND NICK
Jay Gatsby is presented indirectly through what other characters think or say about him and
is surrounded by a halo of mystery.
His real name is James Gatz, but he changed it to Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby stands for the self-made man driven by the dream of regaining his past love through
the power of money.
Nick Carraway is both an observer and a participant in the novel. He is the only character
who shows a sense of morals and decency among careless people.
SYMBOLS
The description of the society of the Jazz Age is very detailed and it's scattered with
symbolic images.
For example, Gatsby's car stands for the destructive power of modern society. His house
celebrates his success during the parties, but his loneliness when its empty. The green light
at the end of Daisy's dock symbolises Gatsby's hopes and dreams, the gap between the
past and the present. "The valley of ashes" is where the industrial waste of the city is
dumped: it stands for emotional and spiritual sterility. Blindness is another central symbol for
the carelessness of the characters, who do not wish to see. They seek out blindness in the
form of drunkenness, contempt for danger and the selfish pursuit of pleasure. The only
character who can truly see is Nick.
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
Nick Carraway is the narrator from whose point of view all the events and characters of the
story are presented. He is a retrospective narrator who, after going through an experience,
looks back on it with better understanding. Fitzgerald rejects chronological order and uses
fragmentation of time and flashbacks to represent the inner world of his characters.
