Francis Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

​​In a nutshell

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American author from the Jazz Age. His most emblematic work was The Great Gatsby.

The Author's Life

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota in 1896. He attended Princeton University where he began to write and have interactions with rich young men. In 1920, he published This Side of Paradise which gave rise to the standard of living of the Roaring Twenties and represented the feeling of emptiness behind materialism. A year later, he married Zelda Sayre and settled in New York, where they lived a life full of parties, alcohol, and drugs.

In 1922, Fitzgerald published Tales of Jazz Age and The Beautiful and Damned, which were considered a reflection of the ideas of the Lost Generation. In the same year, Fitzgerald went to Paris and finished writing The Great Gatsby (1925), though at the moment it was not so well-liked. Back in the States, Fitzgerald was known as an alcoholic and had to write film scripts to pay his debts. His last novel to be published was Tender is the Night, which portrayed the disappointment and failure of the ideals of the Twenties. Francis Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 before completing his last novel The Last Tycoon.

Main Topics

Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote about themes such as money, class, ambition, loss, love, romance, and discipline vs willpower. However, his most emblematic theme was the decay of the American Dream.

THE EFFECTS OF THE ROARING TWENTIES

Fitzgerald emphasized in his novels the effects of the Jazz Age, such as the corrupting effects of Prohibition and the world of greed and money. His work The Great Gatsby, portrays a clear image of this topic, for example, the connection of Gatsby's material achievements to the myth of going from 'rags to riches'. Furthermore, Fitzgerald depicts the decay of the generation through the characters of Tom, Jordan, and Daisy and their careless and selfish pursuit of pleasure.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a novel written by Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1925. The setting of the novel is Long Island in the Jazz Age. It depicts the tragic love story between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

THE PLOT

The story begins with Nick Caraway who recently moves to Long Island. His neighbor, Jay Gatsby, is a mysterious man who gives big parties every Saturday night in order to impress and meet a woman from his past, Daisy Buchanan, whom he is still in love with. Nick's cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom, introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a young woman with whom Nick establishes a romantic relationship. One day, Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties, where he finally meets him and asks Nick for his help to get back with Daisy.

Later, Nick invites both of them, Daisy and Gatsby, to have tea at his place, and so they begin an affair. On the other hand, Tom maintains an affair as well, with a woman named Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the valley of ashes. Tom suspects his wife's fling, so he confronts her and Gatsby and reveals that Gatsby's fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. While driving home, Daisy runs over Tom's mistress, Myrtle, Gatsby tries to take the blame to protect Daisy, however, she leaves him and reconciles with her husband. In the end, Gatsby is shot in his garden by Myrtle's husband who recognized Gatsby's car as the one that killed his wife. Nick moves back to Midwest and ends his relationship with Jordan, he later ponders on how Gatsby and Daisy's relationship was sabotaged by money and dishonesty, in this way Fitzgerald portrays how the American dream of happiness and selfishness is over.

JAY GATSBY AND NICK CARRAWAY

In the novel, Gatsby represents the 'self-made man' who intends to build his past through the influence of money but is destroyed in the end. Fitzgerald describes the idea that the American dream has been corrupted by the wish for materialism. On the other hand, Nick embodies the outsider, the one who does not fit the high society and dishonest people. Also, he represents the opposition between the West and the East, Nick returns to the West at the end of the novel, which he idealized as more moral than the East.

NARRATIVE AND SYMBOLIC IMAGES

The story is narrated from Nick's point of view. Fitzgerald does not follow a chronological order; he uses the fragmentation of time and flashbacks to depict the inner world of the characters. Fitzgerald's writing style is composed of a detailed description of senses, colors, and symbols such as Gatsby's house which symbolizes success during the parties and loneliness when it is empty. 

The following text is an extract from Chapter 1, The Great Gatsby:

In this passage, Daisy talks about what she would like her infant daughter to be like. Even though this quote is not directly connected to the main topics of the novel, it portrays the way of thinking of the 1920s, how ignorance, boredom, and seeking fun over intelligence are the values of the generation.