F.

SCOTT
FITZGERALD
1896 - 1940
 GATSBY-THEMED PARTIES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqwM
7gwIpiM
You are invited to the party of the century.
Ladies grab your fur coat and pearls, gents
wear your spats and bow tie and prepare for a
glamorous affair!
[..], my idea of throwing a Gatsby party is not to mix a few tasty cocktails and
suggest that people put on a prety dress that approximates one that might have
been worn in the 1920s. No, my response is to spend years and years intensively
researching what life would have been like in 1922, what Scott Fitzgerald could
have known when he was sat down to write the novel, what he guessed – and what
he had no way of knowing.

blends biography and history with lost

newspaper accounts, letters, and newly
discovered archival materials
The Great Gatsby
(1925)
 The Great Gatsby: Facts
Jeopardy Game Instructions
1.We have 7 (?) teams. Each team will take turns
choosing a category and a point value (e.g., “Characters
for 300”).
2.Questions are statements. Your team must answer in
the form of a question (e.g.,
→ “This character throws extravagant parties to
impress Daisy.”
→ You answer: “Who is Jay Gatsby?”)
3.You’ll have 30 seconds to discuss as a team before
giving your answer.
Only the team whose turn it is may answer first.
4.If the first team answers incorrectly, the question will
be passed to the next team in rotation.
5.Each correct answer earns points.
6.The team with the most points at the end wins!
0 The Great Gatsby: check yourself
 Seminar
Discussion
 Why Gatsby? Why Now?

“‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the

day after that, and the next thirty years?’”
- Vulgarization of the values
The American Dream: no matter what a person’s roots, America
provides the opportunity and the freedom to succeed.
- Money talks, it shapes lives and identities more definitively
than the human values of love, family, and community:
‘She’s got an indiscreet voice,’ I remarked. ‘It’s full of— ‘ I hesitated.
‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that
was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it,
the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter,
the golden girl… (Chapter 7, p. 76)
 The Great Gatsby
0 Setting - summer 1922; East Egg, West Egg, Valley of
Ashes, New York (function, representation, symbolic
meaning),
0 Characters – relationship, world view, dreams and
wishes
0 Nick Carraway – a narrator, observer and participant
 The Great Gatsby: Discussion Questions
0 Consider how the story of The
Great Gatsby is narrated: who
tells the story, how the Then wear the gold hat, if that will
narrative style shapes the move her;
novel’s meaning. If you can bounce high, bounce for
0 Consider the book's title. her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-
0 Reflect on Gatsby’s parties.
What elements of 1920s bouncing lover,
society does Fitzgerald I must have you!
satirise through these scenes? Thomas Parke d’Invilliers
0 What would you
emphasise/focus on if asked
to deliver a lecture on The
Great Gatsby to your fellow
students? Explain your
answer (present supporting
arguments).
 Nick Carraway

1.What kind of narrator is Nick — reliable or

unreliable? Why?
2.Do you think Nick is emotionally involved in the
story he tells? How can we tell?
3.What is Nick’s social position in relation to the other
characters — is he an insider or outsider?
4.Do you think Nick admires or criticizes Gatsby?
5.How does Nick shape the way we understand the
other characters and events?
6.Is Nick more of an observer or a participant? Can he
really stay neutral?
 Nick Carraway
0 a sympathetic narrator Why sympathetic?
0 both observer and participant
0 a limited and imperfect narrator
0 does not understand Gatsby
0 both symptom and analyst of a class-based
society
0 is often surprised by Gatsby
0 helps to examine the way perspective shapes
the reality
0 no absolute truth
 Nick Carraway
0 I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but
what it was I had forgotten long ago. (Chapter 1, p.14)

0 Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,

and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever
known. (Chapter 3, p.39)

0 He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon,

fell into my palm.
"That's the one from Montenegro."
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look .’Orderi di
Danilo’, ran the circular legend, ‘Montenegro, Nicolas Rex’.
"Turn it."
“Major Jay Gatsby”, I read, “For Valour Extraordinary”.
[..] Then it was all true. (Chapter 4, p.43)
The Great Gatsby
(1925)
 The Great Gatsby: Poetic Work
➢ For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her
glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—
then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like
children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
➢ A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss
Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on
the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased
altogether.
➢ Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.
➢ The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in
the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew
the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the
moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—
fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s
mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver
pepper of the stars.
 Symbols and Symbolism

0 Symbol - a thing (object/colour/activity/space etc.)

that represents or stands for something else,
especially a material object representing something
abstract;
0 Symbolism - the use of symbols to represent ideas or
qualities;
0 Symbolic meaning attributed to natural objects or
facts
 Symbolism of Space: East Egg

- I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a

girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

- They were careless people, Tom and Daisy –

they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess
they had made… (Chapter 9, p. 114)
 Symbolism of Space: East Egg

0 represents the old aristocracy

0 moral decay
0 social cynicism connected with New York

- I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl

can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

- They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they

smashed up things and creatures and then retreated
back into their money or their vast carelessness, or
whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made…
(Chapter 9, p. 114)
 Symbolism of Space: West Egg

0 the self-made rich - being vulgar and lacking in social

graces and taste:
Gatsby’s monstrously ornate mansion/his pink suit/a
Rolls-Royce vs. grace, taste, elegance of old aristocracy
(the Buchanans’ tasteful home and the flowing white
dresses of Daisy and Jordan Baker. They were both in
white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if
they had just been blown back in after a short flight
around the house. (Chapter 1, p.7))
 Symbolism of Space: West Egg

0 the self-made rich - being vulgar and lacking in social

graces and taste:
The one on my right was a colossal affair by any
standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de
Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking
new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble
swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and
garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. (Chapter 1)
Symbolism of Space: The Valley Of Ashes

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow

like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where
ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke
and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track,
gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately
the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an
impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations
from your sight.
(Chapter 2, p.16)
Symbolism of Space: The Valley Of Ashes

0 the plight of the poor

0 the moral and social decay:
This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow
like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where
ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke
and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track,
gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately
the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an
impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations
from your sight.
(Chapter 2, p.16)
 “The Great Gatsby” is about …

Breakout Room Task: Defining the Novel’s Focus

Step 1: Discuss the following prompt in your group:
“The Great Gatsby is a novel about...”
Step 2: Complete the sentence with one defining
concept or focus that, in your view, best captures the
novel’s central idea or conflict.
0 Step 3: Be ready to share your group’s choice and
briefly support it with 1–2 key examples from the
novel.
 THE GREAT GATSBY
0 THEMES:
• The decline of the American dream,
• the spirit of the 1920s,
• the difference between social classes, etc.

0 IMPORTANCE of the novel as a literary work

• repetition of motifs throughout the text (e.g. car accidents
that finish with Myrtle’s death)
• The same story told in different variants (Gatsby’s story –
we find out about it gradually, an effect of a jigsaw puzzle)
 Socio-Historical and Literary Contexts

0 Post-war American society: changes;

0 The Roaring Twenties (the “Jazz Age”): flappers,
bootleggers;
0 Modernism: subjective truth, limited perspective,
imperfect narrator;
0 Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age, the American Dream,
Zelda, Europe;
0 The Great Gatsby…
 «The Great Gatsby»:
historical context
Post-war American Society (1920s):
0 The growth of population: increasing
number of emigrants;

0 A constant movement inside the country:

from rural areas to the urban environment
 1917 vs. 1929
0 The population had risen from 102 million in 1917 to
122 million in 1929;

0 For the first time, the majority of population

(approximately 56 %) was living in towns or cities.

How did it affect society?

 1917 vs. 1929

0 Leisure time was taken up with movies,

plays, sporting events.

0 The prices fell, people could afford more

– electric washing machines, telephones,
radios, and, most importantly, cars.
 1920 - 1930

0 the number of cars sold almost tripled

from 8 million to 20 million.
HENRY FORD
(1863 –1947)
 HENRY FORD
0 an American industrialist,
0 the founder of the Ford
Motor Company,
0 developed and
manufactured the first
automobile that many
middle-class Americans
could afford - the Model T
automobile
0 ‘Fordism’: mass
production of
inexpensive goods
coupled with high
wages for workers.
 Cars in ”The Great Gatsby”
Jordan Baker
0 Jordan Baker, does not own a car,
all present 0
0 Tom Buchanan, a form of 0 still associated with cars:
car - Jordan Baker's name is derived from
0 Owl Eyes, symbolism
two major car companies at the time
of the novel, the Jordan Motor Car
0 George Wilson, Company, and Baker Motor Vehicle
Company
0 Jay Gatsby - The Jordan Motor Car Company was
significant due to its marketing to
women (went along with the
women's rights movements; the focus
- on creating beautiful cars )
- represents the newfound freedom
that women were exploring in the
1920s, but she also represents the
negative side of that freedom (a
"rotter driver”, careless)
 Cars in “The Great Gatsby”: Tom Buchanan

➢ represents old money

➢ owns a classy, blue coupe
➢ In the 1920s, coupes - luxury cars only fit for
the wealthiest people (the image that Tom
wants to portray to others).
➢ Speculation: the blue colour of Tom's car is a
literary symbol - it represents the blue blood
of aristocracy.

Tom Buchanan owned a classy, blue coupe

 Jay Gatsby owned a Rolls-Royce

Cars in “The Great Gatsby”: Jay Gatsby

➢ Jay Gatsby's bright yellow, flashy Rolls-Royce is the most significant

➢ the car is incredibly long
➢ the bright yellow signifies Gatsby's richness and becomes the perfect
symbol to represent Gatsby's life (to attract Daisy’s attention)
The two completely different cars - used as symbols to show how
different Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are:
- Tom is from old money; Gatsby is from new money.
- Tom is reserved with his wealth; Gatsby shows it off.
- Tom prefers older, established things, Gatsby likes new and
exciting things.
Cars in “The Great Gatsby”: Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway drove an old Dodge

Any suggestions what it can mean

0 rapid advances in science and technology modernized America;

0 there was a contradictory attitude to the scientific achievements:

- they helped to make the everyday life easier and more comfortable

- the science itself seemed increasingly difficult and contrary to

common sense;

0 as a result, art began to rival science as a way of interpreting reality,

especially in terms of subjective experience
The Roaring Twenties
 The Roaring Twenties:
the right to vote for women (1920); ‘Flappers’.
 The Roaring Twenties:
Prohibition in the United States
➢ a nationwide constitutional ban on the sale, production,
importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages (up to
1933)
➢ Bootlegger
- also boot-legger, "one who makes, distributes, or sells goods
illegally," 1885, American English, originally in reference to those
who sold illicit liquor in states with strict prohibition laws (Iowa,
Kansas);
- originally a nickname given to smugglers in King George III's
reign (1760-1820), derived from the smugglers' custom of hiding
packages of valuables in the legs of their large sea-boots when
dodging the king's coastguardsmen.
- the word enjoyed great popularity in the U.S. during Prohibition
(1920-1933), and the abstracted element -legger was briefly
active in word-formation, e.g. meatlegger during World War II
rationing, booklegger for those who imported banned titles such
as "Ulysses."
 ‘Speak-easies’ (secret nightclubs):
‘bootleg’ alcohol was available
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrQP4CPUzOc
 The Great Gatsby:
literary context

0 experimentation and creative

inventiveness;
0 the writers attempted to coexist with
new philosophical and psychological
interpretations of reality;
0 conventional standards and established
authors were questioned and attacked.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
1844 - 1900
0 German philosopher (‘God is
dead’);
0 one of the most influential of
all modern thinkers
0 unmasked the motives that
underlie traditional
Western religion, morality,
and philosophy
0 believed his own work
represented the dawning of a
new historical era
45
 MODERNISM: THEORIES

➢Also sprach
Zarathustra (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra) (published
between 1883 and 1885)
➢ modernists found support
in his writings –
his existentialist philosophy
held that reality originated
and ended in individual
experience

Portrait of Nietzsche by Edvard

46
Munch, 1906
 PSYCHOANALYSIS

Carl Gustav Jung 1875 - 1961 Sigmund Freud 1856 - 1939

47
 PSYCHOANALYSIS

Following Jung modernist

authors were into search for
❖challenged traditional psychologically effective
ways of understanding equivalents for religion
human beings as (Huxley)
fundamentally rational,
decision-making
individuals Since Freud a psychoanalytic
❖New notions of the understanding of literature
nature of consciousness has become inevitable
appeared:
consciousness is
multiple
48
COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY – the comparison of myths from different
cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics

Comparative mythology
sought basic connections
between the world’s various
belief systems

0 It destabilized faith in
Christianity as a singularly
privileged (“correct”) belief Sir James George Frazer
system 1854 - 1941
Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early
stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative 49
religion
 MODERNISM:
Einstein’s theory of special relativity
➢ four-dimensional spacetime
➢ from the axiom of the
absolute speed of light,
logically deduced the relativity
of time
➢ subsequent to the advent of
relativity theory, there is no
longer any absolute temporal
metric for defining the real
➢ Einstein published two
seminal papers:
- “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter
Körper” (1905; “The Special
Theory of Relativity”)
- “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen
Relativitätstheorie” (1916; “The Albert Einstein 1879 - 1955
General Theory of Relativity”)
50
 MODERNISM:
Einstein’s theory of special relativity

➢In literature:
- relativistic space and time inspired atemporal
time shifts and stream-of-consciousness narration
- use of relativity theory helped shape the content
and form of Modernists’ work

51
 MODERNISM:
Conceptions of Time and Space
Henri-Louis Bergson
1859 -1941
0 known for his arguments that
processes of immediate
experience and intuition are more
significant than
abstract rationalism and science for
understanding reality
0 The modernist use of ‘stream-of-
consciousness’ (reliance on image-
association)

According to Bergson: the flexibility of

our experience of subjective time as
opposed to public time (subjective
point of view)

the first to elaborate what came to be called a process

philosophy, which rejected static values in favour 52
of values of motion, change, and evolution
 MODERNISM
in the broadest sense –

a term for any kind of literary production in the

interwar period that deals with the modern world;
 MODERNISM
More narrowly –

• refers to work that represents the transformation of

traditional society under the pressures of modernity;
 THE GREAT GATSBY
0 A tale of festivity, irony, excessiveness:

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived

from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same
oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of
pulpless halves. (Chapter 3, p.26)
 “THE GREAT GATSBY”:
MODERNITY as represented
- fascination by signs of modernity:
0 Cars
0 Telephones
0 Cinema and photography
0 Artificial light and lightning

- extensive use of these signs

- unusual use of these signs
 “THE GREAT GATSBY”:
MODERNITY as represented
0 Modern life signs are present to:
- describe nature, scenery:
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I
had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again
with the summer. (Chapter 1, p.5)
- describe people:
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then
there was something gorgeous about him [Gatsby], some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were
related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away. (Chapter 1, p.3)
 “THE GREAT GATSBY”:
MODERNITY as represented
0 Modern life signs are present to:
- reveal human feelings, activities, lifestyle:
• The telephone rang inside, startlingly, [..]. I couldn’t guess
what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss
Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy
skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill
metallic urgency out of mind. (Chapter 1, p.12)
• There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the
juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button
was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.
(Chapter 3, p.26)
 Why “Gatsby”? Why Now?
0 nowadays called by many – the modern American novel
0 A novel about ‘production’:
- in the narrow, industrial meaning (cars, phones, buildings),
- as a metaphor (the ‘production’ of people – self-made
Gatsby, of ideas – the idea of America)
0 in many ways prescient:
- prefigured the Great Depression
- mapped a contemporary urban world (a technological,
consumerist, leisure society)
The main characteristics of modern writing

- a focus on impressionism and subjectivity in writing;

- a movement away from the apparent objectivity

provided by omniscient third-person narrators, fixed
narrative points of view, and clear cut moral positions;
 New approaches in modernist writing

0 Character: a disappearance of character summary; the

representation of the self as diverse, contradictory,
ambiguous, multiple;

0 Plot: the use of discontinuous fragments, "moment

time," achronological leaps in time, open unresolved
endings;
 New approaches in modernist writing

0 Point of view (or focalization): a rejection of the single,

authoritative, omniscient point of view; a narrative
focalized through the consciousness of one character
whose point of view is limited;

0 Individualism: a new kind of reality developed, focus

on the inner life, the subjective.
 THEMES

► Alienation of the individual and the artist

► Society as fractured and culture as fragmented

► Sense of dislocation and meaninglessness

► Questioning the value of cultural norms

► Rejecting recorded history and valuing the mythic

► Focusing on the urban, the mundane, and the marginalized

 F. Scott Fitzgerald
critically looked upon
the ‘American Dream’
(the limitless possibilities of wealth, success and
opportunity in contemporary society)

Fitzgerald depicted excess and the new morality of the

young during
the ‘Jazz Age”
 F. Scott Fitzgerald
His short stories and novels –
0 This side of Paradise (1920),
0 The Beautiful and the Damned (1922),
0 The Great Gatsby (1925),
0 Tender is the Night (1934)
0 The Last Tycoon (1941; unfinished) –
a spare, carefully written prose style and deft use of
symbolism.
 F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896 – 1940)
0 Belonged to the ‘Lost generation’

You are all a lost generation.

– Gertrude Stein in conversation

Hemingway popularised the name in “The

Sun Also Rises” (1926)
 F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896 – 1940)
0 born in St. Paul, Minnesota,
0 from a well-to-do family,
0 became the symbol of the Jazz Age
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age

Some of his famous works on the Jazz Age

are:
two collections of short stories
• Flappers and Philosophers (1921),
• The Jazz Age (1922)
and the novel
• The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)
 THE GREAT GATSBY
0 THEMES:
• The decline of the American dream,
• the spirit of the 1920s,
• the difference between social classes, etc.

0 IMPORTANCE of the novel as a literary work

• repetition of motifs throughout the text (e.g. car accidents
that finish with Myrtle’s death)
• The same story told in different variants (Gatsby’s story –
we find out about it gradually, an effect of a jigsaw puzzle)