The Great Gatsby. By Francis Scott Fitzgerald

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28th December, 2020
Prepared by Vladislav Khanin
IL-11

2.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a notable American novelist,
essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He dropped
out of the University to dedicate himself to writing. Soon
his literary works began bring him financial benefits.
His most remarkable works are This Side of Paradise
(1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great
Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934).
Fitzgerald died from heart attack in 1940 at the age of 40.
His success in the USA is comparable to Ernest
Hemingway’s. Nowadays Fitzgerald is widely regarded as
one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

3.

The novel was published in the middle of February
1925. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary
masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great
American Novel.
Writing the novel, the author shifted between Among
Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the
Road to West Egg, Under the Red, White, and Blue, The
Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and The High-Bouncing Lover, but
eventually the title The Great Gatsby was chosen.
I consider the title to be more unsuggestive, because
basing only on the title, we can not make any suggestions
about the plot until we read the story up to the end and
analyze it.

4.

The setting of the novel plays a significant part in the story,
as it represents characters’ mentality and the whole
atmosphere of the novel. The main action takes place in the
USA, Long Island, West and East Egg in 1922. Fitzgerald
called this time “Jazz Age”. This entourage is colorfully
depicted in this literary work and skillfully used in the movie
based on the novel.

5.

In the novel there are several subjects that may be found.
The main ones are formulated as
• Why is society so rigidly classist?
• What is the real point of the American Dream?
• Can people really change?

6.

The row of thematic vocabulary can help to gain a better
understanding of the topic.
Dignity - достоинство
Levity - легкомыслие
Reveries - грезы
Desire - стремление
Desperation - безысходность
Revulsion - отвращение
Decline - упадок

7.

The message of the novel runs as follow: you should live in
a real world and don’t give up to your blind reveries; you
shouldn't change the person you are and have to fake being
yourself in order to get someone’s acceptance or devotion

8.

From my point of view, the plot is not too overloaded and tangled
up, but at the same time this literary work is full of philosophical
reflections and sharp observations of human’s nature that the
author conveys through the presented situations. The charm of
the story lies in dialogues and description of feelings of
characters. The structure of the plot is closed as it consists of all
elements: the exposition, the story, the climax, the denouement
are represented in it.
The novel has a skillfully developed, unhurriedly-moved plot that
takes our attention from the first pages. The story is told in first
person narration that allows readers to get down into the
atmosphere deeper. The narrator presents his memories, so the
readers are given a retrospective of what happened.

9.

The story is told by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who lives on
Long Island but works in Manhattan. Carraway becomes curious about
his neighbor’s Gatsby enormous mansion. Nick soon learns that Gatsby is
in love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin and the wife of one Tom
Buchanan, an acquaintance of Nick’s from Yale. Buchanan takes his old
friend for a day in the city, where Nick learns that Buchanan has a kept
woman, Myrtle, the wife of a long island mechanic.
Spending time with Gatsby, Nick learns that he, Jay Gatz at the time,
and Daisy had once been in love, but Daisy married Tom while Jay was in
Europe during the Great War. In the aftermath of this, Jay Gatz
abandoned his old identity, becoming Jay Gatsby and made a fortune with
the help of notorious criminal Meyer Wolfsheim.
Nick manages to get Gatsby and Daisy together, and while the
meeting is awkward at first, Gatsby soon relaxes and invites Nick and
Daisy back to his mansion. Gatsby and Daisy begin to see each other
secretly with some frequency. Nick and Gatsby also become close, as Nick
is one of the only people who continues to support Gatsby despite the
rumors that circulate around the man. Buchanan eventually confronts
Gatsby in Manhattan about the affair, and the two argue at length about
who it is that Daisy genuinely loves. Daisy claims to love both of them,
but she decides to return to Long Island with Gatsby, not her husband.

10.

The climax of the story hits us when Daisy driving Gatsby’s car
accidentally kills a woman on the side of the road, and then speeds off. It
turns out that this woman is Buchanan’s girlfriend Myrtle—she had only
run out to see the car because she thought it was Buchanan’s.
The denouement is sharp and unpredictable. Urgently needing to settle
the scores, Myrtle’s husband comes to Tom Buchanan and blames him for
the death, but Buchanan informs him that it was Gatsby’s car that killed the
woman. The mechanic goes to Gatsby’s house, where he shoots Gatsby and
then commits suicide. Daisy refuses to confess to her crime, and only a few
people, including Nick and Gatsby’s father Henry, show up for Gatsby’s
funeral. Disillusioned with his time on the East coast, Nick decides to return
to his home in the Midwest.

11.

The characters are described realistically and vividly, in
accordance with the spirit of 1920th in the USA. They are
full-blooded and many-sided, characterized with great
knowledge of a human nature. Most of the characters are
given characteristics by the narrator, Nick Carraway,
where Nick’s views, as critics and biographers often say,
are similar to Fitzgerald’s. So, we are able to say that the
author uses direct characterization.

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In this novel we can observe several types of conflicts, such as
• Man’s interior conflict (Gatsby’s and Daisy’s)
• Man against values (Nick)
• Man against society

19.

Scorn – презрение
Solemn – торжественный
Immoderate – неумеренный
Flatter – льстить
Glow – светиться
Astounding – поразительный
Conceit – тщеславие
Sumptuous – роскошный
Deceiving – обманчивый
Attain – добиться

20.

• Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world
haven't had the advantages that you've had.
• And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
• I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity
• ‘They are a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn
bunch put together.
• So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

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• It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an
arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
• Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the
longest day of the year and then miss it!
• It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may
come across four or five times in life.
• The rich get richer and the poor get children
• Human sympathy has its limits

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To sum it all up, the novel The Great Gatsby is
a remarkable literary work that was relevant
not only for the Americans in late 20th and
30th. Even nowadays it gives food for
reflections to readers of different nationalities
and ages.