ENGL1001

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ENGL1001 American LiteratureF. Scott
Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)

• Dr. John Masterson
• 6th Lecture
• July 2012

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You can access these presentations through the
ENGL1 blog

• Go to http//witsenglishi.wordpress.com

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Image of Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker from 1974
Film Adaptation Of The Great Gatsby Dr. T.J.
Eckleburg Sign in Background
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Poster for the 1974 Film Adaptation of The Great
Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

• Civilizations going to pieces, broke out Tom
  violently. Ive gotten to be a terrible
  pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise
  of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?
  Well, its a fine book and everyone ought to read
  it. The idea is if we dont look out the white
  race will be will be utterly submerged. Its
  all scientific stuff its been proved This
  fellow has worked out the whole thing. Its up
  to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or
  these other races will have control of things.
  

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19th Century Race Science
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Image from Nazi Concentration Camp
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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7

• Tom - Nowadays people begin by sneering at
  family life and family institutions, and next
  they'll throw everything overboard and have
  intermarriage between black and white.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1

• Something was making him nibble at the edge of
  stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no
  longer nourished his peremptory heart.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9

• I couldnt forgive him or like him, but I saw
  that what he had done was, to him, entirely
  justified. It was all very careless and
  confused. 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

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George Orwell, 1984
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Michel Foucault
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Image of the Panopticon in Practice
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Description of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Sign, The
Great Gatsby, Chapter 2

• some wild wag of an oculist in order to fatten
  his practice in the borough of Queens.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8

• 'I said God knows what you've been doing,
  everything you've been doing. You may fool me,
  but you can't fool God!'
• 'Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock
  that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J.
  Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and
  enormous, from the dissolving night.
• 'God sees everything,' repeated Wilson.
• 'That's an advertisement,' Michaelis assured him.
  Something made him turn away from the window and
  look back into the room. But Wilson stood there
  a long time, his face close to the window pane,
  nodding into the twilight.

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Fitzgeralds definition of The Jazz Age

• a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all
  wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7

• Daisy to Gatsby - You resemble the advertisement
  of the man ... You know the advertisement of the
  man.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9

• He had shown it so often that I think it was
  more real to him now than the house itself.

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Images from the 1974 Film Adaptation of The Great
Gatsby
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F. Scott Fitzgerald quoted in Andrew Wanning,
Fitzgerald and His Brethren

• All the stories that came into my head had a
  touch of disaster in them the lovely young
  creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond
  mountains of my short stories blew up, my
  millionaires were as beautiful and damned as
  Thomas Hardys peasants. In life these things
  hadnt happened yet, but I was pretty sure living
  wasnt the reckless, careless business these
  people thought.

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William Troy, Scott Fitzgerald the Authority
of Failure -

• In Gatsby Fitzgerald was able to isolate one
  part of himself, the spectatorial or aesthetic,
  and also the more intelligent and responsible, in
  the person of the ordinary but quite sensible
  narrator, from another part of himself, the
  dream-ridden romantic adolescent from St. Paul
  and Princeton, in the person of the legendary Jay
  Gatsby.

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Edmund Wilson F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Fitzgerald is partly Irish and brings both to
  life and to fiction certain qualities that are
  not Anglo-Saxon. For, like the Irish, Fitzgerald
  is romantic, BUT ALSO cynical about romance he
  is bitter as well as ecstatic astringent as well
  as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of
  playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks.

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The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5

• Daisy - It makes me sad because Ive never seen
  such such beautiful shirts before.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Andrew Wanning, Fitzgerald and His Brethren

• The Great Gatsby is Fitzgeralds best novel
  because here the congruity of story and style and
  attitude is closest and most meaningful. Here he
  had a story whose central character not only
  symbolized his own conflicts and confusions, but
  made a moving commentary on a period and a
  country as well.

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