Lost Generation Roaring 205 Jazz Age This Side of Paradise Collection of short stories: Flappers and Philosophers. He became very quickly popular both with critics and audiences, popular with magazing with publishing his short stories. He was kind of the golden boy of this age. Influenced by Ezra Pound. He struggled with the mode of writing that would be appropoate for his novels. Personal struggles, his mood, most of his stories have melancholic, tragedic, despite the fact that they are full of parties and live for today. The whole age, Lost Generation, loss of ideals, loss of optimism, the period when taht type of necessary believ in evolution and development in the possibility of finding a purpose at all. Gatsby is the only who has a purpose. He is the embodiment of the nineteenth century. There are no dreams, no carpe diem lifestyle, looking for different sensation but they are above these coulds of hoplessness. You don’t have anything to look forward to. Fitzgerald called it the Jazz Age. In fact he personally and wife Zelda, they were the embodiment of Jazz style. 1925 The Great Gatsby 1922 The Beautiful and the Dammed 1934 Tender is the Night 1941 The Lost Tycoon
Tales of the Jazz Age – short story
Zelda also tried her head with writing, she published Save me the Waltz. From a woman’s perspective. In this book, Gatsby, Fitz… conveys that all the gods are dead, where the remains of the nineteenth century were shattered by the 2nd world war, shaked or destroyed beliefs, where the very possibility of writing authentically was questioned. Omniscient narrator is impossible by this time.
1. Narrator First person narration, naive narrator, focal I, homodiegetic, intradiegetic. He is appropiate for this focal consciousness.. he is a very sensitive young man, notices details that others would not, he is good at storytelling in details. He has access to all circles. We also know that he is an outsider, from a part of the country that is still not trapped in this disillusionment that characterizes New York. The very first pages, certain values are promoted, he lives with advice of his father. Observer of people and environments and he mostly understand the motivations of people around him, he is the one who becomes the confident of everyone, he is a personality who invites people to be intimate with him. He still fails in one thing, he’s subjective.
2. Gatsby (through what we can get to know him, is he a hero or an anti-hero)
We get to know his Gatsby through Daisy’s perspective, through flashbacks, then the narrator, Nick we get to know Gatsby in the same rythm as Nick gets to know him, from gossip. Gatsby himself tells Nick things. The parties that he throws. The house that he owns. From the way he acts, the languge, the conversation seems to be a conversation of no purpose again. The cars they drive, there is a study that analyzes the cars they drive and tells us what they are…. bright yellow car – Gatsby drives. Wants to recreate the past, but it’s not impossible, it’s an interior factor that leads him to his downfall and the exterior factor that he took the blame for the car crush. Remains enigmatic, we get glimpses from his background from different parts of his life, but he remains mysterios, Nick meets Gatsy at the party, most people don’t even know his physical appearance. Not the hero in the universal sense, he is motivated by his self interest. Material interest, all the money in the world, emotional interest, he wants to conquer Daisy back. Hero because he wants to fight for the old values, dreams, that type of existence where there are morals. Period of prohibition with alcoholic issues. Nick is educated, sensitive, with moral compass, he comes from outside, he is related to Daisy. He seems to be the ideal character for the role of the hero and protagonist. We still symphatize with Gatsby anyway, although he might have taken part in some fishy business. He is the only who has a purpose, is couragous enough to dream. Low born hero of American fiction, despite whatever is going around him, he finds sth moral compass what is right and what is wrong. He very much reminds us what Emmerson calls self-reliance and that type of American individualism and optimism thta characterized the nineteenth century. Nick lacks of purpose, he is trying to make sense around the world. This cannot be held up for more. The love between him and Daisy, Gatsby would not look at Daisy as an object it is the tragedy the tragic consequence of American optimism that Gatsby carries. Daisy – quite empty, not very intelligent, confused. She doesn’t really know what she wants, her emotional intelligence is enough to realize that something is missing from her life but incapable of doing anything in order to change this. Towards the end, we have another very important source of information… Gatsby’s father gives Nick a book with his daily routine, Benjamin Franklin, self-improvement. Gatsby is the 20th century, he is an anachronism (antonim: neologism) He is the embodiment of that type of the American man who builds himself up very much in the mode of Benjamin Franklin’s Self-made man, first besteller of the world, Way to Wealth, how you make your way to be wealthy, in the sense that he bears all those ideals and thoughts of the nineteenth century, a very strong belief in evoltuion in improvement and endless possibilites. He carries values that have been lost by the 20th century. He is a tragic hero as well, the tragedy of the jazz age is that all these values die together with Gatsby. 3. Repetition of symboloc elements, East versus West… Daisy and Tom’s house and Gatsby’s villa and Nick’s cottage. The cars they drive. Valey of ashes. When you thrive to New York, you have to cross it and what does it stand for?! Old money – new money. Duality of the age… Nick is not a dreamer he doesn’t have the drive of Gatsby, he has a balance that differ East Egg – West Egg, the homes, Caunterpoint of West Egg, high lifestyle that is supported by people inhabiting the Value of Ashes, the American industry. This is what crashes 29.. without any drive and any possibilites and intertextually links to T.S. Elliot the Waste Land. Green light – goal that can be reached. Gatsby’s hope, green as the colour of hope. The Dollar bill.
In terms of characters, are there any dinamic characters? The only dinamic character of the novel is Nick. He gets to understand the age he lives in, an age without solid value system.
