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worldly, highly nuanced perceptions
and sympathies, Nick is as much
the novel’s subject as Gatsby. The
thought he leaves us with is that
the past pulls us back irresistibly:
dreams of progress are fool’s gold.Belated acclaim
When he was planning his novel
in 1923, Fitzgerald wrote that he
wanted to produce “something
extraordinary and beautiful and
simple and intricately patterned.”
He achieved this ambition with
panache, but the book initially
received mixed reviews and sold
poorly. By the time of his death
Fitzgerald thought of himself as a
failure: during the last year of his
life only 72 copies of his nine books
were recorded as sales in his
royalty statements.
Nowadays, The Great Gatsby
and Fitzgerald’s subsequent work,
Tender is the Night, are widely
regarded as among the greatest
American novels ever written.
Tender is the Night follows anarrative that fictionalizes strands
in Fitzgerald’s deeply troubled life,
including adultery, mental illness,
and an acute sense of personal
and creative failure.
The Great Gatsby is the more
acclaimed of the two novels. It is
particularly admired for its forensic
exposure of a flawed milieu; its
finely judged prose, combining
first-person informality withBREAKING WITH TRADITION
superbly cadenced description; its
brilliantly telling dialogue, capable
of revealing a moral vacuum in
the briefest of exchanges; and its
structural accomplishment—for
example, in the placing of Jordan’s
account of Gatsby’s backstory,
which is both a flashback (telling
of past events) and a flash-forward
(because Tom tells of Jordan’s
revelations out of sequence).
Like the rest of the Lost
Generation, Fitzgerald may have
been reacting to the mood of his
times—disillusionment, a loss
of moral bearings, and the focus
on the material rather than the
spiritual—but his novel transcends
the moment of its creation. This is
in part because of its continuing
relevance in today’s climate of
celebrity, corporate greed, and a
world economy driven by inflated
asset prices. But the book is also
timelessly important because
every aspect of it, aesthetically,
bears witness to Fitzgerald’s
unassailable mastery of his art. ■The characters in the novel are fleshed
out by the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway,
who has come to New York to seek his
fortune. He befriends Gatsby, who is in love
with Nick’s beautiful cousin, Daisy, who is in
turn married to the boorish Tom Buchanan.So we beat on, boats against
the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.
The Great GatsbyJay
GatsbyNick
CarrawayMyrtle
WilsonGeorge
WilsonMeyer
WolfshiemDaisy
BuchananJordan
BakerTom
BuchananFriendsDislikesSpouseDating Cousins Loves Loved Love affairCriminal partnersFriends SpouseUS_228-233_Gatsby.indd 233 08/10/2015 13:08