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This lecture explores the themes of race and social class in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. The lecture examines how these themes are depicted through the characters and their actions.
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ENGL1001 – American LiteratureF. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (1925) Dr. John Masterson 6th Lecture July 2012
You can access these presentations through the ENGL1 blog • Go to – http://witsenglishi.wordpress.com
Image of Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker from 1974 Film Adaptation Of The Great Gatsby – Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Sign in Background
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1 • “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it’s a fine book and everyone ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’”
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.’”
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.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9 • “I couldn’t 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 …”
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.”
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.”
Fitzgerald’s definition of ‘The Jazz Age’ • “a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7 • Daisy to Gatsby - “You resemble the advertisement of the man ... You know the advertisement of the man.”
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.”
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 Hardy’s peasants. In life these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless business these people thought.”
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.”
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.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5 • Daisy - “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”
Andrew Wanning, ‘Fitzgerald and His Brethren’ • “The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s 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.”
