When it was published in 1925, The Great Gatsby was almost immediately hailed as an artistic success for its young author, F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940). The novel reflects the outward glitter and the inward corruption of the Roaring Twenties, also known as the Jazz Age, a decade
of prosperity and excess that began soon after the end of World War I
(1914–18) in 1918 and ended with the 1929 stock-market crash.
Like almost all of Fitzgerald’s work, The Great Gatsby is based on the
author’s own life and presents fictional versions of his thwarted loves, excessive drinking, and search for financial success. His wife, Zelda, was
the model for the character Daisy Buchanan, and Fitzgerald drew upon
the lavish Long Island parties he had attended to populate his story with
a mix of intellectuals, frauds, bootleggers (people who sold alcohol illegally during Prohibition), gangsters, flappers (young women whose
shorter dresses and bobbed hairstyles symbolized a new, more liberated
era), and sad young men such as Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator.
The story
Jay Gatsby, born James Gatz, grew up poor in North Dakota and had always aspired to become one of America’s wealthy elite. During World War
I, Gatsby had been an officer in the army when he met and fell in love with the beautiful, upper-class Daisy Fay. Gatsby
had no money or position, but “he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her
believe that he was a person from much the same
stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take
care of her.” When he went overseas, Daisy married Tom Buchanan, but Gatsby never got over
Daisy; he idealized her and the upper-crust world
in which she lived.
The novel tells the story of Gatsby’s attempt
to win Daisy back some four years later. He has
made a great deal of money, partly from bootlegging liquor, and set himself up in an expensive mansion on Long Island. Daisy has given
birth to a daughter; and Tom has taken as his
mistress Myrtle Wilson, the wife of the owner of
a garage in the ash heaps that lie along the road
about halfway between West Egg, the fictitious
Long Island town where Gatsby lives, and New
York City.
The narrator
Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, has a way of distancing himself from
his story without sacrificing intensity. Nick does not particularly like
Tom Buchanan, but he knows and understands him. At first, Gatsby is
a mystery. He spends and entertains too lavishly; he wears pink suits and
drives yellow cars. As the novel progresses, though, Nick comes to see
that the Buchanans were “careless people … who 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.” He realizes that Gatsby, the bootlegger who followed
his dream, was “worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
The ideal and the real
Gatsby is murdered in the end and the Buchanans retreat back into their
world. For all Fitzgerald lets us know, Gatsby dies with his dream of the
ideal Daisy intact. Gatsby’s greatness lies in his capacity for illusion. Had
he seen Daisy for what she was, he could not have loved her with such single-minded devotion. Everything he has done, Gatsby has done in
order to present himself as worthy of Daisy. Through his crassly materialistic efforts to become wealthy, Gatsby achieved more than his parents
had. He felt he was pursuing a perfect dream, Daisy, who for him embodied the elements of success. He mirrors the ambition, despair, and
disillusionment of America in the 1920s: its ideals lost behind the trappings of class and material success.
Fitzgerald no doubt identified greatly with Gatsby and his dreams,
yet he could stand back with Nick Carraway and see how ridiculous the
young man was. Part of Fitzgerald was realistic, aware of the rot festering beneath the glittering surface of his era. The other part was like
Gatsby, forever seeking the elusive ideal. At the end of the book, Nick
looks at Gatsby’s mansion and ponders his life and that of his generation:
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have
seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know
that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity
beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the
night…. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year
by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.…”