Robert Ornstein - Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West
Gatsby's perspective is that money can buy everything (73,74, 76)
The American Dream in a corrupt society (73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78)
Gatsby's attitude towards the very rich crystallized (74)
The thirst for money is a crucial motive in Gatsby. (74)
romance belongs to the present and not the past
Those who possess the necessary means lack the will motive, or capacity to pursue a dream. Those with a the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life have it because they are the disinherited
Like his romantic dream, Jay Gatsby belongs to a vanished past.
Gatsby destroys himself in an attempt to seize the green light in his own fingers
Gatsby's his life to recapturing a love lost 5 years before.
East or West? (75)
East
West
a turning back itself of the historic pilgrimage towards the frontier which had, in fact, created and sustained that dream
Characterized as where the high/upper class would live
represents a profound displacement of the American Dream
"bored, sprawling, swollen towns with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old
Characterized as where the middle class would love
Buchanan's lived here - Tom would be "a God damned fool to live anywhere else"
Each step towards the green light shadows some part of Gatsby's ambitious achievement
Gatsby's dream is incorruptible because his great enterprise is not side-street "drugstores" or stolen bonds, bit himself, his fictional past, his mansion and his gaudy entertainments.
the smug conceit of the Rich Boy has hardened into Tom Buchanan's arrogant cruelty
Gatsby wants Daisy to tell Tom that she never loved him because only in this way can the sacrament of Gatsby's "marriage" to her in Louisville - his prior claim- be recognized
we see the charming irresponsibility of the flapper has developed into the criminal amorality of Daisy Buchanan
money is never the final goal
none of Fitzgerald's major characters are materials
the rich are too accustomed to covet it.
Money and Social Class can affect romantic relationships/dreams (77-78)
When Tom begins to unfold the sordid details of Gatsby's career, she shrinks away, she never intended to leave her husband, but now even an affair is impossible.
When Tom begins to unfold the sordid details of Gatsby's career, she shrinks away, she never intended to leave her husband, but now even an affair is impossible.
Tom assumed the role of Long Island country gentleman who keeps a mistress in a mistress in a mid-town apartment
Gatsby is the victim of his own small-town notions of virtue and chivalry
Social Class can change people in the future (78)
his return is not a positive rediscovery of the well- springs of American life.
seemed like a melancholy retreat from the ruined promise of the East from the empty present to the childhood memory of the past
After Gatsby died, Nick returned to Minnesota - he carried a surrealistic night vision of the debauchery of the East.
it is this childhood memory , not the reality of the West which Nick cherishes
unmistakably clear that the East does not symbolize contemporary decadence.
The West the pristine virtues of an earlier America
They are not Westerners any longer, or Easterners, but merely two of the very rich, who in the end represent nothing but themselves. They are careless people, Tom and Daisy, selfish, destructive, capable of anything except human sympathy, and yet not sophisticated enough to be really decadent.
Nick realizes: "They live in the eternal moral adolescence which only wealth can produce and protect.
Fitzgerald adumbrated the coming tragedy of a nation grown decadent without achieving maturity (79)
a nation that possessed and enjoyed early, and in its arrogant assumption of superiority lost sight of the dream that had created it.
Fitzgerald's fable of East and West does not lament the decline of American Civilization (79)
it mourns the eternal lateness of the present hour suspended between the past of romantic memory and the future of romantic promise which ever recedes before us.