Chicago '09ers: let's get to know each other!

spazzity
Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:40:51 +0000

ecksfactor: I completely agree with your assessment of Nick as an upper-class outsider, but I think that it adds another dimension to the social commentary, on many levels. First of all, the 20’s, as an artistic/literary period, were all about being disillusioned, I think it was Fitzgerald who described his generation as the one who “had grown up to find all wars fought, all Gods dead, and all faiths in mankind shaken” (or something to that effect), and The Great Gatsby is, after all, about the fall of the American Dream. In this sense, I think that Fitzgerald is attempting to portray also the decay of the upper-class, but from the point of view of an outsider “priviledged” (please note my use of parentheses here) enough to see/experience how the other half lives, so to speak lol. But the fact that Nick is an arrogant moron seems to be cautioning Fitzgerald’s largest audience, the “outsiders”, to not be too arrogant themselves, or they too will be caught up in the fall/decay of the American Dream themselves – or have they already? (times like this, I so wish I had a long beard to thoughfully stroke, but as a female, I don’t think that would work too well lol)

Also, with F. Scott Fitzgerald you have to keep in mind that although he’s one of my favorite authors, he has pretty much zero creativity in coming up with plots, because EVERY SINGLE book/short story he writes is largely autobiographical, plot-wise. So keeping in mind the way that The Great Gatsby is autobiographical to Fitzgerald, there are many elements that make it so but significant to my point here (and yes, I do have one…somewhere, lol) is that Fitzgerald himself was a poor boy who entered upper-class society, and remained there for most of his life, but the entire time he would somewhat be seeing everything from the perspective of an outsider. So what does that mean in terms of relating Nick to Fitzgerald? Gatsby to Fitzgerald?..what about Nick to Gatsby?

Um, sorry that was way longer than I intended it to be lol, but The Great Gatsby gets me excited! It’s one of my favorite books! By one of my favorite authors!