American Lit The Great Gatsby Flashcards
‘A faint doubt occurred to him’ as if ‘Daisy tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion’
obsession with an idealised version of Daisy = appearing to criticise the American Dream
‘She blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete’
Daisy becoming the forever fantasy of Gatsby = he idolises her
‘Gatsby believed in the green light’
Gatsby believed in a future he could never attain
‘Your wife doesn’t love you, she’s never loved you. She loves me’
Gatsby is delusional
'’Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!’
naïve and optimistic
‘I hope she’ll be a fool, that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool’
Daisy = femininity and struggles of being a women, conventions placed on them
‘The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly’
Emotional journey = collapse of his dreams
‘I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life’
Both attraction and repulsion towards wealthy lifestyles = West egg vs East egg
‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and… then retreated back into their money and let other people clean up the mess they had made’
Money and selfishness
‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired’
People trying to obtain the American Dream
‘I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy’
Social Journey = elite circles + superficial connections
Critic Dexter - Gatsby reinventing himself
Gatsby ‘is rootless, friendless, loveless, and ultimately lifeless’
Staveley - caught in a cross fire of class division and disillusionment
‘There are false idols who, despite being built with the best intentions, leave characters ultimately hollow and unfulfilled’
Dexter- opinions on Jay Gatsby
‘Gatsby is a rich nobody’
Staveley- comparing Gatsby to America
‘like America itself, Gatsby has lost sight of his original ideals and strives instead to… an impossible perfection’
Staveley- comparing Gatsby to the American Dream
‘Like the American Dream, (Gatsby) has become corrupt’
Bewley- representation of the American Dream
‘Gatsby is a ‘mythic character’… because he embodies the core conflict in the American Dream between illusion and reality’
