Critics Flashcards
H.L. Mencken, 1925
“Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes”.
Kenneth Eble, 1964
“Daisy moves away from actuality into an idea existing in Gatsby’s mind”.
Thomas Flanagan, 2000
> “Gatsby lives in the world of romantic energies and colors”.
AND
“Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him his outlines are dim”.
Jacqueline Lance, 2000
“Becoming Tom was Gatsby’s dream”.
Claire Stocks, 2007
“Nick wants to portray Gatsby as ‘great’ and undermines anything that might undermine that image”.
Marius Bewley
“Daisy has monstrous moral indifference and vicious emptiness”.
A.E. Dyson
“In one sense Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society… He believes in himself and his illusions”.
Judith Fetterley
“Gatsby’s romanticism of Daisy is heroic though misguided”.
K. Fraser
“Daisy is torn between a desire for personal freedom and the need for stability”.
Lev Grossman
“Gatsby lays bare the empty, tragic heart of the self-made man”.
Alfred Kazin
“Daisy is vulgar and inhuman”
A. License
“Gatsby is a martyr of a materialistic society”
K. Parkinson
“Daisy is only allowed to exist in the images of men create of her”.
Christine Ramos
“By attempting to maintain his way of life, Tom has reduced whole people to ashes without any thought of consequences”.
P. Staveley
“Gatsby, life America itself … strives to reach a place he has created in his own mind, an impossible perfect”.
1) Isabel Paterson, 1925
“…a man from nowhere, without roots or background, absolutely self-made in the image of an obscure and undefined ideal”
2) Isabel Paterson, 1925
“…an incurable romanticist… his mistake was to accept life at its face value”.
Carl Von Veehten, 1925
“…a solid or rather cheap personality transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of a passionate idealism”
Susan Resneck
“The dilemma that Nick, Daisy and Gatsby face is, of course, a human one as well as an American one: whether to embrace the dreams of youth and keep alive the hopes bred in innocence or to face the reality that such dreams are inevitably elusive and illusory because they are part of the past”.
Fredrick Jameson
“…in the commodity age need as a purely material and physical impulse has given way to a structure of artificial stimuli, artificial longings, such that it is no longer possible to separate the true from the false, the primary from the luxury - satisfaction, in them”
Leland S Person
“[Daisy] seems able to transform the material world into some ephemeral dreamland in which objects suddenly glow with symbolic meaning”.
