gatsby Flashcards
Berman - Myrtle
Acts as if she had a script in mind (acc all book characters do)
Daisy identifying a woman’s ideal position as that of a fool, adopting the popular media trope of agreeable female stupidity
“A beautiful little fool” and “basic insincerity”
“Anchored balloon”
“Like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses”
- purposeless, floundering movement
Jordan too is a product of media - reminds Nick of a ‘good illustration’
Myrtle is a more blatant fraud of high society
“Furniture entirely too large for it”
“That boy” - Myrtle calling a waiter for ice, ‘these people’ - separates true life with chosen identity
“You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever” - Sense of carpe diem urgency - repetition shows intense desire for inaccessible new life
- ‘i thought he was a gentleman’, ‘he borrowed somebodys best suit to get married in’
Berman Gatsby
Gatsby doesn’t want to be praised for what he is, but rather for what he is not
“womb of his purposeless splendour”
“Invisible cloak of uniform” - War enables anonimity, artificial remaking of oneself to escape barriers
“a penniless young man without a past”
Tripp masculinity
Link between class identity and masculinity - success positions him as saviour of humanity, but really embodies social decline and facade
“Civilisations going to pieces”
“first man who ever made a stable out of a garage” - hostile to modernisation, polo ponies are indicative of his status
“Mr Nobody from Nowhere”
next theyll ‘have intermarriage between black and white’
vs - NY - “wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world”
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge”
illicit - wolfsheim (1919 world series baseball team succumbed to bribery - rothstein)
Sanderson
Characters become symbols for eachother - Nick admires his commitment to his ‘incorruptible dream’
Daisy still retains her value as a symbol in a deceptive world
“he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail”
“I dont think he had ever really believed in its existence before”
Pearson valley of ashes
The Valley of ashes is dust made of corrupted and perverted American dream
“ashes grow like wheat” - after industrialisation, all life has been eradicated
“The rich get rich and the poor get children” - Striking contrast between two worlds - overindulgence vs struggles
“safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”
jay gatsby had “Broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice”
valley of ashes recalls the bleak landscape of TS Eliots poem The Waste Lnad (published in the year that gatsby is set)
- CONCERN WITH THE SPREAD OF MATERIALIST VALUES
- decline of western civilisation and lack of spirituality
Psalm 23 - the valley of the shadow of death
Churchwell - satire
satirical nick’s probity “trust” company in a time of swindles and scams, making fun of people who desire money
- mocks the follies of contemporary social life, shallowness, hypocrisy, greed
Churchwell hope
Great genius was to take an emotion like hope and nationalise it - national faith that it is never too late to start afresh
“Milk of wonder” “incarnation was complete”
“extraordinary gift for hope”
‘only the dead dream fought on’
gatsby is the story of american failure - he doesnt fulfil his dreams
- in a land of promise, failure is inevitable
“Pearls were around her neck” - subverting American Dream, ultimate end is acquisition of money, and any means are justified
- paradox - success in material term inescapably mean failure in terms of the ideal
eg. continuing involvement of us in armed conflict signals the failure of an early ideal - aspiration to be a peaceful nation
but the world becomes ‘grotesque’ and ‘frightening’ when bereft of his dream of daisy - sartre’s roquentin, existential panic
trilling
gatsby inevitably stands for all of america itself
meditation of the fate of american ideals in the modern world
“Platonic conception”
“ghostly heart”
“Unfamiliar world”
fitzgerald requested name change of title to ‘under the red, white, and blue’
tanner - green light
the green light offers gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning
preserves american ideals of limitless possibility and personal fulfilment - but when approached too closely revert to ordinariness (“colossal significance” is “vanished”)
belief in “the green light, the orgastic future”
may seem trivial when compared to “fresh green breast” of america but is charged with intensity of gatsbys vision
- symbolically preserves same values of hope, dream, and desire that the new world held for settlers
- living and flourishing has diminished to artificial marker of a rich mans property
fresh green breast VS keeping lawn trimmed, material perfection, distant from vitality
“rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing”
- material world is dependent upon an ideal world, and magical touch of the ideal can transform material reality
steinbrink
moments of happiness or triumpth from the past can neither be recaptured nor repeated, and for that reason seldom can they be forgotten
“Cant repeat the past? Why of course you can”
“Im going to fix everything just the way it was before
desire to go back to louisville and be married from her house - ‘just as if it was five years ago’
Cowley West Egg
name carries connotations of the wetward movement that characterised america’s frontier past - idea that both nick and gatsby preserve american ideals that have been lost in sophisticated cities of the east
ironic, as both eggs are located on the eat coast + eggs seems to promise new life but are in fact sterile
“Consoling proximity of millionaires”
Daisy - “appalled” by West Egg and parties
“blazed gaudily”
East was “distorted” for Nick
Horace greeley - offered advice ‘go west’ to americans seeking opportunities for self-advancement (associated with american hope for a new beginning and boundless potential)
cowley - daisy/myrtle
daisy - delicate natural flower, but irony as life is entirely manufactured
opens up “in a flower-like way”, but artificiality makes this simle as unconvincing as nick being compared to a rose
myrtle - dark,hardy shrub - foil
Cowley - TJ Eckleburg
the objective correlative (a term coined by poet and critic T. S. Eliot that refers to an object that takes on greater significance and comes to symbolize the mood and world of a literary work)
eyes - concern with vision, mistaken for omniscient god
- recreating the citizens of america in its own image
- but world is godless and blind
tanner - allusion to a god who has becomes a deus absconditus who no longer wants to care for man
daisy’s “impersonal eyes” echo
“You can’t deceive God - God sees everything” vs “eternal blindness”
advertisement hoarding - consumer culture
- the arbitrariness of the upper class’s lives, which are empty due to the oversaturation of meaningless consumerism that the wealthy trivially indulge in
consumerism and materialism have taken the place of spiritual values in modern america and have become pervasive!!
gatsby is described as “son of god” - advertising + resurrecetion
‘the advertisement of the man’ - daisy to gatbsy
“renewals of complete faith”
“incarnation was complete”
expensive parties are an elaborate advertising display designed to impress daisy
cowley - “feudal silhouette”
ironic imitation - characteristic in us is change, dynamism, creation of new markets
+ ‘high gothic library’ - revival and imitation of the style during the middle ages
cowley - serf
older meaning of bondsman was a labourer bound to a master - ironic light upon america’s purported clean break from their european past
