'The Great Gatsby' Critics Flashcards
Franz Eugene Cruz (American Dream)
Comments on ‘sad irony’ of destruction of dreams
Mulligan (about Daisy)
she is ‘constantly on show, performing all the time’
Bewley (about Daisy)
‘no substance’
Sandage (American Dream)
‘Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it’
Fitzgerald (illusion of American Dream)
‘Life is essentially a cheat […] the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure […] but the deeper satisfactions that come out of the struggle’
Richard W. Lid (Daisy)
‘Daisy Fay, the first ‘nice girl’ James Gatz had ever know, is the bright symbol of Gatsby’s dream […] she is the incarnation of all his elaborate fantasies, his vision of the American Dream’
Leland S. Person Jr (Daisy)
‘Daisy, in fact, is more victim than victmizer’
Alyssa Rosenberg (Daisy)
Daisy ‘cares about adventures more than propriety’ yet ‘doesn’t have the courage or the passion to pursue them’
Anonymous (Daisy)
‘Daisy is the object of his worship, but she is allowed no warm humanity, no autonomous life of her own as a woman’
Judith Fetterly (America)
‘America is female; to be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is a betrayal by women’
Alyssa Rosenberg (Tom)
‘Tom’s tragedy is that he’s too much of a boor’
Dr William Blake (America)
America is the ‘new Garden of Eden where new imagination could be refreshed because of the vast possibilities that the first encounter with the Americans had’
James E Miller Jr (Gatsby)
‘Gatsby is as much of a victim as exploiter’
Yardley (Fitzgerald’s purpose for novel)
‘quest for new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches’
Fahey (American Dream)
‘dreams are based on the assumption that material possessions are synonymous with happiness and harmony’
