The Great Gatsby, by F.S Fitzgerald (1925)

Résumé du document

T. Elliott, writer and critic, referred to The Great Gatsby, as the novel was first published in 1925, as "the first step that American fiction [had] taken since Henry James". Since this date, critics agree to emphasize it as a the most accomplished and mature book ever written by Fitzgerald. The novel was not only praised for its revolutionary topic, based on its ability to render the spirit of the Jazz Age, but more for its destabilizing pattern. In fact, it was immediately sacred as a turning-point in the author's career as well as a major contribution to the elaboration of modern novel. This revolution mainly consisted in a complete different comprehensiveness of the writing of a novel not only as a matter of imagination and style but as matter of pattern and a visceral need for realism. Strikingly, it seems that Fitzgerald intuitively anticipated the critic's judgement through this meaningful remark: "I'm writing something extremely beautiful and simple intricately patterned". Such a phrase wonderfully suggests and resumes the main feeling, that still resists several readings of the novel just three quarters of a century after it has been written : the mysterious impression of having touched and captured for a while the short-lived vision of existence, in its pure and burning reality. Fitzgerald succeeded in concentrating in 200 pages the drama of existence through the spirit of a circumscribed period.
So, beyond social considerations, which gave rise to varied and numerous critical works, it may be relevant to examine the technical and dramatic devices, that conditioned the nature of the novel, as a living and multi-dimensional piece.

Extraits

[...] Fitzgerald succeeded in concentrating in 200 pages the drama of existence through the spirit of a circumscribed period. So, beyond social considerations, which gave rise to varied and numerous critical works, it may be relevant to examine the technical and dramatic devices, that conditioned the nature of the novel, as a living and multi- dimensional piece. First, let us highlight the technical means, based on the revolutionary and modern vision of narration, that govern the original construction of the pattern of the novel as a work of selection Second, one might study the skill of the author to combine this principle of selection to an impressionist approach of narration and language, so- called «magic suggestiveness», which abolishes the traditional conception and imposes a fresh vision of relations between the writer, the narrator and the reader. [...]

[...] In a third one, the figure of Gatsby finally emerges in the background of the stage. After having been the single but hidden object of rumors and phantasms, the hero is ready to invest the story. In fact, in the next chapter, he prepares himself for a decisive meeting with Daisy, which is organized through the intermediary of Nick. This private and sober take-aside does not miss to open on a second party by Gatsby, which echoes the first one as its complete antithesis. [...]

[...] Gradually, such an abstract and utopian hope became a part, and even an emblem of American Nation. So, in the novel, all the characters are motivated by this quest for an idyllic kindness, which is incarnated by the Green Light that is gleaming in Daisy's garden and appeared to Gatsby as a promise in the night. At the end of the book, Nick merges himself into an historic an metaphysic digression, as he contemplates the Green Light, which reminds him of the destiny of his country: I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors As the Dutch sailors and later the pioneers, Gatsby‘s dream must have seen so close that could hardly fail to grasp it. [...]

[...] Moreover he pictures the memory of an eternal debauchery of pleasure. However, beyond this ability to coin some beautiful and striking images, Nick is literally obsessed with the idea of penetrating the heart of that world of artifice and giving it a meaning, as he confesses: I was enjoying myself now ( . and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant , elemental and profound. The author largely committees himself into the narration and he projects some symbols through the individual pictures. [...]

[...] Through his narration, he clearly turns time into an elastic an subjective duration, and he progressively blurs the boundaries between, past, present and future as he declares: For a while I had lost Jordan Baker and then in midsummer I found her again . On the contrary, he plays with time and he outrageously develops Gatsby's party, suggesting the amplifying tension of the atmosphere, which announces a tragedy. The traditional codes of temporality are progressively drowned into the flow of Nick's speech and the speech itself is bound to dissolve. Finally, the author expurgated his style from verbose digressions, and manufactured a clear, simple and incredibly meaningful language. [...]