Hello Everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad as a thinking activity. This blog is based on Scott Fitzgarald's novel 'The Great Gatsby'.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Points to ponder :-
Introduction
About the Novelist
About the novel
Questions based on this novel
Introduction :-
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922.
About the Novelist :-
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularised. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
His Notable works :-
The Beautiful and Damned
The Great Gatsby
All the Sad Young Men
Tender is the Night
About the Novel :-
The Great Gatsby, third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Unsuccessful upon publication, the book is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel.
The book is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale University graduate from the Midwest who moves to New York after World War I to pursue a career in bonds. He recounts the events of the summer he spent in the East two years later, reconstructing his story through a series of flashbacks not always told in chronological order.
Questions based on this novel :-
1) How did the film capture the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Flappers & the Prohibition Act of America in the 1920s?
More than any other author, F. Scott Fitzgerald can be said to have captured the rollicking, tumultuous decade known as the Roaring Twenties, from its wild parties, dancing and illegal drinking to its post-war prosperity and its new freedoms for women.
Above all, Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby has been hailed as the quintessential portrait of Jazz Age America, inspiring Hollywood adaptations populated by dashing bootleggers and glamorous flappers in short, fringed dresses.
The Great Gatsby captures the exuberance of the 1920s, it’s ultimately a portrayal of the darker side of the era, and a pointed criticism of the corruption and immorality lurking beneath the glitz and glamour. Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the ways in which that conflict had transformed American society. The war left Europe devastated, and marked the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world. From 1920 to 1929, America enjoyed an economic boom, with a steady rise in income levels, business growth, construction and trading on the stock market.
In The Great Gatsby, both Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby himself are veterans of World War I, and it is Gatsby’s war service that kicks off his rise from a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (in the words of his romantic rival, Tom Buchanan) to the fabulously wealthy owner of a mansion on West Egg, Long Island.
“The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight is because Prohibition created a black market,” allowing bootleggers like Gatsby and his partners to amass staggering quantities of money in a short time.In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice is “full of money.”
By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. In this novel we find women like Daisy, Jordan and Martial who represent this subculture.
2) Watch PPT on the difference between the film and the novel and write in brief about it.
The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out one of the side stories: the affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy’s from Louisville who is a well-known golfer. Daisy promises to set them up, to push them “accidentally in linen closets and … out to sea in a boat,” a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the film, the matter is dropped. Luhrmann’s Nick says he found Jordan “frightening” at first, a word Carraway doesn’t apply to her in the novel—and later at Gatsby’s we see Jordan whisked away from Nick by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the novel, they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer.
The film, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the adulterous couple have loud sex in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit—but something like that is implied: Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive; Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens; that’s not in the novel at all.
In the book, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a “well-fanned 42nd Street cellar,” where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In the movie, Gatsby and Nick go to a barber shop with a hidden entrance to a speakeasy, and once inside they see not only Wolfsheim but also the police commissioner—who, in the book as in the film, Gatsby was “able to do … a favor once.” They also see there (if I understood things correctly) Nick’s boss, whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom’s friend Walter Chase. (In the novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.) The speakeasy features entertainment from a bevy of Josephine Baker-like dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.
Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who first prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody’s wealth goes to his family.
Near the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic husband of Tom’s mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed her—and that, what’s more, he might have been the one she was sleeping with on the side. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder: The book says that Gatsby grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” (i.e., a floater) and headed to his pool, then Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He’s then shot, and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and go way with him. None of that happens in the book.
3) How did the film help in understanding the symbolic significance of 'The Valley of Ashes', 'The Eyes of Dr. T J . Eckleberg' and 'The Green Light'?
In this novel these three things are symbolically presented.
The Valley of Ashes
The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg
The Green Light
The Green Light :-
Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1 he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolises that more generalised ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.
The Valley of Ashes :-
First introduced in Chapter 2, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolises the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.
The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg :-
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instil them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exist only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick explores these ideas in Chapter 8, when he imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.
4) How did the film capture the theme of racism and sexism?
These are the major themes of this novel.
Theme of Racism :-
There was a dark side to the American Dream Nick and many others were pursuing during the 1920s. Slavery was ended by the American Civil War of the 1860s, but racism never died. Southern states had strict segregation laws, and blacks were treated as inferior.
The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in 1922, an era of loosening morals, jazz and bootlegging. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick ends up living next door to a mysterious, party-throwing millionaire, Jay Gatsby and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Throughout the novel there is a theme of Racism and Anti-Semitism. Racism and Anti-Semitism in the 1920s will greatly influence the ideas of Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
Theme of Sexism :-
Tom is indeed sexist in The Great Gatsby, as is shown through his treatment of Daisy and Myrtle. Tom's disregard for his marriage to Daisy is apparent in his affair with Myrtle, whose death he disregards as an inconvenience.
In Daisy's character also we find this theme, when Daisy meets again Jay and she is introduced with his wealthyness at the time she represents this theme. She loves only the money or wealth of a person,at the first she marries Tom just because of his money and later she seems Jay is more wealthy than Tom ,so she wants to live with him. At this time we find this theme in her character.
5) Watch the video on Nick Carraway and discuss him as a narrator.
The Great Gatsby is written in first-person limited perspective from Nick’s point of view. This means that Nick uses the word “I” and describes events as he experienced them. He does not know what other characters are thinking unless they tell him. Although Nick narrates the book, in many ways he is incidental to the events involved, except that he facilitates the meeting of Daisy and Gatsby. For the most part, he remains an observer of the events around him, disappearing into the background when it comes time to narrate crucial meetings between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. In several extended passages his voice disappears completely, and he relates thoughts and feelings of other characters as though he is inside their heads. When Gatsby tells Nick about his past with Daisy, Nick writes directly from Gatsby’s point of view “His heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl… his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited…” These passages are presented as recollections Gatsby has told Nick, so they don’t violate the first-person narration.
When a story is told from one person’s perspective, the narrator will almost always be unreliable in some way, simply because the narrator brings his or her own biases to bear on the situation. Some narrators deliberately lie to the reader. We call these narrators, or any narrator whose words can largely not be trusted, “unreliable narrators.” Nick Carraway is not a classically unreliable narrator, because Fitzgerald gives no indications that Nick is lying to the reader or that his version of events directly contradicts anyone else’s. He apparently tries to be as truthful as possible. He tells us right away that he has an uncanny ability to reserve judgement and get people to trust him, which encourages us to see him as a reliable narrator. At the same time, he also says “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.” His very need to describe himself this way makes the reader question how much Nick can actually be trusted.
6) Watch the video on psychoanalytical study of Jay Gatsby and write about his character.
Gatsby’s dreams of winning Daisy for himself end in failure, just as America’s era of prosperity would come to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.
Gatsby has great dreams or Goals for his life. He has a shame for his lower-class family background, self-grief , he tries to recapture the lost time , show off his wealth or lavish displays of wealth,and the symbol of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg ,which represents a God who sees everything. Gatsby tries to recapture the lost time which is impossible to be but he does that and as a result he is being killed by George Wilson, a husband of Martal. His distorted reactions are also represented here phycologically.
Word Count :-2493
Images :- 03
Videos :-02
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