F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) • • • • • • • Focus of Study Life Experience Literary Career Point of View Writing Style Significance Focus study on The Great Gatsby.
Download ReportTranscript F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) • • • • • • • Focus of Study Life Experience Literary Career Point of View Writing Style Significance Focus study on The Great Gatsby.
Slide 1
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896-1940)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Focus of Study
Life Experience
Literary Career
Point of View
Writing Style
Significance
Focus study on The
Great Gatsby
Slide 2
An archetypal figure:
• the drunken writer
• the ruined novelist
• the spoiled genius
• the personification
of the Jazz Age
• the sacrificial victim
of the Depression
Slide 3
The apartment house where Fitzgerald died in 1940 in
Hollywood, California.
Slide 4
Life Experience
• He was born in in St. Paul, Minnesota
of mixed Southern and Irish descent on
24 September 1896.
• He wrote that he felt like an outsider
throughout his childhood among the
rich.
• He began to write in the St. Paul
Academy in 1909.
• In 1914, he met a beautiful young
debutante, Ginevra King, his first love.
• He was enlisted in 1917 for War I and
met Zelda in 1918.
• Although she was truly in love with
Scott, she refused to commit herself to
him, for his economic prospects were
not promising.
Slide 5
• They got married after his novels
were accepted in April 1920 and the
couple became the symbol of the era.
• They were riding the crest of success
and enjoying the fame that This Side
of Paradise had brought.
• When Zelda became pregnant they
took their first trip to Europe in 1921
for the birth of their only baby.
• Fitzgerald's debts started to grow.
• The Beautiful and Damned was less
well received.
• In 1924 Fitzgerald moved to Europe,
where he associated with Gertrude
Stein and Hemingway.
• The Great Gatsby received excellent
reviews but the book did not make
the expected money.
Slide 6
Slide 7
•Their marriage was subject to continued
stress from their drinking, his tension
about his work, her feelings of neglect, and
their constant worry about a sufficient
income. Zelda
•Fitzgerald's stormy relationship with is
told in his novel The Crack Up.
•Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Zelda's mental
breakdown attracted wide publicity in the
1930s.
•From 1934, they never lived together. But
their love was enduring.
•He returned to Hollywood in 1937.
•In 1939 Fitzgerald began a novel about
Hollywood, The Last Tycoon.
•Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, in
Hollywood, in Graham's apartment.
• Zelda Sayre died in a hospital fire in 1948.
Slide 8
Literary Career and
Major Works
•This Side of Paradise 1920
• Flappers and Philosophers, 1921
• The Beautiful and the Damned
1922
• Tales of the Jazz Age 1922
•The Vegetable (satirical play) 1923
•The Great Gatsby
1925
•All the Sad Young Men 1926
•Tender is the Night
1934
•Taps At Reveille
1935
•The Last Tycoon (unfinished) 1941
•The Crack-Up
1945
•Others: over 150 short stories
Slide 9
This Side of Paradise(1920)
•This novel closely reflects
Fitzgerald's own experiences
as an undergraduate.
•The story of Amory Blaine,
an aimless, privileged, and
self-absorbed Princeton
student, serves in WW I in
France. His journey from
prep school to college to War
is an account of "the lost
generation." At the end of the
story he finds that his own
egoism has been the cause of
his unhappiness.
Slide 10
•The young "romantic egotist"
symbolizes what Fitzgerald so
memorably described as "a new
generation grown up to find all
Gods dead, all wars fought, all
faiths in man shaken." A pastiche
of literary styles, this dazzling
chronicle of youth remains
bitingly relevant decades later.
•It came as a revelation to
Fitzgerald's contemporaries. It
was regarded as a privileged
glimpse into the new morality or
the new immorality of America's
young, and it made its author
famous.
Slide 11
Tender Is the Night (1934)
•concentrates on the theme of
how money corrupts,
destroying wealthy
individuals who cannot seem
to focus their lives.
•while Dick, the most
promising of the characters, is
ruined by money, position,
and power, eventually
succumb to alcohol and
oblivion.
•critical of the American rich.
Slide 12
Point of View
• He was both a victim and a
keen onlooker of the gaudy
extravagances of the Jazz
Age. His novels show his
ever-deepening
understanding of American
society.
• He was ambivalent about
hunting for money.
• He was, on the one hand, a
great lover for money and
beautiful women, and on the
other, alienated from that
world.
Slide 13
•His major novels are
permeated with underlying
moral burdens, which are
always embodied as his
wrestling with the American
Dream.
•He spent his life inquiring
about the dream, but “he
lived and he wrote at last like
a scapegoat and departed like
one”. He wrote his novel with
his life. “He was Gatsby, a
great Gatsby.”
Slide 14
Writing Style
•His best novels exhibit a
craftsmanship in using
language. His sentences are
always constructed in simple
and subtle diction carefully
chosen, and permeated with
luxuriant symbolic connotations.
•The dialogues and
conversations are dramatized
exactly like those of his time.
•His novels move rapidly in a
series of episodic descriptions
with details which always result
in leaving sufficient room for
the readers’ imagination.
Slide 15
Focus Study on The Great Gatsby
Character Analysis
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz):
Questions:
1. Do you think Gatsby is great?
2. If no, give your reasons. If yes,
what makes Gatsby great?
3. How do you interpret Nick’s
shout at the end of the novel
“They're a rotten crowd”...
“You're worth the whole damn
bunch put together”?
4. Try to comment on Gatsby’s
Dream. (Hints: Is it a
worthwhile dream? Is it our
dream, too? Can we love
Gatsby and be critical of his
dream at the same time? )
• Gatsby’s dream is a kind of
romantic idealism, "some
heightened sensitivity to the
promises of life," It is a belief
in fairytales and princesses
and happy endings, a faith
that life can be special,
remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby
is not interested in power for
its own sake or in money or
prestige.
• What he wants is his dream
and that dream is embodied
in Daisy.
• The Great Gatsby is a kind of
mystery story with Gatsby as
the mystery.
Slide 16
Nick Carraway
Questions:
1.Why the author creates Nick
as the narrator in the novel?
2.Is he in a convenient position
to tell the story?
3.What’s Nick’s attitude
toward Gatsby?
4.What leads to Nick’s final
decision to leave the East and
return to the Midwest?
• He comes from a solid
Midwestern family with
pretty basic values, graduated
from Yale, served in War I,
and decided to go into the
bond business.
• He is honest, but not
Puritanical or narrow minded.
He is tolerant, understanding,
and not hasty to judge people.
• Nick is in a perfect position to
tell the story. He is both a
participant and an observer of
the action. He attempts to solve
the mystery of Gatsby and
comes to accept his greatness
in his commitment to an
illusion.
• Through him we come to know
Gatsby, mysterious—absurd—
a pathetic soul—an admirable
exception to the whole “rotten
world”.
Slide 17
• The author is Gatsby in his passionate devotion
to the glamorous life, while he is Nick in his
awareness of the pettiness and worthlessness of
that life.
• It was this double vision that enabled him to
achieve objectivity and detachment in his
penetrating demonstration of Gatsby as a victim
of American society, which had shifted away
from its frontier ideal and become corrupted by
money.
Slide 18
Daisy Fay Buchanan
Questions:
1. Try to describe Daisy Fay
in your own words.
2. How does Nick think of
Daisy? Is his point of
view the same with that
of Gatsby?
3. What is the most often
used color in the novel to
describe Daisy?
4. What’s Daisy’s attitude
toward money?
5. Can we identify Daisy
with the green light at the
end of her dock?
•Daisy is the princess in the tower, the
golden girl that every man dreams of
possessing. She is beautiful and rich
and innocent and pure (at least on the
surface) in her whiteness. But that
whiteness, as you will notice, is
mixed with the yellow of gold and
the inevitable corruption that money
brings.
•Gatsby worships Daisy, and Nick
distrusts her.
•Daisy herself is much less than the
green light which is the promise, the
dream.
•Daisy is insubstantial, a careless
woman who uses her frail appearance
as an excuse for immaturity.
Slide 19
Tom Buchanan
• Questions:
1. What do you think of
the character of Tom?
2. What’s Nick’s
attitude towards Tom
and Daisy?
• Because he is both very
strong and very rich,
Tom is used to having
his own way.
• Fitzgerald describes
Tom and Daisy as
careless people who
break things and then
retreat into their wealth
and let other people
clean up their messes.
Slide 20
Jordan Baker
• She wears the kind of clothes
that suit her; she smokes, she
1. Which type of people does
drinks, and has sex because she
Jordan symbolize in the
novel? Try to describe this
enjoys them.
type of character.
• Fitzgerald needs her to get the
2. What’s her function in the
story told. As Daisy's friend, she
novel?
can supply Nick with necessary
• In many ways Jordan Baker
information. She is a link
symbolizes a new type of
between the major characters,
woman that was emerging in
the Twenties.
moving back and forth between
• She is hard and self-sufficient, the world of East Egg and West
and she adopts whatever
Egg. She is rich enough to be
morals suit her situation. She
both comfortable among the
has cut herself off from the
East Eggers and a social hustler
older generation.
to appear at Gatsby's parties.
• Questions:
Slide 21
Major Themes of The Great Gatsby
• The withering of American dream is
its predominant theme.
• The Great Gatsby is a highly
symbolic meditation on 1920s
America as a whole, in particular the
disintegration of the American
dream in an era of unprecedented
prosperity and material excess.
• A realistic demonstration of the
economic and social life of the Jazz
Age with its Prohibition, economic
boom, and dislocation on the part of
the younger generation.
• A dramatization of an Age of
Confusion marked by business
corruption, encompassing vulgarity,
frauds and rigid prejudices in social
and political life.
Slide 22
• After his death, his father
brought Nick Gatsby’s
childhood diary with a
schedule for self
improvement: exercise, study,
sport and work, which
clearly shows that Gatsby’s
ideal is shaped in the
tradition of Franklin and the
frontier spirit.
• Gatsby identifies himself
with such a romantic hero
who is capable of conquering
the urban wilderness and is
totally unaware that the New
Land is no longer virgin as it
moved into 20th century.
•The way he realizes his past
dream is to gain his
advantages of wealth over Tom.
•His tragedy shows his
ignorance of a changed and
stratified American society
which prevents him from
materializing his dream. He
dies because he is born too late
and he dies without awareness
that he is an outsider of his
corrupted age.
•He begins with a dream of
success and ends in a tragedy.
This is not only Gatsby’s
personal failure, but also the
failure of American society.
Slide 23
Motifs: Geography and Weather
• Motifs: Motifs are recurring
structures, contrasts, or
literary devices that can
help to develop and inform
the text’s major themes.
• East Egg: the old
aristocracy. People with
grace, taste, subtlety, and
elegance, but they are lack
in heart, careless,
inconsiderate bullies who
are so used to money’s
ability to ease their minds
that they never worry about
hurting others.
• West Egg: the newly rich-vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious,
and lacking in social graces
and taste, but sincere and
loyal.
• Valley of ashes: the moral
and social decay of America.
• New York City: uninhibited,
amoral quest for money
and pleasure.
• the East: moral decay and
social cynicism of New York.
• the West: traditional social
values and ideals
Slide 24
Weather in The Great Gatsby
• Questions:
• What’s the weather like
when Gatsby and Daisy
meet and at the time of
Gatsby and Tom’s quarrel?
• Their reunion begins amid
a pouring rain--awkward
and melancholy
• Their love reawakens just
as the sun begins to come
out.
• Gatsby’s climactic
confrontation with Tom
occurs on the hottest day of
the summer, under the
scorching sun.
Slide 25
Symbols
• Symbols are objects,
characters, figures, or
colors used to represent
abstract ideas or concepts.
• The Green Light：
Gatsby’s hopes and dreams
for the future, a guiding
light to lead him to his
goal. Nick compares the
green light to how America,
rising out of the ocean,
must have looked to early
settlers of the new nation.
Slide 26
• The Valley of Ashes-represents the moral and
social decay that results from
the uninhibited pursuit of
wealth and 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: God staring
down upon and judging
American society as a moral
wasteland; unsettling nature
of the image. the essential
meaninglessness of the world.
Slide 27
Symbols of Color in Gatsby
• Gatsby:
• Green—hope, dream,
full of energy, illusion.
• Blue—broad-minded,
fidelity, bravery, honesty;
sentimentality, faith.
• Daisy—yellow flower with
white linings, fresh and
bright as spring, yet fragile
and without the strength to
resist the heat and dryness of
summer
• Yellow—money and power
• White—beauty, purity,
elegance in the eyes of
Gatsby; terror, death, evil,
nada; blank—meaningless,
purposeless; silver—money.
Slide 28
•
Questions to Think
After
Class
Who do you think the
4. Fitzgerald describes the world
characters in The Great
Gatsby represent? Do they
seem like real people? Which
characters seem the most real
to you?
• What is the symbolism of the
green light (at the end of
Daisy's pier) that appears
throughout the novel?
• Fitzgerald returns several
times to describe a decrepit
optical products sign—the
eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleberg—that hovers over
"the valley of ashes." What
does that sign represent?
as "a valley of ashes" but often
contrasts Daisy and Jay Gatsby
as being spotless. What does this
say about his view of American
culture and of both Jay and
Daisy?
5. The Great Gatsby is often
referred to as the quintessential
novel of the "Jazz Age". Using
examples from the book, explain
what this term meant, and
Fitzgerald's attitudes towards
that characterization of the
1920s.
Slide 29
• Thank You Very Much for
Attending This Lecture
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896-1940)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Focus of Study
Life Experience
Literary Career
Point of View
Writing Style
Significance
Focus study on The
Great Gatsby
Slide 2
An archetypal figure:
• the drunken writer
• the ruined novelist
• the spoiled genius
• the personification
of the Jazz Age
• the sacrificial victim
of the Depression
Slide 3
The apartment house where Fitzgerald died in 1940 in
Hollywood, California.
Slide 4
Life Experience
• He was born in in St. Paul, Minnesota
of mixed Southern and Irish descent on
24 September 1896.
• He wrote that he felt like an outsider
throughout his childhood among the
rich.
• He began to write in the St. Paul
Academy in 1909.
• In 1914, he met a beautiful young
debutante, Ginevra King, his first love.
• He was enlisted in 1917 for War I and
met Zelda in 1918.
• Although she was truly in love with
Scott, she refused to commit herself to
him, for his economic prospects were
not promising.
Slide 5
• They got married after his novels
were accepted in April 1920 and the
couple became the symbol of the era.
• They were riding the crest of success
and enjoying the fame that This Side
of Paradise had brought.
• When Zelda became pregnant they
took their first trip to Europe in 1921
for the birth of their only baby.
• Fitzgerald's debts started to grow.
• The Beautiful and Damned was less
well received.
• In 1924 Fitzgerald moved to Europe,
where he associated with Gertrude
Stein and Hemingway.
• The Great Gatsby received excellent
reviews but the book did not make
the expected money.
Slide 6
Slide 7
•Their marriage was subject to continued
stress from their drinking, his tension
about his work, her feelings of neglect, and
their constant worry about a sufficient
income. Zelda
•Fitzgerald's stormy relationship with is
told in his novel The Crack Up.
•Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Zelda's mental
breakdown attracted wide publicity in the
1930s.
•From 1934, they never lived together. But
their love was enduring.
•He returned to Hollywood in 1937.
•In 1939 Fitzgerald began a novel about
Hollywood, The Last Tycoon.
•Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, in
Hollywood, in Graham's apartment.
• Zelda Sayre died in a hospital fire in 1948.
Slide 8
Literary Career and
Major Works
•This Side of Paradise 1920
• Flappers and Philosophers, 1921
• The Beautiful and the Damned
1922
• Tales of the Jazz Age 1922
•The Vegetable (satirical play) 1923
•The Great Gatsby
1925
•All the Sad Young Men 1926
•Tender is the Night
1934
•Taps At Reveille
1935
•The Last Tycoon (unfinished) 1941
•The Crack-Up
1945
•Others: over 150 short stories
Slide 9
This Side of Paradise(1920)
•This novel closely reflects
Fitzgerald's own experiences
as an undergraduate.
•The story of Amory Blaine,
an aimless, privileged, and
self-absorbed Princeton
student, serves in WW I in
France. His journey from
prep school to college to War
is an account of "the lost
generation." At the end of the
story he finds that his own
egoism has been the cause of
his unhappiness.
Slide 10
•The young "romantic egotist"
symbolizes what Fitzgerald so
memorably described as "a new
generation grown up to find all
Gods dead, all wars fought, all
faiths in man shaken." A pastiche
of literary styles, this dazzling
chronicle of youth remains
bitingly relevant decades later.
•It came as a revelation to
Fitzgerald's contemporaries. It
was regarded as a privileged
glimpse into the new morality or
the new immorality of America's
young, and it made its author
famous.
Slide 11
Tender Is the Night (1934)
•concentrates on the theme of
how money corrupts,
destroying wealthy
individuals who cannot seem
to focus their lives.
•while Dick, the most
promising of the characters, is
ruined by money, position,
and power, eventually
succumb to alcohol and
oblivion.
•critical of the American rich.
Slide 12
Point of View
• He was both a victim and a
keen onlooker of the gaudy
extravagances of the Jazz
Age. His novels show his
ever-deepening
understanding of American
society.
• He was ambivalent about
hunting for money.
• He was, on the one hand, a
great lover for money and
beautiful women, and on the
other, alienated from that
world.
Slide 13
•His major novels are
permeated with underlying
moral burdens, which are
always embodied as his
wrestling with the American
Dream.
•He spent his life inquiring
about the dream, but “he
lived and he wrote at last like
a scapegoat and departed like
one”. He wrote his novel with
his life. “He was Gatsby, a
great Gatsby.”
Slide 14
Writing Style
•His best novels exhibit a
craftsmanship in using
language. His sentences are
always constructed in simple
and subtle diction carefully
chosen, and permeated with
luxuriant symbolic connotations.
•The dialogues and
conversations are dramatized
exactly like those of his time.
•His novels move rapidly in a
series of episodic descriptions
with details which always result
in leaving sufficient room for
the readers’ imagination.
Slide 15
Focus Study on The Great Gatsby
Character Analysis
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz):
Questions:
1. Do you think Gatsby is great?
2. If no, give your reasons. If yes,
what makes Gatsby great?
3. How do you interpret Nick’s
shout at the end of the novel
“They're a rotten crowd”...
“You're worth the whole damn
bunch put together”?
4. Try to comment on Gatsby’s
Dream. (Hints: Is it a
worthwhile dream? Is it our
dream, too? Can we love
Gatsby and be critical of his
dream at the same time? )
• Gatsby’s dream is a kind of
romantic idealism, "some
heightened sensitivity to the
promises of life," It is a belief
in fairytales and princesses
and happy endings, a faith
that life can be special,
remarkable, beautiful. Gatsby
is not interested in power for
its own sake or in money or
prestige.
• What he wants is his dream
and that dream is embodied
in Daisy.
• The Great Gatsby is a kind of
mystery story with Gatsby as
the mystery.
Slide 16
Nick Carraway
Questions:
1.Why the author creates Nick
as the narrator in the novel?
2.Is he in a convenient position
to tell the story?
3.What’s Nick’s attitude
toward Gatsby?
4.What leads to Nick’s final
decision to leave the East and
return to the Midwest?
• He comes from a solid
Midwestern family with
pretty basic values, graduated
from Yale, served in War I,
and decided to go into the
bond business.
• He is honest, but not
Puritanical or narrow minded.
He is tolerant, understanding,
and not hasty to judge people.
• Nick is in a perfect position to
tell the story. He is both a
participant and an observer of
the action. He attempts to solve
the mystery of Gatsby and
comes to accept his greatness
in his commitment to an
illusion.
• Through him we come to know
Gatsby, mysterious—absurd—
a pathetic soul—an admirable
exception to the whole “rotten
world”.
Slide 17
• The author is Gatsby in his passionate devotion
to the glamorous life, while he is Nick in his
awareness of the pettiness and worthlessness of
that life.
• It was this double vision that enabled him to
achieve objectivity and detachment in his
penetrating demonstration of Gatsby as a victim
of American society, which had shifted away
from its frontier ideal and become corrupted by
money.
Slide 18
Daisy Fay Buchanan
Questions:
1. Try to describe Daisy Fay
in your own words.
2. How does Nick think of
Daisy? Is his point of
view the same with that
of Gatsby?
3. What is the most often
used color in the novel to
describe Daisy?
4. What’s Daisy’s attitude
toward money?
5. Can we identify Daisy
with the green light at the
end of her dock?
•Daisy is the princess in the tower, the
golden girl that every man dreams of
possessing. She is beautiful and rich
and innocent and pure (at least on the
surface) in her whiteness. But that
whiteness, as you will notice, is
mixed with the yellow of gold and
the inevitable corruption that money
brings.
•Gatsby worships Daisy, and Nick
distrusts her.
•Daisy herself is much less than the
green light which is the promise, the
dream.
•Daisy is insubstantial, a careless
woman who uses her frail appearance
as an excuse for immaturity.
Slide 19
Tom Buchanan
• Questions:
1. What do you think of
the character of Tom?
2. What’s Nick’s
attitude towards Tom
and Daisy?
• Because he is both very
strong and very rich,
Tom is used to having
his own way.
• Fitzgerald describes
Tom and Daisy as
careless people who
break things and then
retreat into their wealth
and let other people
clean up their messes.
Slide 20
Jordan Baker
• She wears the kind of clothes
that suit her; she smokes, she
1. Which type of people does
drinks, and has sex because she
Jordan symbolize in the
novel? Try to describe this
enjoys them.
type of character.
• Fitzgerald needs her to get the
2. What’s her function in the
story told. As Daisy's friend, she
novel?
can supply Nick with necessary
• In many ways Jordan Baker
information. She is a link
symbolizes a new type of
between the major characters,
woman that was emerging in
the Twenties.
moving back and forth between
• She is hard and self-sufficient, the world of East Egg and West
and she adopts whatever
Egg. She is rich enough to be
morals suit her situation. She
both comfortable among the
has cut herself off from the
East Eggers and a social hustler
older generation.
to appear at Gatsby's parties.
• Questions:
Slide 21
Major Themes of The Great Gatsby
• The withering of American dream is
its predominant theme.
• The Great Gatsby is a highly
symbolic meditation on 1920s
America as a whole, in particular the
disintegration of the American
dream in an era of unprecedented
prosperity and material excess.
• A realistic demonstration of the
economic and social life of the Jazz
Age with its Prohibition, economic
boom, and dislocation on the part of
the younger generation.
• A dramatization of an Age of
Confusion marked by business
corruption, encompassing vulgarity,
frauds and rigid prejudices in social
and political life.
Slide 22
• After his death, his father
brought Nick Gatsby’s
childhood diary with a
schedule for self
improvement: exercise, study,
sport and work, which
clearly shows that Gatsby’s
ideal is shaped in the
tradition of Franklin and the
frontier spirit.
• Gatsby identifies himself
with such a romantic hero
who is capable of conquering
the urban wilderness and is
totally unaware that the New
Land is no longer virgin as it
moved into 20th century.
•The way he realizes his past
dream is to gain his
advantages of wealth over Tom.
•His tragedy shows his
ignorance of a changed and
stratified American society
which prevents him from
materializing his dream. He
dies because he is born too late
and he dies without awareness
that he is an outsider of his
corrupted age.
•He begins with a dream of
success and ends in a tragedy.
This is not only Gatsby’s
personal failure, but also the
failure of American society.
Slide 23
Motifs: Geography and Weather
• Motifs: Motifs are recurring
structures, contrasts, or
literary devices that can
help to develop and inform
the text’s major themes.
• East Egg: the old
aristocracy. People with
grace, taste, subtlety, and
elegance, but they are lack
in heart, careless,
inconsiderate bullies who
are so used to money’s
ability to ease their minds
that they never worry about
hurting others.
• West Egg: the newly rich-vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious,
and lacking in social graces
and taste, but sincere and
loyal.
• Valley of ashes: the moral
and social decay of America.
• New York City: uninhibited,
amoral quest for money
and pleasure.
• the East: moral decay and
social cynicism of New York.
• the West: traditional social
values and ideals
Slide 24
Weather in The Great Gatsby
• Questions:
• What’s the weather like
when Gatsby and Daisy
meet and at the time of
Gatsby and Tom’s quarrel?
• Their reunion begins amid
a pouring rain--awkward
and melancholy
• Their love reawakens just
as the sun begins to come
out.
• Gatsby’s climactic
confrontation with Tom
occurs on the hottest day of
the summer, under the
scorching sun.
Slide 25
Symbols
• Symbols are objects,
characters, figures, or
colors used to represent
abstract ideas or concepts.
• The Green Light：
Gatsby’s hopes and dreams
for the future, a guiding
light to lead him to his
goal. Nick compares the
green light to how America,
rising out of the ocean,
must have looked to early
settlers of the new nation.
Slide 26
• The Valley of Ashes-represents the moral and
social decay that results from
the uninhibited pursuit of
wealth and 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: God staring
down upon and judging
American society as a moral
wasteland; unsettling nature
of the image. the essential
meaninglessness of the world.
Slide 27
Symbols of Color in Gatsby
• Gatsby:
• Green—hope, dream,
full of energy, illusion.
• Blue—broad-minded,
fidelity, bravery, honesty;
sentimentality, faith.
• Daisy—yellow flower with
white linings, fresh and
bright as spring, yet fragile
and without the strength to
resist the heat and dryness of
summer
• Yellow—money and power
• White—beauty, purity,
elegance in the eyes of
Gatsby; terror, death, evil,
nada; blank—meaningless,
purposeless; silver—money.
Slide 28
•
Questions to Think
After
Class
Who do you think the
4. Fitzgerald describes the world
characters in The Great
Gatsby represent? Do they
seem like real people? Which
characters seem the most real
to you?
• What is the symbolism of the
green light (at the end of
Daisy's pier) that appears
throughout the novel?
• Fitzgerald returns several
times to describe a decrepit
optical products sign—the
eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleberg—that hovers over
"the valley of ashes." What
does that sign represent?
as "a valley of ashes" but often
contrasts Daisy and Jay Gatsby
as being spotless. What does this
say about his view of American
culture and of both Jay and
Daisy?
5. The Great Gatsby is often
referred to as the quintessential
novel of the "Jazz Age". Using
examples from the book, explain
what this term meant, and
Fitzgerald's attitudes towards
that characterization of the
1920s.
Slide 29
• Thank You Very Much for
Attending This Lecture