F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
THE GREAT GATSBY
F. S
cott
Fitz
ger
ald
189
6-1
940
St.
Pau
l, M
inn
esot
a
April 10, 1925
Novel
Are our dreams dependent on
others? Who are the gatekeepers?
MAKING OF
THE GREAT GATSBY
INFLUENCES ON THE AUTHOR
The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were
aspiration, literature, Princeton, Ginerva King, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald, and alcohol.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota of
mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three
names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to
whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward
Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose
furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother,
was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and
devoted to her only son. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in
love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of
Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
GATSBY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
The American Dream is what drives the characters in
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The American Dream is the
firmly held belief that everyone has the opportunity to
achieve their goals and become rich and prosperous if they
only work hard enough. What is it about The American
Dream that never seems to satisfy? The ideal American
Dream is not so realistic. The characters of The Great
Gatsby cannot grasp the concept that The American Dream
is an illusion because not everyone can get what they want
if they work hard.
Prohibition, also known as The Noble
Experiment, is the period from
1920-1933, during which the sale,
manufacture, and transportation of
alcohol for consumption were banned
nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth
Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
Mr. Michael Moran www.woodrowwriter.com The American Dream
An American Classic
“The world only
exists in your eyes.
You can make it as
big or as small as
you want.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE GREAT GATSBY!
PAGE
2
ARE YOUR DREAMS IGNORING YOU?
Chapter One
“Their interest rather touched me
and made them less remotely rich—
nevertheless, I was confused and a little
disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me
that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out
of the house, child in arms—but apparently
there were no such intentions in her head.
As for Tom, the fact that he “had some
woman in New York.” was really less
surprising than that he had been depressed
by a book. Something was making him
nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his
sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished
his peremptory heart.”
Chapter Three
There was music from my
neighbor’s house through the summer
nights. In his blue gardens men and girls
came and went like moths among the
whisperings and the champagne and the
stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched
his guests diving from the tower of his raft,
or taking the sun on the hot sand of his
beach while his two motor-boats slit the
waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes
over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his
Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing
parties to and from the city between nine in
the morning and long past midnight, while
his station wagon scampered like a brisk
yellow bug to meet all trains. And on
Mondays eight servants, including an extra
gardener, toiled all day with mops and
scrubbing-brushes and hammers and
garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the
night before.
Chapter Four
“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a
gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added
coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s
Series back in 1919.”
“Fixed the World’s Series?” I
repeated.
The idea staggered me. I
remembered, of course, that the World’s
Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had
thought of it at all I would have thought of it
as a thing that merely HAPPENED, the end
of some inevitable chain. It never occurred
to me that one man could start to play with
the faith of fifty million people—with the
single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a
safe.
“How did he happen to do that?” I
asked after a minute.
“He just saw the opportunity.”
...
“It was a strange coincidence,” I
said.
“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”
“Why not?”
“Gatsby bought that house so that
Daisy would be just across the bay.”
Chapter Five
As I went over to say good-by I saw
that the expression of bewilderment had
come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a
faint doubt had occurred to him as to the
quality of his present happiness. Almost five
years! There must have been moments even
that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of
his dreams—not through her own fault, but
because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.
It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.
He had thrown himself into it with a creative
passion, adding to it all the time, decking it
out with every bright feather that drifted his
way. No amount of fire or freshness can
challenge what a man will store up in his
ghostly heart.
As I watched him he adjusted
himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of
hers, and as she said something low in his
ear he turned toward her with a rush of
emotion. I think that voice held him most,
with its fluctuating, feverish warmth,
because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that
voice was a deathless song.
Chapter Six
James Gatz—that was really, or at
least legally, his name. He had changed it at
the age of seventeen and at the specific
moment that witnessed the beginning of his
career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop
anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake
Superior.
I suppose he’d had the name ready
for a long time, even then. His parents were
shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his
imagination had never really accepted them
as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay
Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang
from his Platonic conception of himself. He
was a son of God—a phrase which, if it
means anything, means just that—and he
must be about His Father’s business, the
service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious
beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay
Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would
be likely to invent, and to this conception he
was faithful to the end
....
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried
incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if
the past were lurking here in the shadow of
his house, just out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the
way it was before,” he said, nodding
determinedly. “She’ll see.”
Chapter Seven
But with every word she was
drawing further and further into herself, so
he gave that up, and only the dead dream
fought on as the afternoon slipped away,
trying to touch what was no longer tangible,
struggling unhappily, undespairingly,
toward that lost voice across the room.
Mr. Michael Moran www.woodrowwriter.com The American Dream