He risks everything for her. Fraudster Gatsby may be, but he was still far more real and authentic than everyone else in the bunch Nick excepted. It was Tom's and Daisy's lies and misdeeds that led to Gatsby's demise, not his own. It was Daisy who drove the car and Tom who had the affair. Gatsby was an relative innocent. It is the ultimate irony that Gatsby -- a criminal, a living facade -- was the most real person in that degenerate affair.
That terrible irony is what makes Gatsby a great tragic figure. His authentic love led to his death, a love that proved to be illusory. Answer by Matthew Petrucci ,. Fitzgerald is said to have agonized over the title of his novel.
He is 'great' because no other person in his position, in his day in age, loved Daisy in the way he did or felt quite the right hideous contempt of Tom, experienced the dolorous fear of being somebody 'ordinary' or felt the same horrible hollowness amid the drinking and partying.
James Gatz is no mere mortal in the eyes of Fitzgerald, the reader, and the characters within the novel itself. Among other reasons, this is perhaps why Fitzgerald felt that the title should deliberately understate his "alter-ego" Jay Gatsby; perhaps in the hopes that we, as a reader, may feel fascinated by the irony.
I see your point but I have to disagree. He seems to me a very depressed character who although he lives surrounded by nice things and parties is actually unhappy. The first time we see him is in the library separate from the party. The scene with the uncut book symbolizes for me the fact that Gatsby has ceased to grow. I agree with you that Gatsby is the only real person in the novel. We were able to see his pain and his self-consciousness that lead him down a bad path to earn his money.
Several new books are in the works, one about The Great Gatsby 's enduring appeal, and two about Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood, while my own book, which traces the genesis of The Great Gatsby , is about to be published. Gatsby has been thoroughly inspected and crawled over, lifted up and shaken out for every last detail it can surrender to its fascinated readers, but this remarkable novel has some surprises left. Meanwhile Scott's wife, Zelda, often called the original flapper, has been enjoying her own renaissance, with a play last year at Trafalgar Studios about her life, and several books about her life coming out this year.
When iconic figures re-emerge into the spotlight, you can bet that merchandising will soon follow: we are surrounded by haute couture and high street "Gatsby" dresses, speakeasies and prohibition cocktails, beads and headdresses, Gatsby clutches and iPhone covers, s jazz standards and Charleston lessons.
Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view. All this, and Baz Luhrmann, too: Luhrmann's new film version of The Great Gatsby , which will open the Cannes film festival before Charlestoning its way around the world, is released this month. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the hopeful hero with a shady past, and Carey Mulligan is Daisy, the shallow woman he adores.
Joel Edgerton is very well cast as Daisy's husband, the bullying Tom Buchanan, while Tobey Maguire must create a character from the voice of the elusive, self-effacing Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator, which is probably the trickiest aspect of dramatising The Great Gatsby , harder even than bringing the magnetic, paradoxical, chimerical Jay Gatsby to life.
Gatsby has been filmed four times to date, but it has been nearly 40 years since the last big-screen adaptation, Jack Clayton's version , with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby.
It was the first version to be filmed in colour. Luhrmann's taste for extravaganza seems to most people to suit Gatsby perfectly, although it is in fact a far more tightly controlled novel than it seems, and Luhrmann is not known for his restraint. Previews suggest a film of decadent, epicurean extravagance and debauchery.
Its reputation for revelries aside, Fitzgerald's novel in fact features just three parties, and only one of these offers paeans to its own splendours. The first party is the sordid little gathering in the flat of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's mistress, when Tom breaks Myrtle's nose for merely mentioning his wife Daisy's name. The third and final party is at Gatsby's mansion, but Fitzgerald uses it to shift the story's mood definitively from enchantment to disenchantment: Daisy and Tom attend, and their contempt for Gatsby's world exposes its tawdriness, its tinsel wrappings.
Only the second party, with Nick as lyrical witness to its glories, features the magical prose that lingers in readers' minds — the girls floating among the whisperings and the moths and the champagne, yellow cocktail music rising over the blue gardens, the opera of voices pitching a key higher — and even that party has little of the saturnalia that seems to characterise Luhrmann's vision. Although colour is central to the novel, the first surviving film version is a black-and-white noir thriller from starring Alan Ladd.
In true Hollywood mid-century style, the film grows deeply uncomfortable with the reprehensible behaviour of its characters and forces them all to repent at story's end; the final moments of the film bring a cascade of changes of heart.
Even Tom feels contrite and tries to save Gatsby, while Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech about saving young men like him from older men like him "What's going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don't tell them we're wrong?
Twenty years before the noir Gatsby was the first cinematic version, a silent film from that has been lost, although the academic Anne Margaret Daniel recently revealed in the Huffington Post that a letter in the Fitzgerald archives shows that Scott and Zelda attended a screening of the film in Zelda wrote to their daughter that it was "ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left. Whether Fitzgerald would have enjoyed any of the subsequent stage and film versions any better is open to some question.
Gatsby is about the superiority of imagination over reality, which makes it very difficult to dramatise well. It is a novel of layered projections: Gatsby projects his fantasies on to Daisy, and we can't be certain whether Nick is projecting his fantasies on to Gatsby, or is instead the only person to see past Gatsby's facade to the grandeur of the real man. Among the dismissive early reviews of the novel was one by the influential critic HL Mencken, who called Gatsby little more than "a glorified anecdote".
Understandably frustrated at the general failure of critical acumen all around him, Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson : "Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A. But, beyond question, Fitzgerald would have been delighted at the adulation his masterpiece has long inspired. When he composed The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald was one of the most successful writers of his era, among the decade's highest-paid writers of magazine fiction.
He had been young, brash, ambitious; when he became his own success story he won Alabama belle Zelda Sayre and the pair rapidly became legendary for their revels, incarnating the "flappers and philosophers" who populated the jazz age — the name Fitzgerald himself bestowed upon the era he and Zelda still embody. Although, his money is made from criminal means, he is sincere, loyal, and has genuine love for Daisy. For example, when Daisy runs over Myrtle in Gatsby's car, Gatsby takes the blame for Daisy, a chivalrous act of love and loyalty towards Daisy, which ultimately results in his death.
Daisy, however, does not respond to Gatsby's death, her silence displaying disloyalty, cowardice and self-serving nature, despite Gatsby's noble sacrifice. However, the greatness of Gatsby's sacrifice is only limited as the cause Daisy is arguably not worth the trouble. Gatsby is great because despite his wealth, he is sincere, loyal, and holds genuine love for Daisy, and these qualities lead to his death as he takes the blame for Daisy's murder.
However, his greatness is limited to an extent because his noble qualities are spent on an unworthy cause as Daisy is not the perfect person Gatsby sees her as. Fitzgerald uses the character of Gatsby, to explore the flaws of 's New York lifestyle and the distorted American Dream of that era.
Gatsby is great because in a shallow world of empty pursuit of pleasure, wealth and luxury, he still has hope and sincere qualities of love and loyalty. However, Gatsby's greatness is only limited due to the goals he strives for; shallow wealth and luxury, and the idealized love of Daisy.
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