The Identity Plot in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Posted on Aug 25, 2024 in Arts and Humanities

IDENTITY PLOT

The narrative revolves around the question of how to define and understand a character’s identity. The character must be a member of a minority within a larger society. The character is at odds with the minority group of which he/she is a part. The character stands in conflict with the majority as well as with the minority on account of his/her difference.

Authenticity and origin are always at stake in the character’s quest for personal identity. There are comic and tragic versions of the plot: in the comic version, the character comes to peace with his identity; in the tragic version, the character does not.

Variations:

  • The character seems to be a member of the majority group.
  • The character does not seem to be conflicted about his/her membership in the minority group.
  • The character resists the whole idea of having an identity that is stable.

Historical Specificity of the Identity Plot

There are identity plots to be found in the literature of other periods: Mistaken identity is a staple of Renaissance comedy; secret identity a staple of Gothic fiction; artistic identity central to Modernist fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

1920: The Jazz Age: A Contradictory Decade

  • Modernity and Change: Economic growth, consumerism, women’s vote.
  • Conservatism: Immigration restrictions, prevalent racism, Prohibition.

A Contradictory Growth

  • “America’s business is business”
  • Cheap credits, stock market
  • Technology, mass production, consumerism
  • Cars, radios, phonographs, cameras, phones
  • Growth of popular culture: jazz music, films, newspapers, magazines

American Dreams Boom

Unprecedented economic growth leads to unprecedented class mobility. The economic boom fuels the dream. The “rags to riches” theme [has a] long-standing presence in American history. Class mobility [versus] social acceptance: The traditionally rich; The new rich; and The rich-to-be.

The American Dream Under Scrutiny, Walter Lippmann

  • “A nation of uncritical drifters”
  • Corruption of the dream: materialism [versus] values
  • Vitality [versus] lethargy: new money [versus] old money characters.
  • Morality, ability to feel, to dream, to respond to others, true feelings [versus] Boredom, unconsciousness, inertia, selfishness.

The New Woman

19th Amendment ratified in 1920, culmination of women’s suffrage movement. Social evolution of the American woman: increasing public power since 1890. The ‘flapper’: young, spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centered, fun-loving, frivolous. [However, there was a] Negative side: dependent on men, consumption victims.

Conservatism, The Prohibition

Revival of Puritanism. Volstead Act (1919), 18th Amendment. Typical prohibitionist: Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, xenophobic. Popular opposition. A failure: gangsters, bootlegging, clandestine bars (speakeasies), poisonings. Jay Gatsby: a bootlegger.

Conservatism, Immigration Bill

Nativist feeling; the Nordic versus the alien; “America for the Americans!”; Reaction to changes in racial makeup of modern America; Immigration Bill (1924) restricts migration; Xenophobia, change of foreign-sounding names for more Anglo ones: Gatz (central Europe) – Gatsby.

Unprecedented Corruption

Government corruption scandals [during the presidency of] Warren Harding: Teapot Dome (Secretary of Interior); Selling of medical supplies, illegal contracts; Pro-business: tax evasion. Also, Bootlegging, Sports: “Black Sox Scandal”, 1919, Arnold Rothstein.

The Great Gatsby

A social novel: specific time and place; A poetic novel: a young man’s dream; romantic search for transcendence uplifting but impossible (Keats); national (promise, aspirations, Crevecoeur); “The following of a grail”; “A secret place among the trees”; “Gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder”.

American socio-economic issues [are present] in the background, non-realistic representation, issues are evoked, not shown. “Yellow cocktail music”; Focus on the character’s subjectivity, feelings, aspirations, conflicts; Under the Red, White and Blue [versus] The Great Gatsby

A Modernist Novel: Fragmentation

Fragmentation in the way Gatsby’s story is told and his character [is] delineated:

“In my theory, it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character … in those and in a hundred of places I tried to evoke not the person but the effect that the person produces on men, its echoes and reverberations”. Fitzgerald //: Collage, series of scenes, cinematic tendencies; Subjective approach.

A Modernist Novel: Vivid Language

Suggestive, evocative, elusive, no realistic detail.

Symbolism

Affects colors, setting, names. Ashes Valley (They always have to go through there to get to the city), within this is Tom’s mistress and the husband who kills Gatsby. It is a gray and enormous place that shows the reality of the time and the protagonists are far from it. Compare the lavish parties of fresh fruit, live music and champagne, with this land of chimneys and men of ashes… it seems that not everyone is as privileged as our cast of characters. The green light at Daisy’s house that Gatsby nostalgically sees from his own house across the water represents “the unattainable dream.” But the green light also represents the nebulous future, the future that will eternally be elusive, as Nick himself says: “Gatsby believed in the green light…”. The eyes of the T.J. Eckleburg billboard.

Setting

Real with symbolic connotations.

Influences on the Novel

  • Rags to riches theme:
    • Petronius’ Satyricon (I AD), Trimalchio
    • Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1790)
    • Horatio Alger’s stories, Ragged Dick (1868)
  • Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)
  • Romantic poetry: John Keats’ odes
  • T.S. Eliot’s poetry: The Wasteland (1922); The Hollow Men (1925) – a post-war mood (hollowness, sterility, moral and emotional failure).

Critical Reception of the Novel

  • “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school masters of ever afterward”
  • Praised by modernist writers: G. Stein, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot
  • “The first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (Eliot)
  • Overall negative criticism and poor sales
  • Revival in 1940s and in 1950s