The novel "The Great Gatsby", written in the spring of 1925, is truly great. It did not bring fame to its author Francis during his lifetime.
Only thirty years later, in the 60s of the last century, the recognition of the classic came: according to the US school curriculum, you need to know a summary of The Great Gatsby. This is a “very American” book: Why did he “succeed”? Firstly, some of Gatsby’s traits are characteristic of Francis Scott himself: earned wealth, dreams, flights of thought towards his dissolute, later beautiful wife Zelda Sayre, which led the writer to a stroke and death. Secondly, the author wrote about his generation in the same way as Pasternak, Sholokhov, as Pelevin writes now.
To truly gain an understanding of The Great Gatsby, a summary will not help much. Open the ending of the novel - here is its leitmotif. In one of the last paragraphs, Fitzgerald mentions a romantic 17th-century sailing ship rushing from the distant shores of Europe to the coast of Long Island (later the site of Gatsby’s residence), the shining eyes of a Dutch sailor, the “bated breath” from the beauty of the surroundings and the “capacity for admiration.” It was just such a person, as if torn out by a time machine from that same Dutch sailing ship, that Scott Fitzgerald “threw” back to the 20s of the last century. Isn’t it related to this leitmotif that 17-year-old James Getz, impressed by millionaire Dan Cody’s yacht, came up with a new name for himself, Jay Gatsby? He remains faithful to the end to the name born of youthful fantasy.
Once you discover the book, you will understand why the Great Gatsby is considered a household name in the United States. The summary of the book is the story of Lieutenant Gatsby's acquaintance with the rich girl Daisy, Nick Carraway's second cousin, and his feelings for her. He went to the front, she married millionaire Tom Buchanan. Even the fact that young Daisy, on the eve of the wedding, threw away her future husband's gift - fifty thousand - and got drunk "to the point of smoke", did not turn the wedding away. However, two principles have always struggled in her: the understanding of benefits and the desire for happiness. But if the girl was protected by wealth, then the Great Gatsby was in the warring army. A brief summary of his subsequent biography: the rank of major, being scorched by the fire of the First World War, studying at Oxford. The young man understood that his beloved belonged to a different class, filled to the brim with luxury and life, so he strove to become rich by any means, even through the underground trade in alcohol, violating the “prohibition law” (bootlegging).
But all this happens behind the scenes. The novel shows him having already purchased a residence in a resort suburb of New York, not far from the Buchanan mansion. The Great Gatsby chose the anonymous tactic of entering the world and making contact with Daisy. The summary is this: after organizing endless noisy parties one after another, in the end he wanted to invite Desi too. His plan was a success, she responded to his call, and was even ready to dissolve her marriage. But Tom Buchanan, the husband, took Gatsby's naive explanation at the Plaza Hotel that Daisy would leave him as a signal to action. He found out about the illegality of the income of the main character of the novel and told his wife about it. She chose to live with her husband, even knowing about his betrayal with his mistress. The Great Gatsby paid severely for trying to “break into high society.” The summary subsequently acquires the features of fatality and tragedy. Tom Buchanan came across an opportunity that he did not miss: Daisy, while driving Jay’s car, killed Myrtle, George Wilson’s wife, then, scared, drove away. When the inconsolable husband came to him asking questions, Buchanan pointed to Jay. George Wilson shot and killed The Great Gatsby while he was relaxing at his residence and then committed suicide.
What did Fitzgerald want to say to his fellow countrymen with this novel? He probably tried to “shake up” the negative balance between dreams, admiration, passion and commercialism, pragmatism.
"The Great Gatsby" is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1925. According to the American critic M. Geismar, “The Great Gatsby” was for its time “the most perfect American novel in the modern tradition” in terms of the mathematical harmony of the composition. This, according to the critic, the author managed to achieve by introducing into the novel the structural elements of his stories, compressed and harmonious, “tightly put together.” All images and details in the novel are carefully thought out and justified, firmly woven into the narrative and figurative-semantic fabric.
Focusing, as the writer admits, on The Brothers Karamazov, he decided to turn the story of an everyday crime into a deep philosophical canvas about the tragedy of modern life. "The Great Gatsby" is one of the first in the 20th century. experiments in the study of the national myth of the “American Dream”, which is transformed into the “American tragedy”. In the fate of the main character of the book, Jay Gatsby, the author ironically reinterprets the medieval plot of the search for the Holy Grail. However, the wanderings and exploits of the hero of the novel lead to a tragic ending.
"The Great Gatsby": a summary of the novel
A native of North Dakota, the son of a poor unsuccessful farmer, James Gatz, according to the author, “invented Jay Gatsby for himself in full accordance with the tastes and concepts of a seventeen-year-old boy and remained faithful to this invention to the end.” Jay is a typical American dreamer who has made it his goal in life to achieve success - wealth, fame and love. Having experienced rapturous delight in his early youth at the sight of someone else's luxury, he vows to himself sooner or later to achieve the same. Another dream of his life was the rich aristocrat Daisy. Having inspired himself with love for the “beautiful lady,” he decides to devote his life to finding Daisy’s heart.
Having changed his ordinary name to the romantic-sounding Jay Gatsby, he turns into a successful businessman with an allegedly Oxford education and comes to bustling New York. There, his indefatigable worship of wealth quickly brings success, embodied in a pompous villa-palace in a prestigious area of Long Island and the grandiose “feasts of Trimalchio” - feasts organized by Gatsby for local celebrities. Naively dreaming of becoming the talk of the town, Gatsby puts on himself an aura of romantic mystery. It is no coincidence that acquaintances spread gossip about him that he is Hindenburg’s nephew, a German spy, or even a fugitive murderer (in this regard, the “demonic” Gatsby paradoxically comes close to Gogol’s Chichikov, about whom residents of the city of N. spread similar fantastic rumors).
No one suspects that the broad gestures of the eccentric rich man pursue the only goal - to attract Daisy's attention. (Now young Gatsby’s “fair lady” is the wife of his next-door neighbor Tom Buchanan.) In the end, the hero achieves his goal and takes possession of Daisy in the same way as he acquired a luxurious villa on the coast, an elegant car and a fashionable wardrobe. The ending of the hero's rapid rise to wealth, fame and happiness is absurdly tragic: he is mistakenly killed by the jealous husband of his mistress Tom Buchanan.
Analysis of the novel
The tragedy of Gatsby's life - and the meaning of the "American tragedy", according to Fitzgerald - is that the hero found himself in the grip of illusions, the collapse of which was inevitable. He was completely alien to the class that he had dreamed of joining since his youth. The hero is not only doomed to loneliness, he is doomed to death (like his literary predecessor Martin Eden D. London), and his “greatness” turns out to be ephemeral, because it is essentially false. Gatsby is a kind of “hero of our time” - the hero of the so-called “Jazz Age”, a cheerful but short-lived period of post-war prosperity. The central character of the novel is the embodiment of the spirit of America, the personification of the romantic idealism of poor provincials, collapsing after a collision with cruel social reality.
The opposite of Jay Gatsby in the novel is the Buchanan couple, first of all Tom - a wealthy aristocrat, a graduate of the prestigious Yale University, a cynical and calculating “new American” of the 20th century, completely devoid of Gatsby’s naive idealism. His wife Daisy, a hypocritical, coldish and smug beauty, matches him. The future of America belongs to people like the Buchanans; they are the masters of a new culture, where there is no place for the “old-fashioned” romanticism of Gatsby.
The doom of Gatsby's tragic fate is highlighted in the climactic episode of the novel: Daisy, while driving Gatsby's car, kills Myrtle Wilson, her husband's mistress. Gatsby, saving his beloved, takes the blame and soon receives a fatal bullet from Mr. Wilson.
Narrator Nick Carraway (like Jake Barnes in E. Hemingway's novel Fiesta) - alter ego The author, who gives a moral commentary to the characters and their actions, is one of the first heroes in American prose of the 20th century to go from “innocence to experience.” Nick Carraway comprehends the hidden moral foundations and social springs of modern society and is able to analyze and evaluate what is happening. Nick Carraway's line is a fragment of the structure of the "novel of education." Becoming a witness and chronicler of the life tragedy of Jay Gatsby, Nick learns a lesson that Gatsby was not destined to comprehend: he learns the emptiness of the existence of the ruling class and the futility of Gatsby’s illusions, and at the same time his own, the same as Gatsby’s - youthful idealism and faith in “ American dream." The apotheosis of a melancholy farewell to the ideological myths of a bygone era is Nick Carraway’s famous monologue at the end of the book: “So we try to swim forward, fighting the current, but it carries everything and carries our little boats back to the past...”.
The novel was filmed three times - in 1926, 1949 and 1974 (the title role in the last film adaptation was played by R. Redford).
“If you measure a personality by its ability to express itself, then there was something truly magnificent in Gatsby, some kind of heightened sensitivity to all the promises of life... It was a rare gift of hope, a romantic fervor that I have never seen in anyone else.”
Nick Carraway belongs to a respectable, wealthy family in one of the small towns of the Midwest. He graduated from Yale in 1915, then fought in Europe; Having returned to his hometown after the war, he “could not find a place for himself” and in 1922 he moved east to New York to study credit business. He settled in the suburbs: on the outskirts of Long Island Sound, two completely identical capes jut into the water, separated by a narrow cove: East Egg and West Egg; in West Egg, between two luxurious villas, nestled a house that he rented for eighty dollars a month. His second cousin Daisy lives in more fashionable East Egg. She is married to Tom Buchanan. Tom is fabulously rich, he studied at Yale at the same time as Nick, and even then Nick was very unsympathetic to his aggressively flawed behavior. Tom started cheating on his wife on their honeymoon; and now he does not consider it necessary to hide from Nick his connection with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of the owner of a gas station and car repair, which is located halfway between West Egg and New York, where the highway runs almost right up to the railroad and a quarter of a mile runs next to her. Daisy also knows about her husband’s infidelities, it torments her; From his first visit to them, Nick was left with the impression that Daisy needed to run away from this house immediately.
On summer evenings there is music at neighbor Nick's villa; on weekends, his Rolls-Royce turns into a shuttle bus to New York, transporting huge numbers of guests, and a multi-seat Ford shuttles between the villa and the station. On Mondays, eight servants and a specially hired second gardener spend the day removing signs of destruction.
Soon Nick receives an official invitation to Mr. Gatsby's party and turns out to be one of the very few invited: they didn't expect an invitation, they just came there. No one in the crowd of guests knows the owner closely; not everyone knows him by sight. His mysterious, romantic figure arouses keen interest - and speculation multiplies in the crowd: some claim that Gatsby killed a man, others that he is a bootlegger, von Hindenburg's nephew and second cousin of the devil, and during the war he was a German spy. It is also said that he studied at Oxford. In the crowd of his guests he is lonely, sober and reserved. The society that enjoyed Gatsby's hospitality paid him by not knowing anything about him. Nick meets Gatsby almost by accident: after talking with some man - they turned out to be fellow soldiers - he noticed that he was somewhat embarrassed by the position of a guest unfamiliar with the owner, and received the answer: “So it’s me - Gatsby.”
After several meetings, Gatsby asks Nick for a favor. Embarrassed, he paces around the bush for a long time, presenting a medal from Montenegro, which he was awarded in the war, and his Oxford photograph as proof of his respectability; Finally, in a very childish way, he says that Jordan Baker will present his request - Nick met her at Gatsby’s, and met her at the house of his sister Daisy: Jordan was her friend.
Nick Carraway, a graduate of Yale University, is in a sanatorium where he is being treated for alcoholism. He talks about a man named Gatsby, with whom fate brought him together in New York. Nick finds it difficult to talk about this, and the doctor invites him to write down this story on paper.
Nick begins his story with a memory of how he moved from the Midwest to New York in 1922 and rented a house in West Egg on Long Island. Nick visits the luxurious estate of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy was Nick's second cousin, and her husband, Tom, once played polo at Yale and now enjoys wealth. Daisy introduces Nick to her friend, famous golfer, Jordan Baker. During dinner, the phone suddenly starts ringing: it’s Tom’s mistress, whose presence everyone has known for a long time.
To meet this mistress, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of an unsuspecting auto mechanic George from the New York mining district, Tom rents an apartment in the city. Tom invites Nick there, where he also meets Katherine, Myrtle's sister, and the McKees, Myrtle's friends. The night ends with general drinking and a broken nose from Myrtle, who annoyed Tom by mentioning Daisy's name.
Everyone around him keeps telling Nick about Mr. Jay Gatsby, who is his next-door neighbor, a very rich man known for hosting lavish, fun parties at his giant estate, which are attended by hundreds of people every Saturday. Soon Gatsby's driver brings Nick a formal invitation to one of these parties. Gatsby was a mysterious man, many rumors circulated about the size and source of his enormous wealth. None of the guests Nick met even knew what Gatsby looked like. During the party, a certain man started a conversation with Nick about Gatsby, but it turned out that he was the same Mr. Gatsby.
Gatsby impresses Nick, and soon a friendship begins between them.
Nick was very surprised when Gatsby told him the story of his life and dizzying success, however, Nick treated these words ironically.
Gatsby is hiding some secret; Nick still doesn’t understand why Jay Gatsby is so protective of him. Gatsby introduces Nick to his companion, a shady businessman named Meyer Wolfshiem, whom he asks to confirm Gatsby's words about his past. Soon Meyer leaves the gentlemen alone, and Gatsby is ready to tell Nick his secret, when suddenly Tom Buchanan appears and Gatsby suddenly leaves. Having met Jordan in the evening at a restaurant, Nick begins to ask her about why Gatsby is behaving so strangely, and Jordan tells him that she, it turns out, had already seen Gatsby 5 years ago. Then he had an affair with Daisy, but soon he had to go to the front, and then he simply disappeared. Gatsby wrote to Daisy on the day of her wedding with Tom that he still loved her, and the wedding almost fell through, but Daisy still married Tom. Then Gatsby bought a house opposite the Buchanan mansion (the house is located on the other side of the bay) so that he could always be close to Daisy, and he threw all the parties in the hope that one day Daisy would come there and they would meet. But Daisy never came, so Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting for them.
Nick promises to do this, and the meeting with Daisy takes place - at first the situation was awkward, but then everything went according to plan.
Nick learns details about the life of Jay Gatsby: his whole past life is a desire to reach the top, because 5 years ago he, a poor officer, was afraid that Daisy, the daughter of rich and noble parents, would refuse him or he simply would not be able to support her, so he did not return to her after the front.
In fact, Gatsby was born into a poor family in the Midwest, growing up in dreams and dreams, where he identified himself as the son of God. As a teenager, Jay Getz (real name of today's rich man Gatsby) left home to meet his destiny. Chance helped him meet a millionaire whom Jay saved from death. As a reward, he received an education - the saved millionaire taught him many things. Unfortunately, after his death, the millionaire's inheritance went to his family, not Jay, but he was already fully armed. By the beginning of summer, the entire press was full of reports about a secret rich man throwing grand parties.
Soon Gatsby invites Daisy and Tom to his party. Tom immediately felt the threat emanating from Gatsby; all evening he threatened to make inquiries about this man. When Tom became attracted to one of the girls at the party, Gatsby took Daisy to the park and kissed her there. Daisy suggested they run away, but Gatsby refused, saying that they would live in his luxurious mansion when the time came. From then on, Daisy began to constantly come to Gatsby. The noisy parties stopped, most of the servants were fired, because Gatsby did not want anyone to find out and talk about his affair with Daisy ahead of time. Soon Gatsby, along with Nick and Jordan, visits the Buchanans, where Daisy has a nervous breakdown.
Tom Buchanan, sensing a brewing conflict, invites everyone to go to the city.
Gatsby, already at the Plaza Hotel, is trying to get Daisy to talk to Tom so that Daisy will admit that she never loved Tom, but Daisy hesitates, because, in fact, she loves both of them. Tom, seeing Daisy's indecisiveness, accuses Gatsby of being a bootlegger, and Tom's words that Gatsby is not of noble birth morally destroy Jay. Tom feels victory and decides that Daisy and Gatsby will ride back together in his car, while he, Nick and Jordan ride in the other car.
At this time, George Wilson has a row with his wife, suspecting her of infidelity. She runs out of the house and is hit and killed by Gatsby's car, driven by Daisy. The car speeds away. Jordan, Nick and Tom, riding behind, notice the deceased. Tom recognizes her as his mistress. George was distraught with grief. He is obsessed with the idea that the driver of the car that hit Myrtle was the one she was dating. Tom tells the widower that the car belongs to Gatsby.
George Wilson finds and kills Gatsby in his swimming pool and then commits suicide. Nick calls Gatsby's acquaintances, but none of them come to the funeral. Tom and Daisy leave without leaving coordinates.
At the sanatorium, Nick is finishing his memoirs. Finishing the last sheet, Nick pencils in the word “great” to the title “Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby” is the name of the novel by the American writer Fitzgerald. The book is actually very popular among readers - and has always been popular. So why? I really want to figure this out. This novel was published on April 10, 1925, in what is commonly called the “Age of Jazz.”
“The Great Gatsby” is in some ways a sentimental love story, in some ways a detective story, and the ending in the novel is tragic. Quite interesting, sometimes strange images of that era constantly flash on the pages of the novel, immersing the reader in that time. Very stormy, but at the same time unforgettable. There was not much time left before the “Great Depression” in the United States, when rich young people simply shot themselves because they found themselves bankrupt.
But in the 1920s, the US economy grew rapidly because the US is the only country in the world that did not suffer from either the consequences of the First World War or the consequences of the Second World War. For some reason, Russia always suffered the most, then the USSR. Many biographers of Fitzgerald write that his wife, the prototype of the heroine of the novel Tender is the Night, fell ill with a severe form of mental illness during this period. The writer himself was endlessly worried about this, and he himself often went to the hospital with tuberculosis.
It is worth keeping in mind that Fitzgerald also had internal contradictions, because at one time he really wanted to go to the front of the First World War to defend democracy, but did not get there. Disappointment in life and the illness of his wife gave the novel a tragic overtone. It is worth noting that the word “jazz” has nothing to do with the cheerful (more often than not) musical direction of that period. In the understanding of Fitzgerald's biographers, “jazz” means some kind of philosophical depth, some kind of nervous tension reigning in the atmosphere of that time, even to the point of tragedy, some kind of premonition of impending discord. Fitzgerald himself emphasized this: “When they talk about jazz, they mean, first of all, the situation in big cities, when the front line is approaching them... and therefore, let’s live while we’re alive, have fun, and tomorrow death will come for us.” In "Echoes of the Jazz Age," Fitzgerald wrote: "The events of 1919 made us more likely to become cynics than revolutionaries... it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that we were not at all interested in politics."
The novel begins with the story of Nick Carraway, who is advised by his father not to judge other people poorly unless they have the same character traits or material advantages as him. “If you want to judge someone, remember that they do not have the same advantages as you” - Fitzgerald. So, Jay Gatsby... he's quite rich. But not as rich as Jay would like.
The image of Jay may have been influenced by Hemingway’s story “The Young Rich Man,” which, naturally, Fitzgerald read. But even without this, he acquired some kind of fame among readers. It is worth noting that a “very rich man” is a socio-psychological type, influencing an entire, and perhaps more than one, generation. But why can there be an interest in very rich people among people who may have never encountered them in life?
Probably, Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” cannot be called satirical or somehow accusatory - otherwise the writer would have brought to the reader’s attention some real or fictitious “vices” of the society in which he was so interested. But, it is likely that Fitzgerald became interested in precisely this layer of people who were far from art, because, most likely, he internally foresaw their collapse in 1929.
Perhaps this will excuse the writer, who, being a creative person himself, brought to the stage not an artist, nor a writer, nor an artist, but simply a “very rich man.” By the way, perhaps Fitzgerald somehow wanted to prevent a collapse - he wanted society to take a closer look at the experience of the USSR, and to change the situation in the economy in a peaceful, non-revolutionary way. Nick begins his story with memories, not only of himself, but also of his family. But he adds: “Gatsby justified himself in the end. It wasn’t him, but what was weighing on him—that poisonous dust that rose up around his dream—that’s what made me temporarily lose interest in people’s fleeting sorrows and rushed joys.”
Nick graduated from Yale University in 1915, got a dog, and settled in West Egg. Opposite, as you know, Gatsby's estate was located. His relatives, husband and wife Tom and Daisy Buchanan, returned to America from France. Young people - Tom, Daisy, Daisy's friend and Nick meet in an informal setting, and Tom, in response to Daisy's question “who is Gatsby,” wanted to introduce him to her as his closest neighbor. The mysterious Gatsby continued to worry Nick for some reason. The incident when he saw Gatsby on the balcony at night alarmed him, but he immediately forgot about it. But between Nick and Gatsby himself, friendly relations subsequently developed when they both realized that they were once comrades in the regiment. Gatsby decides to reveal to Nick the secret of his inner and outer world as much as possible.
Gatsby invites Nick to his villa. “At the beginning of the eighth, I, dressed in a white flannel suit, entered Gatsby’s villa, but felt uncomfortable among many strangers,” Nick described the beginning of the evening. One of Nick's acquaintances meets Jordan Baker at the evening and spends a lot of time with her. The mystery of Gatsby and what he surrounded himself with - pop singers, dancers, emigrants from Russia - all this spurred the interest of Jordan and Nika in him, who really liked each other that evening.
Gatsby's mansion was full of events every day - many guests, magnificent dinners, new women, all this attracted attention to him and created the effect of mystery. But an alarming note began to creep into some of the remarks of visitors to the mansion. “He’s a bootlegger,” the ladies whispered, drinking his cocktails and smelling his flowers.” It must be said that a bootlegger is “an underground liquor dealer during Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s.” But in a broader sense, these people traded everything from music records, to flowers, or perhaps even cars. The origin of Gatsby's fortune and his motives for the society that loved to visit him remained unclear.
It is probably worth noting that the main characters of the novel are 30 years old at the time of the story. All relationships unfold between young people of their time. And, probably, the main circumstance in the novel is the mysterious romance between Daisy and Gatsby himself. It turned out that they already had a relationship long before meeting at Gatsby's mansion. Perhaps his love for Daisy partly explained all of Gatsby's actions. Gatsby probably tried to take Daisy away from Tom, but a tragic incident - when the lovers, leaving the Plaza Hotel, knocked a woman to death on the road, prevented Gatsby's dreams from coming true. Probably either a tragic accident or a fatal mistake - the husband of the deceased kills Gatsby at the end by the pool. And the fact that the main characters who knew Gatsby go in different directions is an indicator of the impossibility of their relationship in the future.
Gatsby seemed to me not so much as indecisive, but rather really mysterious, and loving to boast a little. There is a hint of this in the book in the scene in which he shows Nick the order “from little Montenegro,” although, quite likely, the award received at the front of the First World War then constituted all his personal happiness for the young man. In my opinion, this is a story about the impossible - that Gatsby and Daisy would never have been together, and that Nick and Jordan would ultimately be disappointed in their relationship. Tom and Daisy were still irresponsible people. As the author characterizes them, “careless.” If Daisy had loved Gatsby, she would have married him when he was poor.
But time has passed. Gatsby, on the basis of his fame, may have traded somewhere and made a fortune for himself, and created some kind of mysterious legend about himself, managed to attract society, and Daisy ran after him only because he is not only rich, but also has some kind of glory. Then she no longer needed Tom. By the way, we are not talking about relationships with age differences here. Here we are talking about relationships of exactly the same age - people who are 30. Moreover, everyone. Probably one word characterizes Daisy: “irresponsibility.” Even in relation to her daughter, whom she most likely did not care about. But it must be said that the relationship between Nick and Jordan also could not stand the pressure of events and began to crack. Probably, the greatness and motive of Gatsby’s actions is that in some way he tried to attract the attention of his beloved, Daisy. But, apparently, the young man did not know any other way to conquer a woman’s heart, such as fictitious or real wealth. In fact, this is the main tragedy of Gatsby. And, perhaps, young people in many ways - trying to conquer a woman, they display all their wealth in front of her (somewhat reminiscent of the image of Zlatogor from the opera “The Queen of Spades” by Tchaikovsky). But this is not always a fact. Probably, if Gatsby knew how to attract Daisy’s attention, he would have fought her off from Tom even then. But this is basically sad.
But, quite likely, events would have developed differently if not for a fatal accident - Myrtle’s death in an accident due to Gatsby’s fault. Perhaps Fitzgerald wanted to emphasize the aimlessness of the existence of the generation of thirty-year-olds. For them, life meant fun, but until the moment when a fatal coincidence of circumstances did not force them to think about the human values that they should carry within themselves.
Text: Olga Sysueva
