The Great Gatsby: A Level York Notes

• Modernism was an international movement that flourished at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Writers of modernist fiction often paid as much or more attention to literary form, technique and language as to the content of a story. F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply influenced by the sophisticated narrative techniques of earlier modernist writers, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
• The Great Gatsby ranks alongside John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as a major achievement of American modernism.

• The Great Gatsby is narrated in the first person by Nick Carraway, who is also a character in the story he tells.
• All the events of the novel are filtered through Nick Carraway’s point of view, so it is vital that we remain aware of his voice.
• Nick is not just telling the story, but is writing it, fulfilling his literary ambitions.
• There are significant omissions and apparent contradictions that make us aware that Nick is not necessarily a reliable or entirely trustworthy narrator.

• In his narration Nick occasionally uses words, such as ‘meretricious’, ‘spectroscopic’ and ‘somnambulatory’, that may be obscure and challenging to some readers.
• This tendency reflects his privileged education at Yale and his desire to write in a way he considers literary.
• It also draws attention to the fact that Nick’s narrative is not just a plain telling of events but is filtered through his creative imagination.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald thus makes it clear that Nick’s writing of the story is itself part of the story.

• Direct speech makes us feel we are present when a scene in the novel is taking place, witnessing an actual conversation.
• Yet Nick is writing this dialogue, attributing it to characters involved in the action and sometimes adding his own comments.
• We should be aware that even direct speech may have been crafted by Nick to invite us to interpret a character in a particular way.
• This is most obvious when he mimics a distinctive accent, as in the words of Meyer Wolfshiem or Henry Gatz.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald carefully created patterns of language and imagery in order to suggest symbolic meanings beyond the obvious.
• Words recur in differing contexts and we have to read them in a different light, recognising how meaning can change with circumstances. For example, ‘beat’ on pp. 18, 130 and 172; or ‘dust’ on pp. 8, 26 and 144.
• Images of flowers and plants, to cite an obvious example, are woven through Nick’s narrative, like threads in a verbal tapestry.
• This text draws attention to its own verbal artifice, rather than aspiring to present narrative action as though we were watching it directly.