[On April 10th,
1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published
by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have
my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important
novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ll
highlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellow
GatsbyStudiers!]
As I hope
this week’s series has reflected, there are a lot of layers to Fitzgerald’s novel
and its AmericanStudies contexts, a lot of reasons why it has endured as fully
as it has for the 100 years since its publication. But high on the list has to
be his complex and crucial use of a novelist-narrator, a storytelling voice who
is a character in the story but also and perhaps especially a novelist crafting
the text that we’re reading. That’s a device that many of our most interesting
novels have used, and used specifically to consider the American Dream, as I
argued in this
2011 American Literary Realism article. It’s available in full at
that link, so in lieu of a final post in this series I’d ask you to check out
that article if you’re interested, and let me know any thoughts if you do
please!
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?
