Faith Among the Ashes: Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

In 1925 T. S. Eliot found himself as moved and interested by The Great Gatsby as he had been by any novel for a very long time. Since then, the novel has attracted praise from a great many discriminating critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and the deep interest of first-generation readers has been shared by others coming from different backgrounds and at a later time. Any new consideration must now be concerned with it then as a work which belongs not only to American but to world literature; not only to the immediate soil from which it sprang (prohibition, big business, gangsters, jazz, uprootedness) but to the tragic record of men ‘without God, and without hope in the world’. This is worth stating, if only because an English critic might otherwise feel diffident about approaching a masterpiece which in many ways is so distinctively American, and which has been cited so often in histories of the American dream. An Englishman will miss, no doubt, some important nuances that to an American will be immediately obvious. He will be less sure of himself than an American critic might be in assessing how far Fitzgerald does, or does not, look forward to Salinger, Bellow and other writers of the affluent, or the alienated, society.

Gatsby must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.…