The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 Thinking Activity: "The Great Gatsby"

This is a thinking activity on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This task is assigned by Dr. Dilip Bard sir, after the movie screening of Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby.

The novel The Great Gatsby is written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1925. Set in Jazz Age New York. The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, he tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Gatsby’s quest leads him from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved and eventually to death. 

How did the film capture the Jazz Age - the Roaring Twenties of the America in 1920s?

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” Fitzgerald famously wrote of the 1920s in a 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age.” 

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. 

"Jazz’s lineage—difficult as it is to pin down—was tightly bound up with African-American performance, the music often came to signify black American cultural production, and so, whenever Fitzgerald invoked jazz, he was often, simultaneously, invoking blackness. Yet The Great Gatsby’s usage of jazz is complicated, as Fitzgerald was simultaneously a proponent of the then-new, race-crossing music and a writer prone to resorting to racial stereotypes when black characters appeared—a combination that, unfortunately, was far from uncommon in Fitzgerald’s day." (Bellot) 

 The Jazz age is also know as the Roaring Twenties of America. In the current times the Jazz music coincided a classic music/dance. In the movie it is mostly shown in the parties of the new self made millionaire and a mysterious character Jay Gatsby. 

How did the film help in understanding the symbolic significance of 'The Valley of Ashes', 'The Eyes of Dr. T J Eckleberg' and 'The Green Light'?

In both the novel and the movie The Eyes of Dr. T J Eckleberg is shown over the valley of ashes. Which appear on the advertising billboard of an oculist. these eyes are very significant in the novel and movie.These eyes almost become a moral conscience in the morally vacuous world of The Great Gatsby, to George Wilson, they are the eyes of God.

They are said to “brood” and “[keep] their vigil” over the valley, and they witness some of the most corrupt moments of the novel: Tom and Myrtle’s affair, Myrtle’s death, and the valley itself, full of America’s industrial waste and the toiling poor.However, in the end, they are another product of the materialistic culture of the age, set up by Doctor Eckleburg to “fatten his practice.” Behind them is just one more person trying to get rich. Their function as a divine being who watches and judges is thus ultimately null, and the novel is left without a moral anchor.

The movie starts with the scene of the ocean and the green light. The green light is the symbol of hope in the novel. This light is at Daisy's Dock.Throughout the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a recurrent image that beckons to Gatsby’s sense of ambition.

It is a symbol of “the orgastic future” he believes in so intensely, toward which his arms are outstretched when Nick first sees him.It is this “extraordinary gift for hope” that Nick admires so much in Gatsby, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.”

In essence, the green light is an unattainable promise, one that Nick understands in universal terms at the end of the novel: a future we never grasp but for which we are always reaching.

The Ocean is not that much important in the novel but it is an archetype. The Archetype of Water in Northrop Frye’s Archetype of Literature: The water realm is Represented by rivers usually ends with comedy and the seas and floods signify the tragic end.