F.

SCOTT FITZGERALD
I. CONTEXT
i. THE 1920’s
 The Twenties was a period of transformation, reinvention,
change.
 He even gave a name to this period: The Jazz Age. Takes of the Jazz Age (1922). Jazz
music came to symbolize this decade about rebellion against restrictive codes of
behaviour, demands for freedom (blacks, dry law, etc.). Writers in America did not
become really interested in politics until the 1930’s.
 This decade is also known as the “Roaring Twenties”. According to Fitzgerald:
“America was going on the greatest, gaudiest, spree in history”.
 In the 1920’s/30’s American literature was dominated by “Americans abroad”. They
were crucial, frequent characters in many novels of the period. Hemingway novels all
in foreign places. For many the idea was to go to Paris and live cheaply and freely,
before the Great Depression, only Americans could do (WW1 AMERICA
RICH/EUROPE POOR).
American literature was dominated by the expatriates and Paris became the capital of this
literature. Before the Great Depression many people moved to Paris to live freely.
Expatriation was a synonym for = artistic freedom.
 This was a time of emancipation, rebellion against puritanism and prohibition,
liberation of women. In fact, sex was a powerful metaphor which expressed creativity.
Most of the writers in the period considered America civilization to be oppressive and
restrictive
 The Great Depression of the 1930’s:
It destroyed the claim that prohibition was going to lead to national prosperity, because the
opposite actually happened. Indulgence in drink (reaction against prohibition). Dissipation
(trying to forget your sadness with drink, sex, etc.).
 Crucial important changes in the role of women in the USA:
The role of women in the United States changed radically in this period, American women
contributed to the emancipation of the decade
There was this new model of femininity called Flapper (young girl who goes after her own
pleasure, shortens her skirt, short haircuts, drove cars, went on dates, drank hard liquor, etc.).
The character of the flapper was very recurrent in Scott’s F. novels.
 A constant theme is hypocrisy.
The writers attacked traditional codes of morality and became sceptical about everything,
even the function of writing and the meaning of words and concepts (Hemingway does not
like abstractions). They hated clichés, abstractions, and they praised authenticity, real
experiences.

ii. THE LOST GENERATION

The writers of this generation were called “The Lost Generation”. The famous writer Gertrude
Stein called them so. She was like the mother figure of the generation in Paris. She influenced
their style with her statement about the rose (…).
These writers broke completely away from the past, they had no sense of historical purpose,
and they broke with almost every other writer from the past. They discovered and revived
some lost writers from the past, who had been mostly ignored when they were alive (Herman
Melville).
Novels portrayed these topics:
- Lost individuals
- Loss of the sense of belonging to a community
- Disillusion. For them, everything people believed in was false
They reached the adult life and they found themselves in this post-ww1 period where the
world was chaotic and had lost its order. The faith in human progress and the hope of the
people were destroyed by the Great War (1915-18).
This was a war that took so many young Americans abroad from the New World to the Old
one. One of the characters in The Great Gatsby, Nick, participated in the war and he was
totally restless; many soldiers at that time suffered the shell-shock (trauma and inability to tell
back home what and how they were feeling while they were at war)
In Hemingway’s novel in 1929 (A Farewell to Arms) we see how the war is presented as
being responsible for cynicism, loss of faith and spiritual fall of most people. This war was
important for Americans
Ezra Pound: War victims dying “for an old bitch gone in the teeth / for a botched civilization”
(“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”)
 This is Ezra’s most famous poem, and he talked about the war. They had found a war
which was not a war. Pound saw that America have profited more than suffered from
the war.
Aestheticism as religion and as rebellion.

II. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

Fitzgerald was a perfect representative of the period. A famous figure in American
popular culture because his story is one that combines grammar-failure and grammar-
dissolution. He comes from St. Paul, Minnesota.
He was very ambivalent about his origins and nostalgic for the lost glory. The lost
prestige of their families is quite common in a lot of the writers of this generation as they
came for a prominent family that lost their economic power.
He writes about failures, his life was characterized about these mixed things: extravagance
and success on the one hand and devastating failure on the other. Moreover, he attended
Princeton University, one of the most prestigious American universities, in which he was a
failure academically but he distinguished himself socially and intellectually through writing..
Failure will be a crucial experience for him, failure as an experience.
 - Divided family heritage => ambivalence about social status and money; the
experience of failure.
- A symbol of the delights, the dangers and the defeat of the jazz Age.
His first novel This side of Paradise (1920) made him the cultural hero for his
generation. Autobiographical novel which was a complete success. This novel announced a
new era and it presented a new generation that was hungry for life in a country that was
changing very fast.
He got married the talented Zelda Sayre in 1920  She accepted to get married after
he became rich. Zelda was a woman who immediately responded to his ambition => life of
extravange, glamour, and good publicity. This life of endless partying and dissipation is
presented in many of his writings.
His second novel The beautiful and damned (1922) > it was inspired by Zelda and
Scott’s life. Story of moral and social dissolution. It had a negative response due to the sexual
connotations and moral values.
In 1922 they left America and went to Europe, Paris, where he met many writers, such
as Hemingway, with whom he established a competitive friendship. It was there where he
wrote The Great Gatsby. When he was writing the novel, his intention was “to write
something extraordinary, beautiful and simple”.
This novel was not absolutely successful, especially the second printing, and the novel ended
up being mostly forgotten. However, during WW2, this novel became very famous because it
was reprinted for American troops, which rescued it from obscurity.
In December of 1926 he went back to the USA and he spent some time in Hollywood
writing scripts, … although he never succeeded there. In 1930 during another trip to Europe,
Zelda suffered a series of mental breakdowns and he spent most of her last years hospitalized
due to her depression.
Later, he published the novel Tender is the night (1934), which did not succeed either
and Fitzgerald’s economic situation kept on getting worse. Finally, he went to Hollywood,
where he tried to keep earning his living but he failed and he ended up dying there at the age
of 44. As for his wife, she published a few books such as Save me the waltz (1932) and died in
a hospital fire.
The last tycoon (1941): unfinished novel

i. THE GREAT GATSBY (1925)

The Great Gatsby keeps on being an enormous success due to Fitzgerald’s favourite topics,
money and love, which raises a very interest question: is there a place for love in capitalist
America? This success is also related to his ability to appeal to the popular and educated
audience at the same time since, in a way, he tells the history of America.
The novel captures perfectly well the spirit of the Jazz Age, a period of individuals looking
for pleasure and success.
Its structure is very intrigue and its language is quite easy to read but at the same time it
hides quite a complex reality.
Thus, Gatsby refuses to change and explore different paths, different from what happens 6
years ago when he met Daisy. This novel is a very strong critique of the shadowness and the
dissipation of the high class. In chapter two, for example, we have a reference to the waste
land that America has become. The name itself West Egg is also really interesting because it
is a novel about the origins, the beginning of America and American culture.
The novel has also a social satire. It denounces frivolity, egotism, dissipation of a particular
class of people. Social inequality.
He considered to working titles for the novel:
- Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires (the wasteland theme)
o It points out to the question of the Wasteland. In the novel we have people who
live among the ashes and those millionaires who rejected the poor.
- Trimalchio in West Egg (host of parties in Petronius’ Satyricon)
o “Trimalchio” is the main character in Satyricon. He is a rich person who
hosted big parties. Only once in the novel is Gatsby named “Trimalchio”.
The action of the novel takes place in 1922 and Nick Carraway, the narrator (1st person
narrator), tells the story two years later, in 1924.
The title’s suggestions and connotations:
The title The Great Gatsby, suggests spectacle, a show because Gatsby is, in a way, a
magician, he can transform reality through magic enchantment. It obviously eludes to the hero
version that is so prominent in American culture: he is very strong apparently but, actually, he
is weak on the inside. There is the theme of hero-worship.
The title is obviously ironic and it raises the question that follows: is it possible to become
great, to become a great person in this age?
- Not really, Amory Blane says: “All gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man
shaken”. This is the Age of dissolution as the war destroyed human’s faith and hope,
so, there is no place anymore in America for the individual to achieve distinctions and
to be a hero through adventurous actions in war or in life. In this era, writers do not
believe in the individualism of characters, they are Naturalistics so they think
individuals are conditioned and determined by its surroundings
The novel raises a crucial question: why does the narrator, Nick, make Gatsby great? Nick is a
western with very traditional values, indeed, he goes back to the West very disgusted by the
people from the East. So, how can he pray Gatsby, a corrupt man, if he is so traditional?
(AMBIVALENCE)
Gatsby has obviously been described as a reflection of the American dream and the novel has
been exhaustively analysed for it. One of the aims of this novel is to analyse the condition of
American in the first quarter of the 20th century. Fitzgerald wanted to analyse and
understand America. He was an idealistic. The novel concludes with a passage about the
amazing capacity of the American individual to dream. The novel obviously show that this
dreams and ideas have been idealized and simplified. The thing is, basically, he reinvents
himself and represents the American dream of self-making, simply by inventing it.
GATSBY = AMERICA = THE AMERICAN DREAM
Analyzing America through Gatsby. Lionel Trilling writes:
“ For Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself.
Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, ‘the
American dream.’ We are told that ‘the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island,
sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it
means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a
vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.’ Clearly it is Fitzgerald’s intention that our mind should
turn to the thought of the nation that has sprung from its ‘Platonic conception’ of itself. To the
world it is anomalous in America, just as in the novel it is anomalous in Gatsby, that so much
raw power should be haunted by envisioned romance. Yet in that anomaly lies, for good or
bad, much of the truth of our national life, as, at the present moment, we think about it. […]”

Nick Carraway has two different versions of the American dream:

1) The ideal version is one that Gatsby very often refers to, and that attracts Nick, this version
is also attached down at the end of the novel. this ideal version is related to the sense of
wonder, the unlimited possibilities: It is the sense of America.
Freedom from the past is something that Gatsby defends.
2) The second version is the materialistic version represented in the novel by many characters
like Tom B. Many of them acquired their wealth through heritance but also through
corruption and crime, not hard-work. Needless to say, Nick is disgusted by this world.

In 20th century America, romanticism cannot be separated from materialism, there is a crucial
passage in the novel in which Gatsby says, about Daisy, his voice is full of mine. Daisy is
nice, and admirable and beautiful but you cannot separate her from the fact that she was born
in a rich family. In this novel, romanticism is connected to all the corruption and shadowy
aspects.

Scott F was incredibly attracted by what he in the novel calls the “transitory enchanted
moment”.
A novel written in 1925, such as The Great Gatsby, is without a doubt about the American
dream, but the thing about this concept is that it did not existed in American language, it
appeared during the Great Depression due to a book written by James Truslow Adams: The
Epic of America:
The term was coined during the Great Economic Depression. When this novel was written,
the term didn’t exist.
PASSAGE 1, CHAPTER 6
James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name (=the law means nothing to an
individual like him). He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment
that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over
the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the
beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay
Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind
might catch him and break him up in half an hour. (Chapter 6)
Chapter 6 is essential as Nick, the narrator, puts together pieces about Gatsby’s past. This
passage is in a sense the start of the story of Gatsby, the beginning of Jay, because before this,
he was a different person: James Gatz.
Nick is listening to different people talking about Gatsby and he puts together some of the
pieces of Gatsby’s story, reflecting the theme of self-creation.
In this passage, Gatsby meets Dan Cody, the other person, apart from Daisy, who influences
his life, his own perception about himself. Here, we know about Gatsby’s name change,
because his dream, his vision is more real than reality itself, more important than law (that
was really, or at least legally, his name.) He identifies change of name with change of
personality.
Change of identity suggested by syntax. The syntax itself expresses this mixture of continuity
in the structures. Same persons, two faces.
- In the same sentence but in different clauses, we have two proper names (James Gatz
and James Gatsby), they are both in the same sentence, suggesting that they are
actually the same life, but in different clauses, pointing out the junction, the difference
between James and Jay.
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and
unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at
all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic
conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just
that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and
meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy
would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. (Chapter 6)
This is the most faithful description of Gatsby given by the narrator. This is a comparison
between Gatsby and America, a declaration of independence.
Then, the narrator compares Gatsby to Jesus Christ (He was a son of God...), a sentence that
could mean many things, it could be about his dedication to others, his divinity…
Also, it is really relevant to point out his idealism, ridiculous and self-destructive, his platonic
conception of himself, his life and Daisy.
- Platonic conception of himself: Plato is a representative of idealism in the Western
philosophic tradition and there is this “platonic” side of Gatsby. He has this ideal
conception of who he is, and this is in agreement with Plato’s doctrine. For Plato as an
idealist, their real reality is an ideal world that is beyond every day.
 PLATO < > GATSBY
Rejection of the past, rejection of the authority of tradition. Parallelism between Gatsby
rejecting his past and America rejecting Europe (self-dalliance?)

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits
haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain
while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled
clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness
closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries
provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality,
a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.
We see a very important characteristic of Gatsby’s personality, his self-absorption, he is
totally blind in the totality of reality and his relation to the passage of time.
Then we have the clock, which is very important in a novel in which we find different
conceptions of time:
- Gatsby prefers to ignore the reality of the clock and focus on the light of the moon, the
imagination, he wants it to defeat the clock, to stop history, the passage of time.
- Nick’s conception
The clock reminds him of a painful truth he does not want to accept: we change and other
people change too, he cannot relive the past, his story with Daisy happened 6 years ago and
everything has changed now, a reality that he refuses to accept. When Gatsby met Daisy she
was a Fay but she’s now a Buchanan: Fay is an archaic word for Fairy, a reference of
Gatsby’s idealism.
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran
College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its
ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s
work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and
he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor
in the shallows alongshore.
This novel is about westerns that come to the East, about the conflict between East Egg and
West Egg.
Dan Cody is a really relevant figure in Gatsby’s life, a character which name alludes to two
important figures:
- Daniel Boone, one of the first colonizers, which relates the novel to the history of
America during the period of expansion to the West, a period of wealthy.
- William Cody, Buffalo Bill.
In the next paragraph, Dan Cody is described, he represents the exploitation of America: he
becomes Gatsby’s mentor and protector. Dan is materialistic and opportunistic, something
that is against Gatsby’s ideals.
This novel is centred around the parallels between Gatsby and America.
In the first part of the novel, there was not a first person narrator, but a 3rd person narrator, a
change that takes place after Fitzgerald reveals Gatsby’s history.
PASSAGE 2, CHAPTER 6
“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.
“Of course she did.”
“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”
He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.
“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”
“You mean about the dance?”
“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old
sport, the dance is unimportant.”
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved
you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more
practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back
to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago. (CHAPTER 6)

This takes place after the big party, where she invited Daisy to impress her. After Gatsby has
given this magnificent party, the one Daisy attended to, things have not gone the way Gatsby
expected because she did not respond to the extravagant romantic way in which he has
brought their lives together (through these big parties). They met 5 years ago in Louisville,
Kentucky.
The perception of Daisy is limited. She in unable to respond to everything Gatsby is trying to
express, to respond to the intensive emotions of Gatsby and all the internal vitality Gatsby
wants to express. She is unable to see everything that is behind, the romantic extravagant way
that he has put into the party; she is unable to understand the real reasons and his obsession to
bringing their lives together again.
This passage is about how you can’t repeat the past, something Nick tells Gatsby, he advises
Gatsby that he should live in the present and not try to repeat what he had with Daisy five
years ago. Then, we have a flashback inside the passage. Gatsby wants to go back, he wants to
make Daisy say to her husband that she never loved him, forget about everything they had
(including her daughter) and go back with him to Louisville, where they would get marry
from her mother’s house, as if it were 5 years ago.
This is probably one of the most famous passages of the novel, a passage that reflects
Gatsby’s obsession with repeating the past, her absolute conviction that he can, in fact, go
back and change what happened; he wants Daisy to say Tom she does not love him. The idea
of future for Gatsby is to forget the passage of time. However, the end of the book proves that
he is wrong, that the past is unchangeable, you cannot forget about the passage of time.
Gatsby’s aspirations connect with his identification with America. The original settlers of
America wanted to achieve a new beginning in history and to forget the past. In this sense,
Gatsby also wants to go back to his own paradise, this magnificent moment that happened
years ago.

“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for
hours—”
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded
favours and crushed flowers.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just
out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly.
“She’ll see.”
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea
of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and
disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all
slowly, he could find out what that thing was… (this ellipsis at the end is part of the text)
The past cannot be forgotten, however, Gatsby has this aspiration that makes him unable to
live in the present. Gatsby is presented as a magician: he wants to fix everything just the way
it was before.
Gatsby thinks of himself as all powerful, magnificent, a magician, a God. This is all about
him, about recreating himself through Daisy, who is made into an object rather than a subject,
an object of his romantic construction, an object through which he can be complete.

TEXT 3
… One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the
leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was
white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool
night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The
quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle
among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks
really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if
he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the
incomparable milk of wonder.
What Gatsby pays attention to is just the moonlight (which usually has romantic
connotations), the romantic imagination. He does not want to pay attention to the leaves
falling, to the passage of time. ‘One of the two changes of the year’, meaning the beginning of
Autumn, the passage of time, something that, again, Gatsby is denying completely: Gatsby
preferred to ignore the fact that time changes us and makes things irrevocable.
He is totally transformed and his subjective view alters reality. He sees that the blocks of the
sidewalks really formed a ladder.
- The ladder could be a reference to a passage of the Old Testament about Jacob’s
ladder that connects with Heaven but it could also be the romantic ladder to achieve
the romantic dream.
- If he climbed alone, that is important because he cannot bare the dream alone. A life
with Daisy would be the end of the romantic dream because it is all about the
idealization of the object of desire, the dream of it, which is much more important that
the possession itself. If you make the dream real, maybe it vanishes.

The thing about the ‘pap of life’ is also very relevant:

- The pap is what babies eat.
- Does this mean that Gatsby is terrible immature? that he is a like a baby? - when he
talks about the ‘incomparable milk of wonder’.
- Is Gatsby been compared with a baby sucking the breast of her mother?.
The last lines point to the end of the novel in which one of the limits is the New World
contemplated by the new settlers. This also refers to one of the most important passages in the
novel when Myrtle Wilson is killed by a car and there is a vivid description of Myrtle’s body
and one of her breasts opened by the accident.

His heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed
this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would
never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the
tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she
blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality (high criticism on Gatsby), I
was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard
somewhere a long time ago (images that refer to the idea of perfection). For a moment a
phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there
was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what
I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

For the Romantic individual is more important to maintain intact this self-created image of the
object of desire than the actual possession of the object of desire.
When they kiss, ‘she blossomed for him as a flower’, we see this comparison between
her and a flower (a daisy), the woman is here a weak flower that is protected by the man, a
man that is complete after he deflowers her but, what about her? Also, Fitzgerald relates this
to reincarnation (biblical myth) because, in a sense, Gatsby’s relation is, for him, a religious
experience.
There is an implicit connection between Gatsby’s love for Daisy and the religious pilgrims
fathers who came to the New World.
This is the moment that has trapped Gatsby: she kisses her and, from this moment, he has
been obsessed with reliving this moment. Then, Nick drops it all up with a reflexion about the
stupidity of this obsession. Nick feels that this past is now irrelevant in the present and that it
should be forgotten. Thus, we see the ambivalence of Gatsby's dream: incomparable,
noncommunicable…

In summary; This is a passage in which Fitzgerald exposes both the witnesses of Gatsby’s
childish and full of sentimentality. At the same time, the passage portrays Gatsby being pure,
ideal. The representative of America’s capacity to generate this dream and believe in
possibility. The passage represents things that are admirable in Gatsby but also Gatsby’s main
flaw/problem. Insistence on denying change. He is insistent on closing himself to change and
this is his problem, he has not changed his ideas of who he wants to be, he remains fixed in
this magical momenta and this is something that locks other possible lives or opportunities.
Excessive nostalgia destroyed by a dream of regaining a paradise that has been irrevocably
lost.

CARS AND BAD DRIVERS:

Cars are really important in this novel, that is all about the dream. In our culture, dreams and
cars are inseparable, owning the dream car and getting the dream girl, the dream life. They are
inseparable from the dream.
The action of the novel takes place in the early 1920s, an era in which the car was quite
recent. It was emblematic of the American life, representing wealth and new freedom. The car
has an important presence in the novel as it is a symbol of social status and an agent of
distraction. There are so many reference to the car in the novel.
The car in American culture and American literature is related to ruthless/restlessness but also
to power, to death (Myrtle.) It’s also associated with power and making others powerless. A
car as an indication of how far as an individual are you of success, the life of careless rich
people. It expresses the violence of Modern societies as well (death: Myrtle) In a materialistic
society, the car indicates how far you have moved on the road to success.

CHAPTER 3
“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t
to drive at all.”
“I am careful.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people.
Jordan is in the car with Nick and she drives careless. There are profound conversations with
Jordan Baker.
Jordan Baker’s names refer to different types of cars, the Jordan sports car for the rich and
the conservative Baker electric car. This connects with Jordan’s two faces: on the one hand,
she wants to maintain the advantages of the traditional conservative lady but at the same time
she wants to keep her freedom.
In this scene, Jordan and Nick are in the same car and she is driving in a very irresponsible
way, here the car drive is a metaphor for the different moral values/ethical standards you
have throughout your road through life. Fitzgerald life could be described as a very careless
car life.

This scene is connected to the last time Jordan and Nick see each other at the end of the novel:
‘a bad driver is only in danger when he meets another bad driver’.
It is in chapter 7 where we see the most brutal damage caused by cars and bad drivers. There,
Daisy is driving Gatsby’s car when they came back from Manhattan. She drives so careless
that she kills Myrtle Wilson:
Michaelis and this man reached her first, but when they had torn open her shirtwaist, still
damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap (reference
to the breast we read in passage 3), and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The
mouth was wide open and ripped a little at the corners, as though she had choked a little in
giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.
Vitality is applied to Myrtle in the novel. This passage exemplifies the negative aspects of
cars that kill and injure people.
Cars are also important in connection with women. It gives new freedom and new mobility
to women, to go out unaccompanied. This is the ambivalence between freedom / mobility and
death. In a sense, it could a punishment for breaking up her social class because Myrtle had an
affair with Tom. 
Daisy irresponsibly drives Gatsby’s car, and these are the consequences, although Daisy
refuses to pay the consequences.

CARS AND THE WASTELAND

GEORGE WILSON: is Myrtle’s husband. He is important as he does businesses with
wrecked cars. He represents the other part of America: on the one hand, the rich ones like
Tom, on the other hand, George, who is the opposite; he lives a life with no glamour or
romance.
His life is repeatedly connected to the Wasteland, indeed, his wrecked cars business is
inside this wasteland. He is a Wastelander, with no sense of wonder, or ambition.
Tom and Gatsby are at least indirectly responsible for the waste and poverty in which people
like Wilson live. The Wilsons are destroyed by this carelessness, the world and the cars of
these rich people. The novel relates cars to the wasteland; these cars destroy the people but
also the land itself.
The poem Wasteland by T. S. Eliot is an indirect influence of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald
sent to T.S. Eliot the copy of The Great Gatsby, and T.S. Eliot wrote him a positive
commentary on the novel. The action of the novel takes place in 1922 (date of publication of
the poem), and it is said that it is a sort of tribute to Eliot’s poem and Joyce’s Ulysses. The
Great Gatsby is about the American dream, but as early as chapter 2, we already see the
valley of the ashes, “the wasteland” (beginning of chapter 2): About halfway between West
Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter
of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes
—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens;
where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a
transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the
powdery air

What has happened is that the America the Wonderland gave way to the Wasteland. One of
the titles Fitzgerald considered for this novel was related to the ashes: “Among ash hips and
millionaires”. So, one of the questions that the novel implicitly asks is the following: 
 Do Gatsby represent some kind of redemption among this?
Gatsby represents some hope, some possibility of liberation from the Wasteland. While Eliot
was only able to see the Wasteland, Fitzgerald could also see positive aspects, glimpses of
hope. 
The Wilsons live in the age of the Wasteland, a period of cruel society, with a socioeconomic
system that causes despair. These references to dust and ashes connect the place to death and
sterility. With respect to the American dream, Wilson is a failure: he looks closer to a ghost,
more than a human figure. He is a victim of a society that denies him identity and
opportunity.

The following paragraph of chapter 2 is highly symbolic. It deals with the famous symbol of
the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg: But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust
which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high.
They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass
over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his
practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or
forgot them and moved away
The garage is a reference to the Wasteland in which George Wilson lives. He is a failure and
lives in a society that denies his identity. Here, there is an allusion to the eyes of God by
referring to “the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg”. It is a God that has gone blind to human
society (chapter 2). God is traditionally represented with an observing eye, but he has
absented himself from the place; he no longer turns his eyes on the human beings on the
Wasteland. The symbol of the eyes connects the 20 century American commercial wealth
th

and the traditional world of beliefs, faith... This connection is made to stress the disjunction
between the two. He is no more than this abandoned. Wilson seems to see God there, but the
reader feels that if there is an observer God there, it is a God that is not necessarily a
compasive one.

After the accident, when Myrtle is run over, George Wilson got insane, he starts looking at
these eyes and he speaks of God: “God sees everything, while looking at the eyes
everywhere”. This is connected with the previous passage. Wilson and Michaelis are looking
at Eckleburg, a false God, just an advertisement. 
*Michaelis is a neighbor of the Wilsons.
The symbol of the eyes connects the 20th century American commercial and the word of
traditional beliefs in God. In the early 20th century, God has disappeared and the only thing
they have now is this advertisement of the eyes. The reader feels that if there is an observer
God, it is not necessarily a compassionate (compasivo) God.

DAISY FAY: “A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE FOOL”

Her maiden name suggests fairy, a creature from the world of Romance. This is indeed what
she is in the world of Gatsby (the object of Gatsby’s romantic obsession). She has the name of
a perishable flower. So, it could be an implicit contrast between nature and this world of
industry and mass-production/consumption.
Daisy is the idealized woman who becomes the object of Gatsby’s romantic obsession. This is
a persistent motif in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Gatsby is kept alive by his obsession of regaining
Daisy. In some respects, Gatsby’s character resembles Fitzgerald himself. 

Fitzgerald had a lot of experiences of social inadequacy, about frustrated dreams of marrying
rich girls. As he was told at a party, “ Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls”.
Fitzgerald was not able to be with the girl he wanted because his family was poor. He had an
intense love affair with a girl from Chicago, but their relationship failed due to his social and
economic position. Fitzgerald once said: “the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor
young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again
because I lived it.”
She is a romantic construction. The description emphasized her attractiveness, and what she
says is not important. So, Daisy is very charming, a central role in Gatsby’s dream, but, at the
same time, passages like this make Daisy a victim of the conventional image of woman as
object of male desire. Nick is more realistic and detached but there are some glimpses of
romanticism as well.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was
the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of
notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,
bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men
who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,”
a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,
exciting things hovering in the next hour. (Ch. 1)
Daisy is aware of her role as charmer and seductress, something that she, cynically, informs
Nick: All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing
a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ (Ch. 1).This passage stresses her awareness,
she knows what is her role. According to SF these are the own words her wife said when she
knew she was going to have a girl. Girls are seen in society as flowers that blossom when
men touch them.
She insists on images that men created on her, so has not a conception of her own. She finds
no interest on the maternal word but she has no chance in this society. She is just an object of
Gatsby’s desire, a creation of his romantic imagination, so Gatsby is attracted to his own
creation, he ignored the real Daisy who has inconsistencies and flaws, however, she presents
to consider her perfect and ideal. Daisy become a prisoner of Gatsby’s romantic vision. He
freezes her when they were together 5 years ago. It was in that passage that Gatsby tells Nick
about his intentions: “I’m going to fix everything just in the way it was before”. It is Gatsby
who gives life to the Daisy of his dream.
Daisy is caught in the middle of this conflict between: Gatsby’s romantic vision and Tom’s
materialistic conception of her. Tom is hateful and he represents the right wing powerful
patriarchy; he is one of those powerful people who feel threaten by social change. Daisy
becomes a victim of these two people and neither of the two acknowledged Daisy’s
individuality and needs. She is always this blank page on which the males write.
In CHAPTER 7, Gatsby and Daisy go to Manhattan, but it was a serious mistake for them
because there he asked her to say in front of Tom that she had never loved Tom. Gatsby is
unable to see that after five years her life has changed. He does not see that he has devoted his
life to the obsession with her. With this refusal, Gatsby limits himself. He cannot understand
that after five years she has changed; she is not the same person. 
In Manhattan, Daisy is the passive object of these two men. She is not quite able to control the
situation. Later on, when they go back home, she is not able to control the car and the accident
happened. Tom tells Daisy the illegal sources of Gatsby’s money, and in this way, he asserts
his power. Then, he allows Daisy to come back home in the car with Gatsby. The day of the
accident is the end of the dream; Daisy goes back to his safety. She feels safety in the male’s
hands and the wealth of Tom.
THE DAY OF THE ACCIDENT = THE END OF THE DREAM
  He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen
upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.
They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they
weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture,
and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together. (138, CH. 7)
After Gatsby’s death, Nick calls Daisy, but she never answers because she has disappeared.
And as Nick noticed, she never sent a flower nor a note. Daisy has preferred Tom’s
materialism over Gatsby’s romanticism. She has gone back to Tom’s safety with money.
“Her voice is full of money”: Romanticism is inseparable from the monetary, so: isn’t money
what dreams are made of?
Nick knows what happened to Myrtle, however, Daisy is a lady and lady’s name has always
to be portrayed, this is the reason why he doesn’t say anything. You cannot separate Gatsby’s
obsession with Daisy from her wealth:
[in 1917] Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons
and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and
proud above the hot struggles of the poor. (chapter 7)
Daisy is nice, she has a natural charm, she is also mysterious and beautiful, but at the same
time, she is a product of an environment of great wealth. It is now, when Nick understands
why he felt so attracted to Daisy’s voice. In this sense, we go back to the beginning, to the
question by Gatsby whether is romance possible in the 20th century capitalist America. The
answer is that maybe, because both romance and money are inseparable, money is what
dreams are made of.: “That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that
was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…
High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…”

NICK CARRAWAY’S STORY PARALLELS WITH GATSBY

The story of Gatsby is at the same time the story of Nick: Parallels between Nick and Gatsby.
Gatsby is a very static figure throughout the novel, he does not really change. Both of them
come from the mid-West, they fought in the WW1, both come from the West to the East, both
failed in their relationship with women (Nick with Jordan and Gatsby fails with Daisy).
The fact that Gatsby is presented through the perspective of Nick is important as it embraces
questions: Is Nick trying to build an ideal Gatsby? Is he trying to rescue Gatsby from a bad
reputation? Does Nick romanticize Gatsby? Nick is a first person narrator but he becomes
omniscient. Nick’s double role in the novel: he passes from being a detached observer to
become a narrator.
Nick is inflicted by Gatsby but also critic on him. Nick does not agree with the immorality but
he sympathized with the Daisy’s impulses that led Gatsby to construct his new world. So,
Nick needs a balance between his innocence when he first came to the East and the reality of
his new life, the reality of the valley of ashes. He needs to find also some balance between
Gatsby’s immature dream and the harsh reality of the valley of ashes, the wasteland. He has to
find a way to live in this immoral materialistic modern world and at the same time he wants
this world to have some space for those basic impulses/imagination of Gatsby.
So, Gatsby is corrupted but he represents the whole of something that is redeemable,
something that shines in the middle of the wasteland.
Ambivalence in America: the awareness of the wasteland that coexists with a new world after
the WW1.

TEXT 3. Passage from the end of the novel.

This is one of the most famous passages in American literature. It is about Nick’s final night
in the East. He had a vision, this night vigil. He is on Long Island shore, literally on the edge
of the American continent. He has a romantic vision that elevates Gatsby to the level of myth.
This passage balances nostalgia for a lost (Gatsby’s lost) and at the same time, celebrates. It’s
about the possibility and failure on Gatsby’s dream. It presents Gatsby as representative of the
American and human aspirations and at the same time, the failure of Gatsby’s aspiration.
A bit earlier of this chapter, Nick says “I see now that this has been a story of the West after
all”. This is probably an evening in the month of November. He realized that it’s a story of
the West as it is a story of the mid-westerners.  If the story of Gatsby is the story of America,
the story of America is inseparable from the West. From the very beginning, the West was
connected to new ideals, new beginnings, new generations, and this is the story of the failure
of those ideals represented by the West. America has always been inseparable from the West,
which has the permanent condition of transformation. You cannot separate the story of the
West with the story of the beginning of America as a nation.
Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left—the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine.
One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping
for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East
Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t
want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked
at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word,
scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased
it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and
sprawled out on the sand.
In this passage, we see Gatsby’s house empty, the grass has now grown, something that
Gatsby could have never accepted, because it would mean that he was accepting the passage
of time. But he is no longer there, so he could not pay his servants to cut the grass and to
achieve perfection. One of the obsessions of Nick was to preserve the memory of Gatsby.
Gatsby stood out for his being a mysterious person; so, the speculation about him continues
after his death and the taxi driver is part of that; but Nick does not want this to be a gossip.

The difference between East and West is very important: East Egg is richer than West in the
novel. West is for people like Gatsby, people who all of a sudden have become millionaires,
while East is for the traditional wealthy people. This is related to the East vs West theme.
The Great Gatsby is a novel that stresses American symbolic geography. 
- Is Nick going back to infuse coherency about Gatsby’s life? about Gatsby’s dream? 
- Is he going to make Gatsby a loser but in some respects a winner?
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were
with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from
his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car
The distinction between materialism and idealism is important) there, and saw its lights stop
at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been
away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.(in more than one
sense)
In this passage, it’s stressed the end of the party in more than one sense. The word “last” is
repeated several times in this passage.
The failure of Gatsby is the failure of the democratic ideals and the American nation, the
failure of democratic ideals: the magnificence is based on false ideas.
“the moonlight” represents the approach to the world of romance. Nick is going to have this
vigil and he is going to feel something that may be transcending the present moment. Nick is
going back to the very beginning, to the arrival of the first settlers. He goes back to the mid-
West with a mission, to write Gatsby’s story, to write about failure and incoherence.
Nick evades the unseen world and Nick wants Gatsby’s memory to be preserved by his
narration. He does not want Gatsby’s memory to be preserved by obscenities. So, he elevates
Gatsby to the level of myth, and thus, we move away from reality and closer to myth, as if the
real was retreated to the romance and the dream.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the
shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the
inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island
(Manhattan, NY) here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the
new world.(metaphor of the natural, territorial) Its vanished trees, the trees that had made
way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of
this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder.
This passage brings together 3 important symbols: eyes – flowers – breast. Green is usually
associated with hope. America is associated with traditional female images: America is a
mother that has the ‘green breast’, that promises to give sustenance to new settlers. The rest of
the passage emphasizes the past. It is a passage in which Gatsby’s dream is fused with
original mythological past, with the American continent seen by the Dutch (eyes-flower-green
breast-Dutch sailors). 
“Transitory enchanted moment” represents the beginning and simultaneously the end in
history.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he
first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this
blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He
did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond
the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It
eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
further… And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
This passage makes another allusion to mid-West. Idealism and hope (symbol of America)
have always been destroyed by the powerful forces of the desire of the material. The idea of
passion and care on God has given way to blind eyes. The blind eyes that look over the
wasteland. This is about a paradise that has been lost. 
The capacity of wonder is always corrupted by our attraction to the material and the object of
desire is unattainable. 
The green light is a central symbol in the novel representing innocence. The dream is already
behind him. He thinks he is going to get the dream, but it is the dream that gets him, it is
already him being America. Nick is talking about the passage of time for Gatsby, but also for
American as a whole. It is also about American history and what Gatsby represents, the first
settlers, who like him observed America with hope. They idealized coming to the new
continent and understood it as a paradise. Thus, the theme is going back to paradise, but it is a
lost paradise; they will never be a material reality, rather they are a myth. 
In a complex modern world, full of material ambition, there is no idealism left. “Tomorrow
we will continue to dream” represents the desire that keeps us going to the point of stopping
when we get the object of desire. Nick does not know how to express what he is feeling
because the nature of the dream is impossible to specify. 

ii. BABYLON REVISITED (1931)

The Great Depression started at the end of October 1929, and this short story takes place in
1931, after the famous crash in Wall Street.
Money is very important in this story, and Fitzgerald was also interested in the experience of
failure. He as an individual was a paradigmatic case of self-distraction.
The title: Babylon was famous in the Old Testament as the Hebrews were exiled in Babylon,
a place near Iraq. Babylon was also important in the book of Revelation, the Apocalypse.
Babylon in the title calls our attention to moral degeneration.
It is a symbolic female, not just a female famous for sexual disillusion, but also a woman who
is like an idolatress. (Symbolic female and symbolic place of evil). Babylon in the title echoes
the progressive spiritual degeneration of men. 
Then, regarding the Old Testament and the Hebrews, Hebrews were people without a
permanent home, as they were in a continuous exile. Something that is important in the story,
as the protagonist is an American exile who lived in Prague. Besides, the question of “home”
is also important as he wanted to live in a house with his daughter, Honoria (significant name,
as the protagonist wants to “recover his honour”).
Before he moved to Prague, Charles was in Paris (Babylon in the story), so, he returns to Paris
after a two-year absence, so, in stories dealing with the theme of exile’s return.
The theme of identity is also important in this story. Who is the protagonist? Is he a new and
reformed person? The new Charles, from Prague, responsible and hardworking. Or is he the
old one as Lorraine and Duncan try to point out? Or is he fluctuating between the two? This is
the question the story raises. He is a reformed sinner but he was also imaginative, dissipation
but also wonder. ‘He suddenly realised the meaning of the word dissipation’, the concept of
dissipation describes the 1920s but also the moral dissipation of the present time, after the
crash.
This is probably one of the best stories of Fitzgerald. The story is very clear from beginning to
end, without obscurity. The dominant point is the 3 rd person, however, everything is filtered
through the conscience of Charles, a 3rd person restrictive/limited narration. The fact that
the story is told through Charles’ point of view may be emphasizing the two Charles: the
present vs the former Charles. 
The conflict between the two Charles:
- Charles J Wales, a man characterised by his honour and morality
- Charlie Wales of the past.
In the story, the American family, Lincoln and Marion Peters, the sister of Helen (Charles’
wife), lived in Paris and took care of Honoria. Although they were from middle class, they
had that family life that Charles aspired to. There is a contrast between the self-distractive
past of Charles, which is all the same time a living past, in contrast with the life of the Peters.
The passage at the beginning shows Charles at the Ritz bar, a place which opens and closes
the story. This fact is significant as it seems that Charles’ life is surrounded by a vicious
circle. “He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the
Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more”. The Ritz used to
be an American Bar and he still believes in the idea that the Americans were the owners of
everything.
The story is about the present of Charles, 1931, but also about the past. The past is evoked
with a few short and significant hints. The past is like a permanent mess for Charles,
something that is still present and threatens to defeat Charles from the beginning of the story.
The story is significantly placed in the autumn when winter is coming soon. There is a big
sense of irrevocability because his daughter is 9 and he is 35 and he would have to wait
another 6 months to try and be with her.
The story is about the tragedy of the Roaring Twenties: “they were roaring with laughter”.
Some people such as Lorraine and Duncan do not want to leave the Roaring Twenties behind.
In the part when Duncan and Lorraine entered Lincoln’s and Marion’s house, they were
roaring of laughter, meaning that they represented the “Roaring twenties”. They resented to
move on from those years.
At the end, Charles realizes that so much of his world was lost.
This story offers a specific conception of the past:
- The past is characterised by carelessness and excess. The effect of the past in the
present is very important as Charles is paying for his own past sins (the past
represented by Lorraine and Duncan)
- So, there is a story about the possibility of avoiding the disasters and consequences of
the past. The story seems to be influenced by the Puritan ideas.
- The story is fatalistic in the sense that the individual has to pay by the sins which he
committed in the past, when he was drunk and locked out his wife in the snow, an
event that ends up killing her.
- This conditions his daughter’s life and also the situation of his sister-in-law, Marion,
who hated Charles: Marion blamed Charles of the death of his sister, and she does
not trust him as she thinks he still has come problems with the alcohol.
- There is the issue of jealously, as Charles and his wife had lots of money in the past,
they lived happily, in contrast with Marion and her husband. This is one of the things
that influences the resentment we feel in Marion, even in the present days as Charles is
still a wealthy man.
This is a story about Charles paying for his past sins and now he is figuratively excluded from
home, as he had done with his wife by locking her outside. This is something that contrasts
with the Peters.
- The house of the Peters is presented as a warm American home where people were
together by the fire, something that Charles desires.
- It is a very significant scene that closes the passage 2 of the story, Charles is dreaming
with a home while he walks with his daughter. At the end of the day, he left his
daughter in the Peter’s house, there, he is left out in the cold as he did with his wife,
while the Peters and his daughter were in the warm home.
The fact that the action takes place is significant, as it takes place in the autumn. It is
significant as another six months are going to pass until he could take his daughter with him.
---
The Ritz bar: This is the most representative place of the dissipation of the Americans in
Paris during the boom years of the 1920s, now, in the present, the bar is the best indication of
how things have changed, now, during Paris Great Depression. The fact that the story begins
and closes there emphasized the consequences of the past.
Then, in section 5, the last section, he remembers events from the past that had disaster
consequences. At the same time, the bar for Charles is like a home, it is a substitute for the
home he had lost and he was unable to regain. The beginning and the ending give the story of
Charlie a circular movement, indicating that he had not achieved his purpose. In this sense,
the story is tragic; he comes back to Babylon Paris and he has no house. The fact that he
“lives” in the bar gives him certain insincerity because he still miss the past that the Ritz
represents. Is there some part of Charles that want to return to the past?
The money: this is a story with many allusions to the stock market world, which stablish a
connection between private moral transactions and public money transactions. There is this
idea of paying in both senses of the world.
This parallelism between spiritual and economic bankrupt, but this is more a story of
moral bankrupt. I mean, the moral collapse of people like Charles Wales in the 1920s. His
irresponsible behaviour caused the death of his wife, and it coincided with the collapse of the
stock market.
"It's a great change," he said sadly. "We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I
hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the
second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?"
"No, I'm in business in Prague."
"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash."
"I did," and he added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in the boom."
For Charles, he has not lost only money, but everything he wanted. Further down on the same
page, Charles asks the waiter “what do I owe you?”. Here, the material and spiritual aspect of
financial appears. Then, he thinks: “He would come back some day; they couldn't make him
pay forever”, and he refers to Marion making him paying for his past mistakes (not allowing
to give Honoria to him).
One of the things that the story proves is that the real home is in a sense incompatible with
big money. Charlie in the present is homeless but compared to the Peters, he has a lot of
money. Nevertheless, the Peters who didn’t have money, enjoyed a warm life. This is
something that Charles seems not to be very conscious, the incompatibility between his
money and his domestic desire.
He thinks that he can fix things by buying her daughter things and sending money. At the end
of the story, he decides to send Honoria a lot of things, but that is not the solution.
In the 1920s, Charles had a lot of money and a family, but he was not conscious of the value
of the home until he had lost everything.