įitzgerald’s-Triumph_-Writing-the-American-Dream. T he Great Gatsby: A-Story-of-Lost-Illusions.

Scott Fitzgerald’s The-Great-Gatsby: American-Romance. Finally, Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night has a medical degree, an overabundance of charm, and a wealthy wife.į. Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby possesses power, newly made money, and good looks. Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned has a multimillionaire grandfather, a beautiful wife, and youth. Amory Blaine, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is a questing hero armed with youth, intelligence, and good looks.

The major themes of Fitzgerald’s novels derive from the resolution of tension when one idea (usually embodied in a character) triumphs over another. By following the changes in Fitzgerald’s narrative technique from This Side of Paradise to The Beautiful and Damned to The Great Gatsby and finally into Tender Is the Night, one can trace the growth of his double vision, which is, in effect, to study his development as a literary artist. The foundation of double vision is polarity, the setting of extremes against each other the result in a novel is dramatic tension. It implies the tension involved when Fitzgerald sets things in opposition such that the reader can, on one hand, sensually experience the event about which Fitzgerald is writing, becoming emotionally immersed in it, and yet at the same time retain the objectivity to stand back and intellectually criticize it. “Double vision” denotes two ways of seeing. The image above is of Robert Redford as Gatsby in a scene from the film 'The Great Gatsby', 1974.“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald remarked during the late 1930’s, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” At his best-in The Great Gatsby, in parts of Tender Is the Night, in the unfinished The Last Tycoon, and in parts of his first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned-Fitzgerald demonstrates the kind of intelligence he describes, an intelligence characterized by the aesthetic principle of “double vision.” An understanding of this phrase (coined and first applied to Fitzgerald’s art by Malcolm Cowley) is central to any discussion of Fitzgerald’s novels. They were lovers as teenagers but she had given him up for a richer man who she soon married, and Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back. In the age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, in the hope she’ll attend one of them and they can be reunited. It is told by Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss F Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, published in 1925, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century.

The Great Gatsby by Julian Cowley