Great Gatsby Critical Commentary

“Gatsby stands for America itself—ingenuous, self-dramatizing, and full of longing.”

Reference: Lionel Trilling, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Liberal Imagination (1950).

“Gatsby’s dream is the naïve confidence that he can transform the world through the power of his own will.”

Reference: Marius Bewley, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” in The Sewanee Review (1954).

“The novel shows the American Dream as an illusion designed to deceive and destroy.”

Reference: Roger Lewis, “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” The English Review (1994).

“Gatsby embodies the tension between illusion and reality more forcefully than any other character in modern literature.”

Reference: W. J. Harvey, “Theme and Texture in The Great Gatsby,” in Scott Donaldson (ed.), Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1984).

“Gatsby is the apotheosis of the self-made man, and the epitome of the will to illusion.”

Reference: Edwin Clark, contemporary review in The New York Times (1925).

“Gatsby wants to be accepted by a society that can never accept him.”

Reference: Ronald Berman, “The Great Gatsby and the Twenties,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2001).

“The Buchanans represent a class that survives because it is secure in its own sense of irresponsibility.”

Reference: Tony Tanner, Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby (1990).

“Daisy is condemned for not living up to Gatsby’s impossible dream, not her own failures.”

Reference: Judith Fetterley, “A Feminist Approach to American Fiction,” in The Resisting Reader (1978).

“Daisy is less a woman than a projection of male desire.”

Reference: Leland S. Person, “Herstory and Daisy Buchanan,” American Literature (1978).

“Fitzgerald saw that the new world of the 1920s glittered but did not shine.”

Reference: Malcolm Cowley, Introduction to The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951).

“A story of the utmost moral lethargy.”

Reference: H. L. Mencken, original review, The Baltimore Evening Sun (1925).

“Nick is simultaneously seduced and repelled by Gatsby.”

Reference: Gary Scrimgeour, “Against The Great Gatsby,” Critical Quarterly (1966).

“Nick’s narrative is an act of moral judgement rather than detached observation.”

Reference: James E. Miller Jr., “Boats Against the Current,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Criticism (1963).