He belongs to the lost generation but he gave his own name to it – “jazz age”. Jazz was representative of the general atmosphere of the years – the feeling of instability in life. Age of transition of social values. To his mind jazz beat ideally expressed that feeling of hopeless despair with which his young men & women tried to experience the every passing moment of their lives, their age. There is a recurrent “capre diem”(лови момент) theme in his novels. His heroes indulge & overindulge. Jazz age expresses instability & changebility of life present in mind of many people who tried to flee from the feeling of being lost, for they no longer believed in life, so they tried to live it to their full. Fitzgerald was not very rich but was educated in Princeton. He dropped out of it because of poor health & poor performance, he didn’t get to front though he enlisted. He was painfully aware of the difference between himself & rich students. He had hatred for the rich. The main topic of his work – money & its corruptive influence. For him money & wealth were social categories. He regarded the rich to be another race, whose habits & moral principles differ very much. He looked into the phenomenon of being rich. For him a rich person is one for whom everything is permitted & they lack human qualities, he tried to penetrate to the very heart of the matter. So, money & wealth for him were not economic categories but social phenomena. He regarded rich as another race, alien kind of people whose habits, moral principles, views were not as the habits of the ordinary people. They are the people to whom everything is permitted & consequently they lack certain human qualities that of pity, compassion, and sympathy. In his works Fitzgerald striped this world of this mysterious veil. He tried to penetrate to the very depths exploring the ethics of the rich world. Wealth has dehumanizing impact on human personality. He had a feeling that something awful is coming. “All the stories that come to my head have touch of disaster”. He produced the collection of short stories “All the Sad Young Men”, “Tales of the Jazz Age”. They are permeated with appocaliptical feeling of tragedy of American life. Fitzgerald was not the only one who treated this topic – Theodore Dreiser in “American Tragedy” did the same.
His finest achievement is the novel “The Great Gatsby” which showed the contrast between material wealth & the spiritual poverty of the heroes. Concerning this work in Soviet criticism the term “поэзия отрицательных величин” was used. It means that he tried to show people who were real characters, strong individuals, but this all is directed not to a right channel – to make one’s life to the top, to get something from life, strive for the world success. For Gatsby wealth is not the purpose but means to have everything that money can give, a key to personal happiness = relations between Jay Gatsby & Daisy whom he loves. In youth he suffered feeling of inferiority, for she was the daughter of rich parents & he was a poor soldier. He seeks to get money by bootlegging but it turned out that happiness could not be achieved even with money because Daisy had changed, she is very deaf & blind spiritually, feeling of all-permissiveness increased in her. She doesn’t stop short in the fraud (car accident). Gatsby was killed, Daisy departed, fled with her husband without any remorse. Gatsby’s tragedy lies in the fact that he hoped to find happiness, sympathy, love in the world where these feelings don’t exist. The tragedy is that money changes people & money changed him & Daisy & he didn’t understand this tragedy couldn’t foresee it.
Was he a positive or a negative character for the author? He possesses good moral qualities but he is not the paragon of moral beauty, he obtained his wealth by not clear ways. It’s clear that he is a tragic person. He wastes his talent for money. Very often he is compared to Clyde Griffite (Dreiser’s). But Gatsby is a personality.
Fitzgerald’s own story in a way repeats Gatsby’s story: he lived bohemian life, gradually writing became an obligation. He appeared to be a hostage of his own success. He also had drinking problems, & his wife whom he loved very deeply had some mental problems.
The other works are “This Side of Paradise”, “Tender is the Night”, “The Last Typcoon”, “The Beautiful & the Damned” where he developed the same topic. Fitzgerald also had a dilemma & he had to choose to write for money that ruined his health. He died in 1940.
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