ABSTRACT
The Great Gatsby1 is not only a brilliant period piece bringing memorable images of the roaring twenties to life, but also a piece of literary genius that engages readers with Fitzgerald’s provocative style. Below is a sampling of Fitzgerald’s lilting sensuous detail from Chapter Three of the novel:
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. (39)
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. (39)
The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names. (40)
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. (40)
Students are inclined to enjoy Fitzgerald’s style, to be taken in by his seductive imagery and ironic dialogue. More importantly, The Great Gatsby is a novel about the viability and fragility of dreams, about perceptions of reality, about desires, and about the extremes to which people will go to pursue them. It has a particular appeal to young adult readers because it challenges them to confront the meaning of friendship, love, and the pursuit of happiness in a world that at once glitters with tantalizing options and drones with an enervating barrenness. It asks them to explore what constitutes personal identity. Timely and resonant with the pulsing enticements of our own image-saturated culture, The Great Gatsby raises a number of important questions that appeal to students who are in the zv138 throes of developing their own sense of self: Will possessing the right “stuff” and cultivating the right image make me more attractive? Will they make my life more satisfying, exciting, and happy? Are all dreams worthy of pursuit? What makes a dream worthy of pursuit?
