James Baquet

    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) published “The Great Gatsby” — second on our list of the 20th century’s greatest — in 1925, and by doing so virtually defined what has come to be called “The Jazz Age.” It was a time of outrageous behavior, a new-found exuberance following the grim years of what had been called “The Great War,” now known as World War I.

    In writing of the flappers (carefree women) and bootleggers (makers and sellers of illegal alcoholic beverages), the wild parties and the flouting of social conventions, Fitzgerald captured the spirit of the “Roaring 1920s.” As a man of his time, Fitzgerald most likely died due to complications from alcoholism at 44.

    But the greatest single creation in the novel, and probably in all of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre, is the character of James Gatz, who had transformed himself (with the backing of a bootlegger) into Jay Gatsby, a dashing young millionaire playboy who was obsessed with Daisy Buchanan, a married woman he had met years before.

    Of this transformation, the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, whom we suspect is somewhat jealous of his fashionable neighbor, writes that Gatz/Gatsby’s parents were “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people” and that “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all.” Like many young people, then, Gatz had dreamed that he was better than he really was, and “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” He had “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

    The mention of Plato ties this work in to the “Great Conversation” of Western civilization, referring to the concept of “ideals,” pre-existing forms or archetypes that are then manifested into the real world. But in this case, Gatz himself had formed the ideal of “Gatsby” and then brought it forth so convincingly that he believed it — even to his death.

    In many ways, this is a penetrating psychological insight, questioning who we really are, as opposed to who we think we are, in a very 20th-century way.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. accepted ways of doing things

    2. unable to stop thinking about

    3. understanding

    4. ignoring, showing disrespect for

    5. body of work

    6. excitement, enthusiasm

    7. lazy, lacking ambition

    8. medical problems resulting from another condition

    9. idea, also, beginning

    10. serious, with no lightheartedness