A little more than one month ago, precisely on 24th of September, the American writer Scott Fitzgerald would complete 120 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. Like many realistic writers, his novels contributed to become the world less hypocritical. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald. The second was published at http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/viewFile/44230/26674. The third was published athttp://www.bookrags.com/essay-2005/10/28/12454/461/#gsc.tab=0
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the called Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known) and Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald also wrote numerous short stories, many of which treat themes of youth and promise, and age and despair. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, NY. His formative years in Buffalo revealed him to be a boy of unnusual intelligence with a keen early interest in literature. After graduating from the Newman High school in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. This Side of Paradise, a semi-autobiographical account of Fitzgerald's undergraduate years at Princeton, was published in March of 1920 and became an instant success. It launched his career as a writer and provided a steady income. He married with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge from Alabama and they had their daughter and only child Frances in October of 1921. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for magazines, and sold stories and novels to Hollywood studios. Fitzgerald, an alcoholic since university, became notorious during the 1920s for his heavy drinking, undermining his health by the late 1930s. He died of a heart attack in December of 1940 in Hollywood. His work has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication of, The Great Gatsby, prompted T.S. Eliot to write, "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James..." Into the 21st century, millions of copies of The Great Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and university classes.
Fitzgerald's style is completely his own and perhaps the most incomparable aspect of his prose. He frequently exploited and became famous for his material rather than because of his technical innovations. This paper tries to investigate the influence of three important literary movements: Realism, Modernism and Existentialism on Fitzgerald's creative works. The realistic elements are obvious in all Fitzgerald's works. He best represented the Roaring Twenties with his evocative works. Many authors after the First World War created a new literature that shattered conservative taboos in their expression of physical and psychological reality. This was the beginning of Modernism. Fitzgerald developed a modernist literature that was connected to American traditions but, what all the modernists shred was a belief in literature's significance in the contemporary world, and the need for it to be repeatedly vital. Like realists, the modernists and naturalists focused on changes on society and used symbolism to attack society's problems. What is significant about this author is the influence of European Existencialism on his works. The Great Gatsby focused on the applicability of Nietzsche's philosophies of modern civilization. Like the existencialists, Fitzgerald recognizes the inadequacy of American democracy in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and rejects the capitalistic values, and norms prescribed and reinforced through the oppressive political structures of American culture. For Fitzgerald what are at stake are the individual, the inventive spirit, and the life of the nation and they echoes all the way through his works, a sentiment manifest in their portraits of incapable, lost, aimless, and emotionally unfulfilled characters. Fitzgerald was not a purely objective chronicler of the 1920s and 1930s but instead brought a strong moral perspective to his work. His central characters undergo processes of self-assessment, or they judge others, or they are judged by author himself, who constantly measured the behavior of characters against implicit standards of responsibility, honor and courage. In his novels, Fitzgerald revealed not only the fulfillment of the American dream but also the many ways it could be distorted. His most evocative protagonists, among them Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, share that quality of the idea and willingness of the heart. Although they are frequently disappointed in their quests, it is not finally the dream that fails them but instead something else, some weakness or corruption in themselves or others. In 1940, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his daughter: "Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." More than any other author of his era, Fitzgerald was conscious about the influence of money on American life and character. As he wrote solemnly about money, ambition, and love, which were undividable in his work, he has been labeled a materialist. Fitzgerald's sense of being excluded from the freedom and opportunities provided by money had been further intensified by his inability to marry Zelda right away because of his failures in New York following his army discharge. Because Fotzgerald's response to wealth was complex, mixing resentment and strong attraction, his fictional treatment of his material is both profound and extensive. Beside, Fitzgerald with his great sense of pattern was trying to find a way through which he could impose order in the chaotic world he was living in. With the book, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald became known as a daring writer primarily because of his themes rather than his technical innovations. His questing young men and courageous young women, who challenged conventional standards of behavior, seemed emblematic of the decade of the 1920s. He was not essentially a modernist, as were many of his contemporaries. He avoided the stream of consciousness, technique perfected by James Joyce and Virgina Woolf. He also rejected the style with short declarative sentences and simple diction of Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald was above all, a story teller who achieved a close relationship with the reader through the voice of his fiction, which was intimate, warm, and witty. Trilling defined this quality as 'his power of love:' "There is a tone and pitch to the sentences with suggest his warmth and tenderness, and what is rare nowadays and not likely to be admired, his gentleness without softness. He was gifted with satiric eye, yet we feel that his morality, he was more drawn to celebrate the good than to denounce the bad... we perceive that he loved the good not only with his mind but also with his quick senses and his youthful pride and desire." Commentators have given much attention to Symbolism in Fitzgerald's novels, particularly his expansion of color imagery into large symbolic patterns, his persistent drawing upon figures and episodes from American history, and above all, his pervasive concern with time and mutability, or inevitable change. Fitzgerald like other late 19th century realist writers, tried to show the diverse manners, classes and stratification of life in America and he created this picture by combining a broad variety of details derived from surveillance and documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared the objective or absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. as a result, the realistc elements are apparent in all his works. Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using realistis and naturalistic techniques. He is considered as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with realism, meaning precision of observation and characterization. Moreover, what is noteworthy about this author is the influence of existentialism and the depth of the cultural moments he captures in his art.
While it is argued that Fitzgerald emulated Shakespeare in his novel The Great Gatsby through his incorporation of tragic character flaws, his incorporation of existentialist ideals is much more apparent. The character Jay Gatsby embodies three main principles of existentialism: Gatsby is nonconformist individual combatting absurdity and inhumanity; he created a second life for himself in order to win Daisy's love; and he preserved his separateness as an emblem of his independence.
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