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i>GATSBY , THE JAZZ AGE, AND LUHRMANN LAND
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, a distinguished Poet Laureate in the history of American literature, is known for his poetry and insightful portrayal of the Jazz Age and his work The Great Gatsby is the pinnacle of his literary achievement and one of the most influential novels in 20th-century American literature. In this novel, Fitzgerald, with his unique literary talent, presents the protagonist Jay Gatsby’s obsessive pursuit of wealth, love, and the American dream, as well as the tragedy of the eventual dashing of these dreams, through a well-constructed narrative framework and rich symbolism. The image of Gatsby is a complex symbol, representing the glitz and illusion of American society in the 1920s. Through an in-depth exploration of the symbolism of colors, situations, and characters, we are enabled to immerse ourselves in the symbolic aesthetics of The Great Gatsby with heightened acuity, thereby resonating deeply with the allegorical melancholy that pervades the protagonist’s thwarted aspirations. The Great Gatsby transcends the narrative of personal misfortune to expose the epochal tragedy that underpins it. As such, the novel has emerged as an enduring discourse on the themes of aspiration, romance, and the harsh realities of life. Its literary merit and symbolic significance continue to be the subject of extensive deliberation and scholarly inquiry.
The focus of this chapter will be Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 blockbuster version of The Great Gatsby and how Luhrmann steps outside the limitations of national and international borders in order to create his films. Luhrmann does not see this stepping outside borders as hindrances to his films but rather embraces the complexes that transnational filmmaking brings with it. Throughout Luhrmann’s Gatsby Nick repeats the line “within and without.” This one line could be seen as Luhrmann’s approach to filmmaking. He operates within the large global film industry drawing on funding and marketing but he also operates without, an outsider who cannot be slotted neatly between boundaries.
In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective re-evaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.
From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Shumway
- Beth L Bailey
- R David
Three Novels of Manners
- Richard Chase
The Rich Boy” in Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
- F Fitzgerald
- Scott
The Greatness of Gatsby
- Luhrmann
- Baz
My Lost City” in The Crack-Up
- F Scott Fitzgerald
Echoes of the Jazz Age
- F Fitzgerald
- Scott
Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle,” review of The Great Gatsby
- A O Scott