The great Gatsby

Preface by Giancarlo Rossini

Preface by Giancarlo Rossini

Reading the prefaces of the books (perhaps at the end) you can find insights and behind-the-scenes of the novels. Sometimes it can be reassuring to discover that a masterpiece did not arise spontaneously like a fruit from a tree, but was the result of frustration, second thoughts, rewrites, amputations and compromises.

The great classics, before becoming such, were contemporary texts. Francis Scott Fitzgerald was considered a leisure author.

Fitzgerald greatly increased the production of genres (we could call it pink) to meet the economic needs of the family. In other words, he wrote a lot of short stories to pay off the mortgage. With The Great Gatsby he wanted to redeem himself from this image of a somewhat frivolous author. The novel was not born as a finished product.

The correspondence between the author and the publisher Perkins (the same as Hemingway) is interesting: the novel has undergone multiple revisions of drafts, second thoughts and rewrites. In one passage, Fitzgerald went into crisis as he couldn't handle a scene.

Narrative techniques.

Let's see some of the narrative devices that Fitzgerald, assisted by the publisher, used in the book:

* The point of view.

Fitzgerald chooses to have the story told in the first person, not by the protagonist but by a peripheral character: this point of view makes the narrator more reliable, because it places a certain distance between who tells the story and the subject of the story.

* Show places and characters through the senses.

In particular, the author does it through precise details, sounds, smells, colors. “A rumor full of money”, speaking of Daisy, remains a memorable description.

* Dialogue.

The dialogue is scripted. To build the suspense, the writer inserts a pause before Gatsby gives the answer to a specious question, bringing in a waiter with a cocktail.

* Condense.

The author cuts all rhetorical trappings, building on the criticisms of his previous works.

The importance of the choice of title. Beloved that you jump high. Or: Trimalcione in West Egg. What do you think? Not much of a title. Yet these were the alternatives proposed by the author. The Great Gatsby - The Great Gatsby - was chosen by the publisher.

The consecration.

The novel was consecrated by Eliot only a few years after its publication (the novel sold a few initial copies), and received a lukewarm reception from critics. Few reviewers have noticed the size and innovative and cinematic edge of the book. They did not grasp the montage of the scenes, the importance of the details, the impressionist brushstrokes. I assume that only time can determine whether a novel has universal value or not.

Long Island, New York, summer 1922. The young Nick Carraway, just arrived from the province, witnesses the unfolding of the opulent parties organized by the neighbor, the very rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby, with whom he forms a progressive friendship which in a later moment it will prove to be sincere and unique. Gatsby asks Nick to let him meet his cousin, Daisy, with whom he had had a short but profound love affair years ago. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, a wealthy, nasty-mannered businessman who is having an affair with Myrtle, the wife of an unfortunate mechanic. The passion between Gatsby and Daisy is rekindled until Tom, suspicious and irritated by his wife's absence, confronts Gatsby in the presence of Daisy and Nick during a trip to New York and accuses him of having enriched himself with alcohol trafficking and other criminal activities . Gatsby, in trouble, asks Daisy to leave her husband but she is not ready for such a drastic decision. Gatsby and Daisy, on their way home, run over Myrtle. Tom, who is traveling in another car, accidentally discovers what has happened and is accused of the fact by the woman's husband, upset by her pain. The car that hit Myrtle was actually driven by Daisy, but Tom directs Wilson's suspicions towards Gatsby. Wilson goes to Gatsby's villa, now deserted and abandoned, and kills him, taking his own life soon after.

Nick Carraway will be the only one not to forget about Gatsby: he is in charge of organizing the funeral which will be attended only by him, Gatsby's father from the Midwest, and his servants. At that point the parable of the man who from James Gatz of Minnesota had become Jay Gatsby of Long Island is revealed and ends. Nick, disappointed and nauseated by the false and cruel New York social environment, decides to return to the provincial town where he started from.

Two lovers meet again after a few years: she is now married and decides to stay with her husband, who in turn has an affair with another; the tragic ending closes a story made of wild parties, luxurious cars and rivers of champagne. It could be the very banal plot of a fourth-rate novel; instead The Great Gatsby is something else.

Several themes emerge during the reading of this novel: set in the midst of the "Roarin 'Twenties" and prohibitionism, The Great Gatsby is an abrupt and dramatic awakening from the "American dream". Fitzgerald paints a merciless portrait of the American upper class, itself divided between the rich and the wealthy. Nobody is saved in this confrontation: if the "new rich" are ignorant scum who only thinks of having fun in an extreme way and without any limit, the "aristocrats" are selfish and cruel, jealous of their social primacy and completely inattentive to interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, material wealth seems to be, for Fitzgerald, the only possibility of having a bearable life: Wilson, the mechanic, drags a desperate and meaningless life into an even ghostly place, not surprisingly called "the valley of ashes. ". His wife, in order to get away from that hell, agrees to be used as a mere s****l object by the violent Tom Buchanan. And the nonchalance in matters of s*x and premarital relationships, a disruptive element in America that is still Victorian and respectable, is another burning issue that comes out strongly from the pages of the masterpiece of this author who has literally changed the history of costume, portraying in this and in other novels "upper class girls who let themselves be kissed in petting parties, drank whiskey, replied rudely to their parents and thus scandalized a society where marriageable girls could not go out without chaperonne, could not be alone with boys without being engaged and they had to see in marital submission the ultimate goal of their life ".

No social mobility is allowed in the America of "liberty and justice for all": the walls between classes are impassable, yet the absolute and indisputable value of money and its ostentation makes enrichment by illicit means acceptable. Daisy is only willing to accept Gatsby's love now that he's rich, having rejected it years ago when he wasn't.

The Great Gatsby is also a great novel about incommunicability and the impossibility of truly loving. Relationships between people are forced and based on material interest, at no time is there an attempt to truly understand the other or to welcome him for what he is. Even Gatsby, whose love for Daisy is total and sincere, cannot accept the fact that he is not reciprocated by the girl with the same intensity and in an absolute way. Furthermore, Gatsby is determined to relive and amend his past as if the time elapsed had left no trace, wanting to believe that it is possible to change the course of one's life retrospectively.

An omnipresent and pervasive element (as indeed in Fitzgerald's life) is alcohol, which often makes the dialogues between the protagonists opaque and veiled by inconsistency, as well as becoming, through exasperated and continuous consumption, a symbol of wealth and well-being as well as of real power, deriving from the transgression of the Volstead law which prohibited its use.

The story is narrated by Nick Carraway and is therefore filtered by the perspective of this narrator-guide who, if at first he is intrigued by the fabulous party environment in Gatsby's palace, with the passage of time he acquires more and more awareness until he decides to leave a social environment that has deeply disappointed and embittered him. Gatsby, enriched by illicit activities, is paradoxically more honest, sincere and innocent than his respectable party guests, attracted by the hundreds to the glitz and opulence but disappeared immediately after Gatsby's fall into disrepair, so much so that he doesn't even show up at the funeral.

There are many aspects that link the novel to the real and tumultuous life of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, faithfully portrayed in the rich, spoiled and somewhat obtuse Daisy; like Daisy, Zelda thought it unthinkable that a rich girl could marry a poor boy, so much so that she only agreed to marry Fitzgerald after the success of her first novel, This Side of Paradise. Gatsby's lavish receptions are reminiscent of those organized by Fitzgerald himself, who like Gatsby experienced incredible fortunes and disastrous falls. The commercial failure of this novel, which at the time of publication in 1925 was printed in just over twenty thousand copies and earned the author about two thousand dollars, marked the beginning of the downfall of Fitzgerald, increasingly ravaged by alcohol which quickly dissolved. his enormous talent is burdened by his wife's psychiatric problems and financial difficulties.

The Great Gatsby is therefore a mirror portrait, which faithfully and without hypocrisy reflects that unscrupulous world that through excesses and the absence of rules would have led from the unbridled "Jazz Age" to the financial collapse of 1929, a world to which Fitzgerald belongs and in which he cannot help but insert himself, floating between the damned figure of Gatsby and that of Nick Carraway, whose future is entrusted with the hope that all is not lost.