Name:- Hinaba D. Sarvaiya.
M.A.- SEM:-2
Paper no:- 106 The Twentieth century Literature: 1900to World War II
Roll no:- 09
Enrollment no:- 4069206420210032
Email ID:- hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com
Submitted by:- S.B. Gardi Department of English MKBU.
Q:- The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby novel by F.Scott, Fitzgerald:-
"Genius is the ability to put into
Effect what is on your mind"
-F.Scott, Fitzgerald.
Introduction:-
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F.Scott, Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former love, Daisy Bachanan.
About author:-
F Scott Fitzgerald novelist, essayist, shortstory writer and screenwriter. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age a term, he popularized during his lifetime. He published four novels, four story collections, and 164 Short stories.
His notable works:-
-The Side Of Paradise 1920
-The Beautiful and Damned 1922
-The Great Gatsby 1925
-Tebder Is The Night 1934
Symbols of this Novel:-
The Green Light:-
Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.
The Valley of Asheh:-
The valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.
The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg:-
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instill them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exists only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick explores these ideas in Chapter 8, when he imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.
Let's discuss about The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby novel.
'Jazz Age' has come to signify, as a kind of evocative shorthand, the 1920s in both academy c and pop culture.
"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire"
Fitzgerald famously wrote of the 1920s in 1931 essay,
"Echoes of The Jazz Age"
In Fitzgerald's most popular novel, The Great Gatsby, Jazz appears as constant background music. In the contemporary phenomenon of 'Gatsby Parties' fesitivities intended to capture the Air of the titular Jay Gatsby's famously lavish, bachanalian parties- jazz is de rigueur to evoke the 1920s.
For all of its ubiquity in American culture int he twentieth century. Jazz was also deeply divisive from it very beginnings. If jazz was the most visible exampl of a new musical form in early twentieth century America.
David Savron Wrote in 2006,
"Jazz was everything. A weltanschuuny a personal indentity, a metaphysics, an epistemology, an ethics, an eros, a mode of sociality, an entire way of being"
Fitzgerald's Relationship with Jazz and Race:-
Fitzgerald's embrace of Jazz, then was both an acceptance of popular music and a rejection of those racist critiques. Although the word 'Jazz' only appears a few times in the Great Gatsby, the music itself is ever present, whenbmusic is playing in the background, Fitzgerald frequently refers to saxophones and horms, iconic instruments of the genre. Because of how organically jazz is in Fitzgerald's novel, virtually all latet depiatitions of the book feature roaring Jazz orchestras as aways of capturing the book's atmosphere, from film adaptations to the by new common phenomenon of the Gatsby party.
So indebted is Gatsby to Jazz and its origins that the critics Catherine kunce Kunce and Paul M. Levitt have strikingly argued that even,
"The structure of the novel itself can be convincingly read as a kind of extended vaudevillian performance"
At the same time, however, Fitzgerald tonded to outline black characters in language straight out of minstrel iconography. In the great Gatsby and elsewhere, blacke men are often described as 'bucks' a term linking black males to animals white men might hunt. As Gatsby drive Nick Carraway into Newyork, the narrator describes passing "three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry". The men are 'bucks' the rolling eyeballs suggest a caricature from a minstrel poster, and the whole group is meant to inspire laughter. That this is one of the few times black characters explicitly appear in the novel is suggestive.
When Gatsby's narrator describes Tom Buchanan's infamous white supremacist rants as impassioned gibberish. He is perhaps eching Fitzgerald own views. The ideology of 'Nordicism' appears in Gatsby only as further proof of Buchanan's irredeemable unpleasantness, as Buchanan the book's most overtly racist character is clearly menat to be unlikeable.
Emapathy is partly what Jazz set out to create,unsetting traditions and traditionalists at first, then luring them in with its almost surreal, fey beauty, jazz attempted to dissolve social lines between race, class, and political affiliation, as in James Baldwin's famous short story "sonny's Blues" in which the new music ultimately brings two long wasrrimg brothers together by the sheer emotiveness of the melodies that the titular Sonny plays for his siblings. Jazz was to a degree, an equalizing force both in Fitzgerald's oeuvre and the wider world.
The Great Gatsby, then, was a clear product of its time, embracing the new music but also falling prey to the caricatures that had became associated with it, still, it used jazz as the gentle but powerful backdrop to a story fo failed love tha endures today, and in this way, along with his usage of the term "Jazz age" Fitzgerald helped cement the idea that jazz defined the 1920s for all his flaws, Fitzgerald, too,was a dancer on that grand stage of an era, saxophones, pianos and everything else blaring around him.
The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby:-
After the first World War America was full of triumph and confidence. The young generation was free from the shackles of puritanism, breathing a sigh of relief from the tradinal norms that had tried down the society till now. The young generation breaking free from the conventional restraints had declared its new motto of eating, drinking and being merry. They did not want to think about their future. They wanted to make the optimum use of their present day.
Fitzgerald's expaination about the term Jazz was first sex, then dancing, then music. The women of the Jazz Age was busy chasing her material dreams without realising that she had lost all her chastity in the quest. The women of the Jazz age were best depicted in the characters of Daisy Bachanan, Myrtle Wilson, Jordan Baker. The woman of this age was characterized by greed, materialism, lust and selfishness.
Daisy secretly understood the infidelity of her hasband Tom so she engaged herself in her social life to get away from the problems in her domestic life. Gatsby is at tha same time, madly in love with Daisy overlooking her flaws as a women. Jordon Baker a women, atheletic in frame. She was a golf player, meet Nick Carraway. She realize that he was not financially stable enought to meet her monetary requirements. She left Nick for another man just to fulfil her materialistic urges. Another prominent female character Myrtle Wilson, she lives amongest the deprived sections of the society in the Valley of Ahes. She friends Tom in order to fulfil her financial requirements.
Conclusion:-
The Jazz age was symbolic of wealth which was deeply associated with the American dream. It was this money which cast a corrupting influence on man. The man here being Jay Gatsby who had to a mass money in order to gain love. This poor man James gatz was unable to marry the girl of his dreams due to his economic position and status.
It was majorly this overwhelming influence of the jazz age culture, which leads to the unfulfilled wishes and tragic lives of Myrtle, Gatsby and all other s who were influenced by the optimism of this age.
Words:- 1,531
Work citations:-
“F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby | Mirza Www.ajms.co.in/Sites/Ajms/Index.php/Ajms/Article/ViewFile/381/327.” F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby, May 2014.
Gabrielle Bellot. “Https://Daily.jstor.org/What-the-Great-Gatsby-Reveals-about-the-Jazz-Age/.” What The Great Gatsby Reveals About The Jazz Age, 8 May 2019.
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