The Great Gatsby

 This Thinking Activity given by Dilip Bard sir. The Great Gatsby.

Stories Behind Classic Book Covers: The Great Gatsby

Cugat’s iconic painting of a disembodied face floating above the lights of New York is perhaps the most famous and celebrated book cover in all of American literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s publisher, Maxwell Perkins, seemed to understand the significance of the image even before the novel was published, declaring it “a masterpiece for this book” in a letter to Fitzgerald. However, despite all of this, relatively little is known about Cugat himself – The Great Gatsby was the only book cover he ever painted, and no one is quite sure how he came to the attention of Fitzgerald’s publisher – and the origins of the “Celestial Eyes” image remain uncertain too. Readers may recognize the image in the figure of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, a monstrous advertising billboard which consists of two eyes peering out of a pair glasses “which pass over a nonexistent nose”, or in Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy as the “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs”. However, it is quite possible that, rather than Cugat being inspired by Fitzgerald’s imagery, the reverse is true, as Fitzgerald stated that he had “written it [the cover] into the book”.

Observing Cugat’s preliminary drafts for the cover only strengthens this hypothesis, as we can clearly see that his early sketches depict the disembodied face over a desert-like wasteland, similar to T. J. Eckleburg’s home. Cugat was working from one Fitzgerald’s early titles at the time, Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, suggesting something of a collaborative process between cover artist and author: perhaps Fitzgerald inspired Cugat with his landscape image, and Cugat in turn inspired Fitzgerald with the “Celestial Eyes”. This possibility is reinforced in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, when he recalls seeing the cover for the first time. Although Hemingway describes it as “garish”, he also reveals Fitzgerald’s explanation that “it had to do with a billboard along a highway”. The fact that Cugat’s final cover clearly does not depict T. J. Eckleburg, yet Fitzgerald still points to a thematic linkage, once again implies that Cugat provided the seed of inspiration for the Eckleburg figure. As well as possibly providing imagery for the book, Cugat’s cover also mirrors Fitzgerald’s own

themes, thereby acting almost as a kind of pictorial prologue. For example, Cugat includes the famous green light in his painting, but its positioning and shape are reminiscent of a falling tear, foregrounding the exposure Gatsby’s of misplaced idealism. Likewise, Cugat subtly hides a pair of nudes in the gigantic eyes, perhaps reflecting Gatsby’s objectification of Daisy or her own awareness of Tom’s affair.

Although it may never be known how much Fitzgerald took from Cugat’s imagery, the painting remains a masterpiece in its own right. It provides a fine illustration of the fact that not only is all art necessarily created collaboratively, as creators learn from and draw from one another, but also that different art forms can interact with one another and color our interpretations in deeply meaningful ways. -Christian Kriticos Sources The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece” by Charles Scribner III.

2. Reflections of jay gatsby, the invisible psychoanalytical hero: an exploration of freudian psychoanalysis in fitzgerald’s the great gatsby

Life doesn’t go as we always wish so, there are twists and turns, ups and downs that are inevitable. Literature isn’t just books or poems; it’s a multidisciplinary venture with the essence of life, values and emotions. It has the potential to shape personalities, change the way we perceive and understand the world in a better way. As we are navigating across an unprecedented Covid Pandemic situation, it’s a unique experience that tells the importance of being optimistic, hygienic, determinant and concerned of others. Likewise, Gatsby’s life helps to seek golden reminders for living an accountable, peaceful and valuable life instead of running away madly behind worldly pleasures. One of the profound psychological theories of the modern world, Psychoanalysis holds a pride of place among contemporary psychological studies. This research paper aims to bring out the Psychoanalytical elements embedded in F Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby. The present research navigates into the representation of the novel’s characters, especially Jay Gatsby as the ‘psychoanalytical hero’ using the research methodology of Freud’s psychoanalysis. In the present turbulent society where people fail to understand the value of relationships, Jay Gatsby’s character becomes more relevant.

3. How Faithful Is The Great Gatsby?

Ever since Baz Luhrmann announced that he was adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby­—and especially after he revealed that he’d be doing it in 3-D—much digital ink has been spilled about the hideous sacrilege that was sure to follow. Nevermind that Luhrmann’s previous adaptation, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, was quite true to both the language and the spirit of that legendary play; Gatsby, as David Denby puts it in The New Yorker this week, is “too intricate, too subtle, too tender for the movies,” and especially for such an unsubtle filmmaker as Luhrmann.

So the argument goes, anyway. In fact, Fitzgerald’s novel, while great, is not, for the most part, terribly subtle. And though it has moments of real tenderness, it also has melodrama, murder, adultery, and, of course, wild parties. In any case, we can put aside, for the moment, the larger question of whether Luhrmann captured the spirit of Gatsby, which is very much open for debate. There’s a simpler question to address first: How faithful was the filmmaker to the letter of Fitzgerald’s book?

The Frame Story:

Luhrmann’s chief departure from the novel arrives right at the beginning, with a frame story in which the narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), some time after that summer spent with Gatsby & co., has checked into a sanitarium, diagnosed by a doctor of some sort as “morbidly alcoholic.” Fitzgerald’s Nick does refer to Gatsby as “the man who gives his name to this book” (emphasis mine), so the idea that The Great Gatsby is a text written by Nick is not entirely original with Luhrmann—though the filmmaker takes this much further than Fitzgerald, showing Nick writing by hand, then typing, and finally compiling his finished manuscript. He even titles it, first just Gatsby, then adding, by hand, “The Great,” in a concluding flourish. (Fitzgerald himself went through many more potential titles.) As for that morbid alcoholism, Nick claims in the novel that he’s “been drunk just twice in my life,” but the movie slyly implies that he’s in denial, by showing him cross out “once” for “twice,” and then, in the frame story, suggesting that it was far more than that, really.

Jordan and Nick :

The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out one of the side stories: the affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy’s from Louisville who is a well-known golfer. Daisy promises to set them up, to push them “accidentally in linen closets and … out to sea in a boat,” a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the film, the matter is dropped. Luhrmann’s Nick says he found Jordan “frightening” at first, a word Carraway doesn’t apply to her in the novel—and later at Gatsby’s we see Jordan whisked away from Nick by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the novel, they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer.

The Apartment Party :

The film, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the adulterous couple have loud sex in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit—but something like that is implied: Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive; Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens; that’s not in the novel at all. Luhrmann’s Nick wakes up at home, half-dressed, unsure how he got there, while Fitzgerald’s narrator comes to in an apartment downstairs from Tom and Myrtle’s place, owned by one of their friends (and party-guests); he then goes to Penn Station to take the 4 o’clock train home.

Lunch With Wolfsheim :

In the book, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a “well-fanned 42nd Street cellar,” where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In the movie, Gatsby and Nick go to a barber shop with a hidden entrance to a speakeasy, and once inside they see not only Wolfsheim but also the police commissioner—who, in the book as in the film, Gatsby was “able to do … a favor once.” They also see there (if I understood things correctly) Nick’s boss, whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom’s friend Walter Chase. (In the novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.) The speakeasy features entertainment from a bevy of Josephine Baker-like dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.

Race :

At least one reviewer—David Denby again—has protested Luhmann’s decision to cast an Indian actor, Amitabh Bachchan, as Wolfsheim, a character based on notorious Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein. But faithfulness in this case probably would have meant anti-Semitism, since it is very hard to defend Fitzgerald’s characterization of the “small, flat-nosed Jew” with a “large head” and “two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril.” Casting Bachchan preserves the character’s otherness while complicating the rather gruesome stereotype Fitzgerald employed. Luhrmann appears to have given some thought to this, given that he faithfully keeps key passages from the novel about race: Tom’s trumpeting of a racist book called Rise of the Colored Empires (which had a real-world inspiration), Nick’s glimpse of apparently wealthy black men and women being driven into Manhattan by a white chauffeur, and Tom’s later diatribe about “intermarriage between black and white.”

l Finnish Woman and Ella Kaye :

Did you know that Nick Carraway had a maid? This is easy to forget, since Nick seems generally financially a bit strapped, certainly in comparison to his rich neighbors. But in the novel he employs “a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.” She makes a few appearances in the book but is understandably cut from the movie. So is Ella Kaye, the seemingly conniving woman who manages to snag the inheritance of Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who first prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody’s wealth goes to his family.

Gatsby’s Death and Funeral :

Near the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic husband of Tom’s mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed her—and that, what’s more, he might have been the one she was sleeping with on the side. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder: The book says that Gatsby grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” (i.e., a floater) and headed to his pool, then Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He’s then shot, and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and go way with him. None of that happens in the book.

Gatsby is, in both versions, lonely in death, but the film is even crueler to him in this regard, dropping the last-minute appearance of his father and the unexpected arrival at the funeral of a man who Nick previously met in Gatsby’s study. This is the same man who famously points out that Gatsby has real books, but hasn’t cut the pages. We meet him in the movie in that study, but he makes no mention of the books, and his subsequent appearance is dropped entirely.

4.symbolic significance of 'Green Light' and 'Billboard of The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelberg'

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Green Light symbolizes Gatsby's hopes and dreams, particularly his longing for Daisy and the idealized future he envisions with her. It represents the American Dream—its allure, but also its unattainability and illusionary nature.

The Billboard of the Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg serves as a haunting symbol of moral and social decay. The faded, godlike eyes watching over the desolate valley of ashes suggest the absence of true moral authority in a world driven by wealth and corruption. Some characters, like George Wilson, interpret the eyes as a form of divine judgment.

5.theme of 'The American Dream' and 'Class Conflict' in the novel.

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the themes of The American Dream and Class Conflict are central to the novel's exploration of wealth, ambition, and social divisions.

The American Dream

The novel critiques the idea of the American Dream, showing how it has been corrupted by materialism and social status. Gatsby’s rise from poverty to wealth symbolizes the traditional dream of success through hard work. However, his ultimate failure—fueled by his obsession with Daisy—reveals the dream’s hollowness, as wealth alone cannot buy love or acceptance into the upper class.

Class Conflict

Fitzgerald highlights the rigid social divisions between the old money elite (Tom and Daisy Buchanan), the new money class (Gatsby), and the struggling lower class (George and Myrtle Wilson). The novel illustrates how wealth does not guarantee social mobility or respect, as Gatsby, despite his fortune, is never fully accepted by the aristocracy. Meanwhile, the working class remains trapped in hardship, reinforcing the inequality between the rich and the poor.

Together, these themes expose the illusion of the American Dream and the enduring power of class distinctions in 1920s America.

My Reference:

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=honors

https://blog.prepscholar.com/jay-gatsby-great-gatsby-character-analysis-quotes

https://www.erpublications.com/uploaded_files/download/beatriz-moresca-de-lacerda_fjaPp.pdf

https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=etd

Thank you....