Abstract
This chapter examines Nick Carraway’s memories of Jay Gatsby and his own life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) by looking at how the narrator combines both his individual and national shared memories and creates Jay Gatsby’s story as well as the stories of his family, his hometown, his Middle West, and his 1922 New York experience. In his recollections, Nick Carraway “writes” Gatsby through voluntary memory production, dependence on visual perception and specific spatial, material and temporal factors, utilization of hearsay, fist-hand and second-hand memories, biographical memories, fictionalized narrative, rememory, (re)living of emotions, chronicle, history proper, and a number of different memory conveyors. Nick’s narrative simultaneously operates as the collective and cultural memory of the Roaring Twenties as experienced by the characters of the novel and the Fitzgeralds themselves. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the memories of the Roaring Twenties are deconstructed as they are identified with the collective pursuit of material wealth, the hunger for power and social position, the culture of consumption, and the subsequent reduction of people to commodities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The notion of both the Carraway collective decision-making and the Carraway collective doubt in Nick’s business abilities is introduced at the very beginning of the novel when Nick describes why he came to New York: “Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, ‘Why – ye-es,’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year” (Fitzgerald 1994, 9).
- 2.
Nick was engaged in two love relationships: first in “a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department” (Fitzgerald 1994, 63) and then in “something more.... [He] wasn’t actually in love, but... [he] felt a sort of tender curiosity” (Fitzgerald 1994, 64) involving Jordan Baker. Both failed.
- 3.
Arnold Weinstein refers to Jay Gatsby as “the consummate fiction maker” (1985, 38) as he is “so primarily by making fiction in and of himself” (Hochman 2010, 29). I would like to argue that this term, even though applicable to Gatsby as he invented himself, can also refer to Nick as he is the one who writes Gatsby’s story and has the power to manipulate the related events by adding and omitting whatever he wants.
- 4.
Nick wants to introduce himself to Gatsby but decides not to as Gatsby seems to enjoy his solitude. The notion of involuntary action on Nick’s part is present as well: “Involuntarily I glanced seaward…” (Fitzgerald 1994, 28).
- 5.
Although Daisy killed Myrtle, Gatsby was ready to take the responsibility for her act if necessary.
- 6.
Nick comes from a distinguished and respectable family, has attended Yale, is confidential and, as he claims, not judgmental (see the beginning of Chapter 1).
- 7.
The first systematic study of collective memory was conducted by Maurice Halbwachs in 1925.
- 8.
Both Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson have risen from the same stratum. While Gatsby single-handedly gains wealth through bootlegging and bond-rigging, which makes him rich and powerful in the short run, Myrtle Wilson has to rely on her sexuality and the affair with Tom Buchanan to rise above her circumstances, which turns her into a victim and an object to be possessed.
References
Beuka, Robert. 2011. American Icon: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context. Lake Placid: Camden House.
Carlisle, Rodney P. 2009. The Roaring Twenties 1920 to 1929. New York: Facts on File-Infobase Publishing.
Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Declaration of independence: A transcription. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript. Accessed 15 July 2021.
Donaldson, Scott. 2001. Possessions in The Great Gatsby. The Southern Review 37 (2): 187–210.
Eckstein, Lars. 2006. Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Fitzgerald, Scott F. 1994. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books.
Godfrey, Laura G. 2016. Hemingway’s Geographies: Intimacy, Materiality, and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Habermann, Ina. 2010. Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestly, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochman, Barbara. 2010. Disembodied voices and narrating bodies in The Great Gatsby. In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby new edition, ed. Harold Bloom, 13–38. New York: Infobase Publishing.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Lachmann, Renate. 2008. Mnemonic and intertextual aspects of literature. In Media and Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll, 301–310. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Nalbantian, Suzanne. 2003. Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rodriguez, Jeanette, and Ted Fortier. 2007. Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith & Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A.. 1990. “Rememory”: Primal scenes and constructions in Toni Morrison’s novels. Contemporary Literature 31 (3): 300–323.
Shackel, Paul A. 2001. Introduction: The making of the American landscape. In Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape, ed. Paul A. Shackel, 1–16. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Van Fleet, Connie. 2006. Westerns: Essay. In Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests, 6th ed., ed. Diana Tixier Herald, 81–90. Westport: Libraries Unlimited.
Wallmann, Jeffrey M. 1999. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.
Weinstein, Arnold. 1985. Fiction as greatness: The case of Gatsby. Novel 19: 22–38.
White, Hayden. 1980. The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.
Yugin, Teo. 2014. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grmusa, L.G., Oklopcic, B. (2022). The Great Gatsby: A Memory of the Memory. In: Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern American Literature. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5025-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5025-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-5024-7
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-5025-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)