Gatsby, Tess and Rapture Critics - AO3

Critics - AO3

Gatsby

Ian and Michelle McMechan:
"The impressions generated by Daisy Fay's name are of sunshine, transience and vague unreality"

Lionel Trilling:
Gatsby "comes inevitably to stand for America itself"

Tony Tanner:
"Gatsby's concern with time - its arrest-ability, recuperability, repeatability - is equally obsessive"
"He has given us an El Greco-ish version - heightened, enlarged, excitably glorified - of Gatsby"
"The green light offers Gatsby a suitably inaccessible focus for his yearning"
"Nick who transcribes these accounts; how much he may be re-quoting his sources and how much translating them - transforming, embellished, amplifying, rewording - we can never know"
Nick is a "self-isolating ******"
"About 4% of the book is in Gatsby's own words"
"By systematic deletion Fitzgerald makes Gatsby a far more shadowy, less knowable, more ultimately elusive figure"
"He prefers to 'erase' whatever might be the 'dirty' side of the story, either by omission, denial, over-writing, reinterpretation or by transformation"

Barbara Will:
"He is for most of the novel a force if corruption: a criminal, a bootlegger and an adulterer"
"What matters to Gatsby matters to us; Gatsby's story is 'our' story, his fate and the fate of the nation entwined"

Bryant Mangum:
"The green light which carries meaning at every level of the story - as Gatsby's go ahead sign, money, as the breast of the green world"
[TJ Eckleburg] "reminder that God has been replaced by fading signs of American materialism"

Frederick C Millet:
"Green is the colour of the promise, hope and renewal"
"Daisy tells Gatsby he reminds her of an advertisement. This statement confirms that Daisy does not like Gatsby for himself but a superficial illusion he represents"

Rena Sanderson:
"Hugo Munsterberg, among others, denigrated women's cultural activity sas sentimental, overly emotional, intellectual inferior"
Flapper = "spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centred, fun-loving an magnetic"
Women had more social mobility in the boom so perhaps the flapper is "product of the…