When I read GATSBY for a class long ago--way too long ago for
me to remember why I thought it--I understood Gatsby to be
Jewish and trying to fit into the old Anglo establishment. I
have no desire to reread GATSBY, but now I do want to reread
BLACK MONEY.
Joy
> Jim Winter wrote:
>> But here's a thought about GATSBY that makes me
wonder if it
>> originated with MacDonald. A few years ago, a
professor wrote a
>> paper suggesting that Jay Gatsby was trying to
pass as a white man.
>> The plot of BLACK MONEY almost suggests that
MacDonald had picked up
>> on the idea 30 years earlier. I wished I'd read
GATSBY before I'd
>> heard that, because it was in the back of my
mind when I finally did,
>> both from that article and BLACK MONEY. Still,
it's an intriguing
>> debate, and there's nothing in GATSBY to suggest
it wasn't possible.
and then Brian Thornton wrote:
> And there's nothing to suggest it was. Fitzgerald is
one of the great
> voices of the early 20th century because of what he
leaves unsaid, true,
> but
> this sounds to me like someone on a tenure track
reading something into
> the
> text, as opposed to trying to pull it out. Gatsby is
clearly a parvenue,
> that much is painfully clear, and the novel lays it
out vividly that no
> matter how much new money he illegally makes, he's
still "new money" and
> will never be able to truly enter Daisy's world any
more than I can sprout
> wings and fly.
>
> I think the deeper question about Gatsby is whether
Fitzgerald identified
> more with the viewpoint of Nick Carraway or with the
viewpoint of Jay
> Gatsby
> himself. Fitzgerald was himself a parvenue who went
out and "made it big"
> in order to win his own Daisy, his wife Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald. A social
> climber by nature, and an alcoholic by long
practice, Fitzgerald opened up
> both the world of the "cruel rich" and of jazz age
party excess ("jazz
> age"
> being a term Fitzgerald himself coined) for people
who might never have
> had
> an inkling of what they were like otherwise. I think
he did a bang-up job
> of showing how he himself (a good Catholic boy from
the Midwest) was both
> attracted and repelled by both these aspects of
1920s America.
>
> Oh, and let me repeat for emphasis, I don't see the
"black guy trying to
> pass" any more than I see a potentially drunken gay
encounter for Nick
> after
> the party scene in the apartment where he helps the
other drunk guy home.
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