AO5

• "a drama of dysfunctional love" Lois Tyson (psychoanalytical)
• "that light, the bright, shining embodiment of his ideal Daisy" (Observer)
• "[Gatsby] lays bare the empty, tragic heart of the self-made man" Lev Grossman
• The flapper is "spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centred, fun-loving and magnetic" Rena Sanderson
• "it is Gatsby's unwavering focused on Daisy, and his concomitant lack of feeling for the dead woman, that is so chilling" Rowe
• "The impersonal death machine violates Myrtle's female identity and ravages her: it is a symbolic rape" Parkison
• "women characters are decorative characters of seemingly fragile beauty" Parkison
• "the imagery of decay, death and corruption infects the story and it's hero too." Herman
• "This trophy daughter, on display for a matter of moments, is the tangible consequence of the Buchanan's unhappy marriage." McMechan
• "Ownership of women is invoked as the index of power: he who possesses Daisy Fay is the most powerful boy." Fetterly
• "Daisy is dressed in white and associated with light and sunshine...it is impossible for Gatsby to catch this light and fix it in one place." Herman
• “the seasonal calendar… is a metaphor for the blooming and blasting of love and hope" Herman
• • “Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes.” Mencken
• • “Daisy moves away from actuality into an idea existing in Gatsby’s mind.” Eble
• • “Gatsby lives in the world of romantic energies and colours.”
  • “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim.” Flanagan
• • “Becoming Tom was Gatsby’s dream.” Lance
• • “Nick wants to portray Gatsby as ‘great’ and undermines anything that might undermine that image.” Stocks
• • “Daisy has monstrous moral indifference and vicious emptiness.” Bewley
• • “Daisy is torn between a desire for personal freedom and the need for stability.” Fraser
• • “By attempting to maintain his way of life, Tom has reduced whole people to ashes without any thought of consequences.” Ramos
• • “Gatsby, like America itself … strives to reach a place he has created in his own mind, an impossible perfect.” Staveley
• America is “worshipping advertising” Churchwell
• “Fitzgerald gave us a mediation on some of this country’s most central ideas… the quest for new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches” Yardley
• “So much of the meaning of Gatsby come out of its imagery, its texture and the complexity of its motives” Bloom
• “Just because a plot did not revolve around race did not mean that race was not there, an active and shaping entity” Tanner
• "The reader’s attitude is more frequently shaped by an ironic juxtaposition of such themes as romantic idealization and realistic disillusionment" Donyo (formalist)
• "Myrtle’s desperate romanticism and Nick’s uncomfortable realism…. Is juxtaposed to and qualifies the other" Donyo
• “a dark destroyer, a purveyor of ‘corruption and death’ and ‘the first notable anti-virgin of our fiction, the prototype of the blasphemous portraits of Fair Goddess as bitch in which C20th fiction abounds.’ Fielder
• "She becomes the unwitting ‘grail’ in Gatsby’s adolescent quest to remain faithful to his seventeen-year-old conception of self" Person
• "Although extremely visual, the novel is full of barriers to sight and insight" Berman
• "Another American ‘love story’ centred on hostility to women and the concomitant strategy of the scapegoat" Parkinson
• For the first time Fitzgerald surveys the Babylonian captivity of this era unblended by the bright lights. Benet
• Gatsby’s version of time is solipsistic (Dickerson)
• It is no accident that Gatsby fears time; for Trimalchio (his prototype in Petronius's Satyricon) kept a trumpeter to announce constantly how much of his lifetime was gone (Stallman)
• "The result is the creation of a world in which the fairy tale of adolescence becomes the sole motivation of manhood. It is a conceit that views the reality of time as enemy” Dickerson
• Leland Pearson: “She is a victim first of Tom’s cruel power but then of Gatsby’s increasingly depersonalised version of her”
• Gatsby “wants nothing to do with the valley of ashes and the sexual woman who lives there” (Wasiolek)
• "In one sense Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society... He really believes in himself and his illusions" AE Dyson
• Gatsby sees that the pursuit of money is a substitute for love (Roger Lewis)