tgg ao5

• "a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas... the quest for new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches" Yardley, C21
• "Gatsby lives in the world of romantic energies and colors" Flanagan, C21
• “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim” Flanagan, C21
• “In one sense Gatsby is the apotheosis of his rootless society... He really believes in himself and his illusions" Dyson, C20
• “a means of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties" "they are dumb in their insensate selfishness…” Clark, C20
• About Daisy, “an emptiness that we see curdling into the viciousness of a monstrous moral indifference” Brewley, C20
• “no more than a glorified anecdote” – Mencken C20
• “a disillusioned novel, and a mature novel.” – Benet, C20
• “doglike fidelity not only to his ideal but to his fictions” Vechten, C20
• “…an incurable romanticist… his mistake was to accept life at its face value.” – Paterson C20
• “Daisy moves away from actuality into an idea existing in Gatsby’s mind.” Eble, C20
• "The dreamer dies so that an image, however grotesque, of the American Dream can continue to live" - Bloom C20
• “marked by a deep sense of nostalgia for a lost world, a world of glamour and excitement that has vanished forever”. Characters are “often restless and dissatisfied” “searching for meaning and purpose in a world that seems to offer little hope." - Wilson, C20
• “The author presents a documented analysis of the major ethics themes in the book including, for example, moral growth, Gatsby’s life of illusion, the withering of the American dream, and the parallels between the 1920s and the 1980s.” - McAdams C20
• Parkinson C20: “Gatsby most of all embodies the duality of American experience, but it is Nick who confronts the issues this raises.”
• ‘Nick and Gatsby progressively devitalise Daisy’s symbolic meaning until she exists as a vulgar emblem of the money values which dominate their world.’ - Person C20
• “one of the few truly mythological creations in our recent literature” - Troy; C20