Stylistic Analysis of Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald was the son of Edward Fitzgerald, who worked for Proctor and Gamble and brought his family to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, for most of his son’s first decade. Edward Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandfather was the brother of the grandfather of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner. ” This fact was of great significance to Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mollie McQuillan, and later to Scott.

Mollie Fitzgerald’s own family could offer no pretensions to aristocracy, but her father, an Irish immigrant who came to America in 1843, was a self-made businessman. Equally important was Fitzgerald’s sense of having come from two widely different Celtic strains. He had early on developed an inferiority complex in a family where the “black Irish half … had the money and looked down on the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had … ‘breeding,’” according to Scott Donaldson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Out of this divergence of classes in his family background arose what critics called F. Scott’s “double vision. ” He had the ability to experience the lifestyle of the wealthy from an insider’s perspective, yet never felt a part of this clique and always felt the outsider. As a youth, Fitzgerald revealed a flair for dramatics, first in St. Paul, where he wrote original plays for amateur production, and later at The Newman Academy in Hackensack, New Jersey. At Princeton, he composed lyrics for the university’s famous Triangle Club productions.

Fitzgerald was also a writer and actor with the Triangle Club at college. Before he could graduate, he volunteered for the army during World War I. He spent the weekends writing the earliest drafts of his first novel. The work was accepted for publication in 1919 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The popular and financial success that accompanied this event enabled Fitzgerald to marry Zelda Sayre, whom he met at training camp in Alabama. Zelda played a pivotal role in the writer’s life, both in a tempestuous way and an inspirational one.

Mostly, she shared his extravagant lifestyle and artistic interests. In the 1930s she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and was hospitalized in Switzerland and then Maryland, where she died in a fire. For some time, Fitzgerald lived with his wife in Long Island. There, the setting for The Great Gatsby, he entertained in a manner similar to his characters, with expensive liquors and entertainment. He revealled in demonstrating the antics of the crazy, irresponsible rich, and carried this attitude wherever he went.

Especially on the Riviera in France the Fitzgerald’s befriended the elite of the cultural world and wealthy classes, only to offend most of them in some way by their outrageous behavior. Self-absorbed, drunk, and eccentric, they sought and received attention of all kinds. The party ended with the hospitalization of Zelda for schizophrenia in Prangins, a Swiss clinic, and, coincidentally, with the Great Depression of 1929, which tolled the start of Scott’s personal depression. In the decade before his death, Fitzgerald’s troubles and the debilitating effects of his alcoholism limited the quality and amount of his writing.

Nonetheless, it was also during this period that he attempted his most psychologically complex and aesthetically ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). After Zelda’s breakdown, Fitzgerald became romantically involved with Sheila Graham, a gossip columnist in Hollywood, during the last years of his life. He also wrote but did not finish the novel The Last Tycoon, now considered to be one of his best works, about the Hollywood motion picture industry. Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack, most likely induced by a long addiction to alcohol, on December 21, 1940.

At the time of his death, he was virtually forgotten and unread. A growing Fitzgerald revival, begun in the 1950s, led to the publication of numerous volumes of stories, letters, and notebooks. One of his literary critics, Stephen Vincent Benet, concluded in his review of The Last Tycoon, “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation – and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time. ” General characteristic 1.

The text under consideration is a part of well-known novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of the twentieth century America. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, referred to as “The Great American Novel”, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. The Great Gatsby is the classic novel about the American Dream, one of the great novels of the 20th Century as it captures perfectly some essential quality of the American myth and dream of the Jazz Age.

The novel has profoundly portrayed the unsatisfied desire of the wealth and the success and displayed the theme of the novel— the disillusion of American dream. Meanwhile, it also shows Fitzgerald’s outstanding talent and the writing technique incisively. His style is exquisite, and the plot is compelling. The splendid work establishes Fitzgerald as a great writer in American literature. Fitzgerald’s novel reveals his poetic temperament and style. His observation to the world is exquisite. 2. The general slant of the text is a 1st person (sing. narration, which shows that we deal with narrative with the personage uttered monologue – so the whole narration sounds very subjective. Narrator clearly expresses his opinion, gives an extraordinary description for all the personages and events. 3. The text of the story is not homogeneous. The author’s narration is interrupted by the dialogues of the characters. Direct speech harmoniously interrelates with narration. It leaves much for the reader’s guesswork and helps the reader to realize all the events taking place in the story. 4. The linguo-stylistic analysis proper: I.

Phonographic analysis The traditional text segmentation is observed in this story. It consists of paragraphs. Sometimes direct speech appears in the story. Also changes of the print present in the story, especially capitalization of some words. Author wants to underline some words and phrases with the help of this mean. That’s why he indicates the whole word by the capital letters. e. g. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES. I don’t think it’s so much THAT,” argued Lucille sceptically; “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war. ” “There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with ANYbody. ” As for rhythmical background of the text, there are alliteration and assonance for better reading and perception of the story. e. g. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York… Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. II. Lexical analysis ) The words are stylistically neutral in the text. The communicative situation is highly informal. Narrator describes all events which take place at the Gatsby’ party. The communicative situation is highly informal. The vocabulary includes not only standard colloquial words and expressions, but also idioms, phrasal verbs, barbarisms, etc. e. g. The bar is in a full swing, and floating rounds of cocktail permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter… “See! ” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide (real) piece of printed matter…” Also the colloquial words proper are observed here. . g. “…This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! ” The writer strong sense of place is revealed by the use of barbarism such as hors-d’oeure (snack), chauffeur, gayety (elegance), etc. Even some archaic phrases are in the text. e. g. …already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change (a profound or notable transformation) of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. ) The analysis of the vocabulary shows that author uses extraordinary words and words combination to make reader complicit in the story. The most of the words are neutral but rich in connotations. III. Morphological analysis Past Indefinite Tense is frequently used in the chapter, because narrator speaks about past events. But in the third paragraph Past Indefinite Tense is changed for Present Indefinite and Present Continuous Tenses to transfer the reader into the atmosphere of celebration, it creates the effect of immediate presence. The change of tenses registers changes in the narrated events. IV. Syntactic analysis