Conrad and The Great Gatsby

Abstract

ized influences strike me as peripheral because central one, as I see it, is obsessive hold of Conrad in shaping Fitzgerald's greatest novel. His biographer reports that Fitzgerald never very conscious of his literary debts, but so numerous are his debts to Conrad that is (I think) misleading to swallow this false notion in good faith. In Mr. Arthur Mizener's version of him, Fitzgerald is an Original Geniusalmost nobody at all influenced this Very Bright Boy. He tells us that Fitzgerald had an intuitive way of working, and that source of one of his symbols in The Great Gatsby was a dust-jacket picturing two enormous eyes which suggested Daisy brooding over an amusement-park version of New York. This dustjacket, as Mr. Mizener admits, not, of course, real source of that symbol, but he insists that it was only source Fitzgerald consciously understood, and he was hardly more aware of his literary sources.' Shortly after writing The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald listed for The Chicago Tribune ten most important novels, and Nostromo was one he singled out as the greatest novel since 'Vanity Fair' (possibly excluding 'Madame Bovary') .' He does not say what Conrad works he read other than admitted Nostromo, but these must have included Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. What he learned from Conrad includes not only device of perplexed narrator and turns of phrasing, but also themes and plotsituations, ambivalence of symbolism, etc.-in fact, craft of novel, including a theory of its construction. Conrad's secret theory examined, Fitzgerald writes in his Notebooks; and secret of scheme? Well, he wrote truth-adding confusion however to his structure. How closely he studied Conrad is indicated also by what he says in this same note: Nevertheless, there is in his scheme a desire to imitate life which is in all big shots. Have I such an idea in composition of this book? And how much of Con-