The Great Gatsby (Masterwork Studies Series) Paperback – December 1, 1989

Lehan provides a fairly satisfying reading of The Great Gatsby, its themes, and its language in this book. Lehan reads the novel as a movement from romantic possibilities to a corrupt reality: "The green breast of the new world...gives way to the valley of ashes; the dream of an idealized love gives way to adultery and death; and the idea of a just God gives way to blind eyes overlooking a physical wasteland and to characters who continually missee when they see at all" (124). Lehan provides a good analysis of all the major characters in the novel and also provides a good chronology that helps the reader grasp the symmetrical structure of the novel - centering around the central reunion between Gatsby and Daisy in chapter 5 - and provides insight into some of the recurring metaphors and tropes that structure the themes of the novel. Lehan makes the interesting point that the symbolic language in the novel "undercuts a strict literal and realistic reading" of the text. The symbolic relationships are more important than the literal chronology, i.e. the "movement from summer to winter, from youth to early adulthood, from romantic expectation to disillusionment, from life to death, from the pastoral to tragic, from the ideal to the grotesque, from the spiritual to the material" (132)Lehan also provides some very interesting quotes from Fitzgerald's correspondence. In one quote Fitzgerald wrote that, "The worst fault in [The Great Gatsby], I think is a big fault: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However, the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby's past and by the blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it - tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name" (125) I think this is an interesting quote because I think Fitzgerald does put his finger on a genuine flaw in the novel but it is one that - as Fitgzerald himself recognized - most people (including me) do not consciously notice until it is pointed out to them. Fitzgerald said he did not have a feel for how Daisy would react to someone like Gatsby and that does seem to be a real gap in the novel that I think I did feel on some level. It was like there was an expectation there that was waiting to be filled and never was.Lehan also discusses some of the real characters behind the novel and provides a little biographical detail. Fitzgerald apparently had his heart broken by a woman named Ginevra and that experience had a profound effect on his life and his work. Lehan explains the way that experience produced what I think is the dominant aesthetic of the novel, "When Fitzgerald lost Ginevra, he came to believe that such yearning was an end in itself; he believed in the need to preserve a romantic state of mind where the imagination and the will are arrested - in a state of suspension - by an idealized concept of beauty and love. The loss creates an eternal striving, and hope keeps the world beautifully alive" (72) The reason readers respond to this novel on such a deep level is because they can feel that aesthetic operating in the background. It was nice to have it stated so plainly.While Lehan's book increased my appreciation for Fitzgerald's novel I felt it suffered from a couple of flaws. Actually, there is really one main flaw. Lehan is constantly comparing the themes of The Great Gatsby to the themes of other Fitzgerald stories or other novels written by other authors. I think the idea was to highlight the themes of The Great Gatsby by comparing and contrasting them with the same themes as they appear in other works. However, I rarely found this very enlightening. I did not think it added much to the simple statement of the theme and the drawback was Lehan had to spend a fair amount of time summarizing the stories or novels he is comparing The Great Gatsby to since he cannot assume the reader has read those stories. So, he spends paragraphs summarizing Fitzgerald stories like "Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy", and paragraphs summarizing The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and A Lost Lady by Willa Cather. It felt a little bit like padding to me and I felt that, in a book that was supposed to be devoted to an analysis of The Great Gatsby, Lehan spent too much time summarizing and analyzing other novels and stories. So, that is my opinion, such as it is.

There was some confusion between the title I thought I was ordering and what I actually received. I had to return the item. I was very satisfied with the way the return was handled.

This is a great piece of literary criticism, Lehan does a great job. I used a specific chapter, "Seeing and Misseeing: Narrative Unfolding" in an essay of mine.