English A-Level Grapes + Gatsby Critical Quotations

Judith Fetterley

Fitzgerald's golden girls are scapegoats for male disappointments because even the poorest male gains something from a system in which all women are at some level his subjects

Kirk Curnutt

Daisy a lack of agency

Kazin

Daisy is vulgar and inhuman

Katie McGettigan

[Nick is] concerned with proving his own moral superiority

Claire Stocks

Nick wants to portray Gatsby as 'great' and to ignore or edit anything that might undermine that image

Thomas Flanagan

Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader's eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim

William Boyd

The truth about Nick is that he is a hollow man - a vacuum - and the judgement of a hollow man is always suspect

Bewley

The Great Gatsby lamented the collapse of the American Dream

H. Kelly Crockett

Steinbeck has made the Joads representative of the American Pioneer

W Motley

Ma Joad possesses the psychological qualities to govern her family community, because she has actually given birth to it and nurtured it

H. Kelly Crockett 2

California is not a promised land but a man-blighted Eden

Stanley Kunitz, 1939

It had to be written

Blades

The novel picks apart the wilful optimism of the pioneer and questions the limits of individualism

Hughes

Steinbeck countered the idealism of the frontier

DeMott

Praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing