Gatsby Critics

“Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes”

H.L. Mencken

Gatsby is a “modern Icrarus”

R. W. Stallman

“Gatsby is a martyr of a materialistic society”

A. License

“Nick’s infatuation with Gatsby colours his judgement”

Monty J. Heying

“Daisy is torn between a desire for personal freedom and the need for stability”

Keath Fraser

“Daisy exists only in the images men create of her”

Kathleen Parkinson

“Daisy has monstrous moral indifference and vicious emptiness”

Marius Bewley

“Myrtle’s vitality bursts forth in violence”

Harold Bloom

Myrtle is ‘a victim of Tom’s aggression”

Kathleen Parkinson

“Becoming Tom was Gatsby’s dream”

Jaqueline Lance

Gatsby “embodies the core conflict in the American Dream between illusion and reality”

Marius Bewley

“Gatsby is neither ‘great’, nor indeed ‘Gatsby”

Claire Stocks

Jordan is “the cynically amoral socialite”

Philip French

Gatsby is “a divided personality, ambivalent even in his death”

Kathleen Parkinson

Daisy’s voice is her “typifying feature of her role as ‘la belle dame sans merci’”

Edwin Fussell

“Gatsby comes inevitably to stand for America itself”

Trilling