AO5

Alexander Raubo

• His failure, culminating in his murder, leaves Nick as the novel’s true villain, a smiling witness who lets the worst happen and then records it in beautiful prose.

• Nick seeks exoneration through his style

The East Coast

• ‘scattered intimations of England’

  • Daisy thinks she hears a nightingale and imagines it having come over on a Cunard liner.

  • Jordan Baker recalls Gatsby’s first encounter with Daisy by describing her English golfing shoes.

  • Gatsby himself claims to have studied at Oxford.

Social Distance

• Raubo

• ‘Gatsby is cast as a bootlegger and fraud, but the social distance between him and the Buchanans is minimal.’

• Their social world is narrow and provincial

  • Daisy has only her Louisville friend Jordan

  • Tom spends most of his time with his mistress Myrtle

Gatsby as performative

• Raubo

• Gatsby is the archetype of the American confidence man

• a swindler whose charm is part of the swindle

• whose criminality is forgiven in light of his charisma

• The archetype runs from Benjamin Franklin, pioneer of American self-invention, through P.T. Barnum, Jay Gatsby, and Jordan Belfort.

Gatsby’s failure

• Harold Bloom: Gatsby failed because he overestimated what money could buy

• Raubo: Gatsby failed because he didn’t believe in money enough. He didn’t close the deal.

  • He didn’t make Daisy an offer she couldn’t refuse, as Tom had once done with a $300,000 pearl necklace.

Tragic novel?

• Raubo

• ‘[the novel’s] famous closing lines aren’t tragic. Gatsby dies before confronting the truth that Daisy wouldn’t have chosen him.

• Nick compares Gatsby’s dream to the “last and greatest of all human dreams,” the settlement of America. Both are comedies of misrecognition.