Introduction: The Multifaceted Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most renowned writers of the 20th century that his heritage and the public fascination of his lifestyle have significant roles in the context of world literature. The realistic effort of the late 19th century writers—especially in this case F. Scott Fitzgerald—who accurately shows life and its problems attempted to give a comprehensive picture of modern life by presenting the entire world picture. He did not try to give one view of life but instead attempted to show the different manners, classes, and stratification of life in America and he created this picture by combining a wide variety of details derived from observation and documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared the objective or absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. Thus, the Realistic elements are obvious in all Fitzgerald's works. The main objective of this paper is conducting a scientific study of unique style and writing techniques of Fitzgerald in the field of literature and creating an updated perspective of the reflection of three literary movements Realism, Modernism and Existentialism in his works. F. Scott Fitzgerald occupied an outstanding place in the annuals of American Literary history in the arena of twentieth century American fiction. He best represented the Roaring Twenties with his evocative works. The importance of this study and the necessity of awareness of literature and Fitzgerald’s life and environment at that time seems useful according to the study of literature. The fact that there is a perennial interest in Fitzgerald that has resulted in dozens of books and hundreds of articles also the variety of opinions about Fitzgerald’s works has been expressed by several of the most famous writers. One of the primary and valuable sources we paid attention to, is Judith S. Baughman and Mathew J. Bruccoli, The Literary Masters; F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2000. These series provide educators and researchers a source featuring not only literary movements and biographical data but also discussions of significant cultural and historical aspects of literature.
Literary Influences and Key Sources
The Literary Masters Series lights up biographical details of an author's life, providing a point of reference that gives insight into experiences that may have influenced the author's subject matter and writing style. The next literary source is The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cambridge university press, 2002. This particular volume has a great amount of information both in terms of analysis of Fitzgerald’s works, and the ramifications their receptions had on Fitzgerald himself and on his careered. It takes note of Fitzgerald's career in terms of both his writing and his life, and presents the reader with a full and accessible picture of each, against the background of American social and cultural change in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener and a new introduction by Mathew J. Bruccoli, 2006, was the first biography about Fitzgerald to be published and is ascribed with renewing public interest in the subject. Mizener believed that there are three concentric areas of interest in a study of Scott Fitzgerald. At the heart of it is his work, One area of interest in this book is the time and place in which he lived. His time and place haunted him every minute of his life and the effect of his preoccupation is what most obviously distinguishes his work from that of the good sociological novelists like Doss Passos on the one hand and, on the other, from that of the emotional and self-regarding novelists. Autumn Fontenot in an article by the name of The Writing Style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prezi, 2013, mentioned that F. Scott Fitzgerald is known as one of the most brilliant writers of his time.
Fitzgerald's Writing Techniques: A Deep Dive
His wonderful writing style is The most obvious feature he is known for. Though Fitzgerald took a few techniques from his idol authors, he created strategies that captured a deep and meaningful message. Fitzgerald uses many writing techniques to draw the reader in and create his unique style. He uses diction, similes, syntax, and rhetorical strategies to convey his message and understanding of his novels' qualities. 2. Method The methodology and technique to be used in writing this paper will be such that will make it a comprehensive, insightful and stimulating one. Different kinds of resources has been used such as printed and digital library books, academic journal articles about Fitzgerald's life and works and found background information on Fitzgerald in order to establish uniqueness of Fitzgerald's literary writing style and techniques. 3. Discussion Many authors after the First World War created a new literature of long-term merit that shattered conservative taboos in their expression of physical and psychological reality. This was the beginning of Modernism, which although, influenced by Realism and often mentioned to as postponement of naturalistic values, was the answer to America’s new-found problems. Fitzgerald was a non-expatriate who developed a modernist literature that was connected to American traditions but, what all the modernists shared was a belief in literature's significance in the contemporary world, and the need for it to be repeatedly vital. Like realists, the modernists and naturalists focused on changes on society and used symbolism, to attack society's problems and make their own judgments of the basic foundations of American life. Indeed both attacked the different moral dilemmas in the society. The only difference was that these dilemmas were different. So, author like Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using realistic and naturalistic techniques. He is thought of as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with Realism, meaning accuracy of observation and characterization. This Side of Paradise was read as a realistic account of Princeton undergraduate experience and the next novel Tender is the Night provides a convincing account of expatriate life and a profound examination of character deterioration.
Besides, the effects of Fitzgerald's exposure to naturalism are evident in his novelette May Day and the novel The Beautiful and Damned. What is significant about this author is the influence of European Existentialisms on his canon of works and the depth of the cultural moments he capture in his art. For example in The Great Gatsby the dominant strain of cultural discourse, which focused on the applicability of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophies of modern civilization and the modern individual to American interests and concerns is reflected. Like the existentialists, Fitzgerald recognizes the inadequacy of American democracy in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and rejects the capitalistic values, identities and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture. For Fitzgerald what are at stake are the individual, the inventive spirit, and the life of the nation and they echoes all the way through his early works, a sentiment manifest in their portraits of incapable, lost, aimless, and emotionally unfulfilled characters. Extensively, he expatriated himself since he felt America no longer provided an environment for the real growth of the individual or for the cultivation of the resourceful spirit, something particularly Europe, and Paris, not only offered, but encouraged and held in high esteem. Indeed he presents his readers with art of living for his time, for his readers’ personal, unquestionably biased lives.
Throughout his twenty-year career as a professional writer, Fitzgerald was often regarded as a not-quite-serious literary figure. This assessment was fueled by his image as a free-spending, heavy-drinking playboy and by the material he often exploited: the romantic interests of young people; the pursuit of wealth, success, and happiness by ambitious poor boys; the concerns of affluent, upper-middle-class men and women. Fitzgerald's material seemed, in short, the stuff of popular, escapist fiction rather than of enduring literature.
Writers' material—the subjects, experiences, ideas that they examine and re-examine—makes them the authors they are. As Fitzgerald explained in his 1933 essay One Hundred False Starts, writers and material are inseparable: “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise- maybe ten times, may be a hundred, as long as people will listen.”
The American Dream: A Recurring Theme in Fitzgerald's Work
Fitzgerald's experiences include his growing up with a sense of being a poor boy in a rich man's world but also with a sense of his own special destiny: both perceptions led him to believe in and pursue the American Dream of success, personal fulfillment, and wealth. Another of his formative experiences was his dramatic early success as a writer and celebrity, which was followed by his later collapse into Emotional Bankruptcy and anonymity: his greatest work from the late 1920s through the mid of 1930s examines the decline of potential heroes, a decline colored by their own and their creator's sense of regret. Another of his life- and work-shaping experiences was the intense romance and devastating misfortune of his relationship with Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: virtually all of his important female characters reflect some facet of Zelda and his involvement with her. 3.1 Subjects and Themes Theme is most dramatically expressed through character, and Fitzgerald used the people he created to convey his personal vision of the world. He portrayed a wide range of characters in his five novels and 160 stories.
Though he may be most closely identified with his debutantes, college boys, and ambitious young men seeking the fulfillments promised by wealth, social standing, and personal happiness, he also provided memorable portraits of the other kinds of people. Because they are drawn from his own experience, many of Fitzgerald's characters manifest recognizably Fitzgeraldian qualities. His men often combine ambition for early success with the desire for romantic love and the achievement of an ideal life. They often lack the hardness to fulfill their dreams. Certain of Fitzgerald's male characters are actually weak, but the majority of the men portrayed by Fitzgerald fail because the objects of their pursuit do not and cannot measure up to the men's conceptions of them. Because the quests of Fitzgerald's best male characters usually are played out in the real world, their objects, their dreams, are assailed by inevitable change and loss, so that youthful beauty fades; innocence hardens into cynicism; and aspiration fade when tested against harsh experience. “Can't repeat the past?' [Gatsby] cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!” Gatsby is wrong, but his faith makes him unforgettable.
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Women like Fitzgerald's female characters scarcely existed in American fiction before 1920. The best of his heroines are brave, determined, beautiful or attractive, intelligent (but not educated), and chaste. These young women, many of them still in their teens, also understand that their lives depend upon their marital choices. Fitzgerald clearly admired attractive, independent, unconventional women, but he also tended to treat his most fully developed women characters rather critically. Many of his most complex female characters are incapable of sharing the lofty dreams and aspirations of the men who love them. Fitzgerald was not a purely objective reporter or chronicler of the Jazz Age and the 1930s but instead brought a strong moral perspective to his work. His central characters undergo self-assessment processes (Amory Blaine, for example), or they judge others (Nick Carraway), or they are judged by Fitzgerald himself, who constantly measured characters' behavior against implicit standards of responsibility, honor, and courage. One of this writer's main methods was his adaption of a standpoint that the critique Malcolm Cowley labeled Double Vision, the discernment of events both as an outsider and as an insider. One of the paramount and mainly recognizable embodiments of double vision in Fitzgerald's work is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, who both takes part in and explains the action of the novel. In the second chapter Nick describes himself as “an entangled” in as well as a “watcher” over the events and his position as both insider and outsider remains intact throughout the novel.
For many of the young expatriate writers, the American Dream—the belief that aspiration could be fulfilled through imagination and hard work—seemed dead or at least terribly corrupted. They thus moved to Europe, which appeared to offer a freer, more stimulating, and perhaps less hypocritical environment. Although Fitzgerald lived abroad for nearly six years and was one of the major American writers to emerge during 1920s, he did not share the disillusionment with or contempt for their country of certain expatriate Americans. Instead, he was unabashedly patriotic, believing that America remained the land of opportunity of idealism, of great potentialities and possibilities. For Fitzgerald the American Dream was inextricably connected with the country's history, which he called in a note accompanying material for The Love of the Last Tycoon “the most beautiful history in the world.” In his novels and stories, Fitzgerald revealed not only the fulfillment of the American Dream but also the many ways it could be debased and distorted. His most evocative protagonists—among them Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver —share that quality of the idea and willingness of the heart defined by Fitzgerald as quintessentially American. Although they are frequently disappointed in their quests, it is not finally the dream that fails them but instead something else: some weakness or corruption in themselves or others. In The Great Gatsby, for example, Gatsby's dreams are noble, even incorruptible; but as Nick Carraway says, it is “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” that destroys him: his own purity about the differences between the new and old wealth, and the solidity and negligence of the Buchanans. In Tender is the Night Dick Diver's pursuit of the American Dream of success and fulfillment is defeated by weakness in himself, and in his final unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald develops a protagonist who has achieved the American Dream of success and fulfillment and then makes explicit both the imaginative and historical validity of his twenty-year investigation of the American Dream. In 1940 Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his daughter: “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat ... the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.'
This short sentence sums up Fitzgerald’s point about the American Dream. More than any other author of his era, with the probable exception of Theodore Dreiser, Fitzgerald was conscious about the influence of money on American life and character. As he wrote solemnly about money, ambition, and love, which were generally undividable in his work, he has been labeled a materialist by his critics. He has been considered as an uncritical venerator of the wealthy, a view disseminated by Ernest Hemingway at 1936. It will be of conspicuous importance to see what was in money that a resourceful man of Fitzgerald’s personality and mentality was so earnestly after. Fitzgerald wrote about the rich, but his understanding of the effects of money on character was complex. His works reflect his ambivalence of attitude: his attraction to and his distrust of the rich. For Fitzgerald, money was an important part of the American Dream because it provided not just luxuries but also opportunities unavailable to less affluent people. Money therefore had its obligation. As once Fitzgerald told Hemingway in his 16 July, 1936 letter of reply to The Snows of Kilimanjaro: “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.” (Fitzgerald, 1994, p. 302) Wealthy people who wasted or perverted the opportunities that their money gave them were objects of Fitzgerald's disappointment or disapproval. In The Beautiful and Damned Anthony Patch's expectations of an inheritance cause him to waste his talents and life. In The Great Gatsby “the Buchanan's money makes them careless, hard and directionless.” (Fitzgerald, 1951, p. 10) In Tender is the Night “Dick Diver has been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the warren safety-deposit vaults.” (Fitzgerald, 1996, p. 209) Fitzgerald clearly understood that money had the power to corrupt its possessors, just as it had the potential to increase their fulfillment. Fitzgerald's reaction to money was wrought by his family's vague social status in St. Paul and by his contact to the sons and daughters of the wealthy at prep school and Princeton. In a 4 March, 1938 letter to Anne Ober about Scottie Fitzgerald's forthcoming private-school graduation ceremony, Fitzgerald wrote: “… we will watch all the other little girls get diamond bracelets and Cord roadsters. I am going to costumers in New York and buy Scotty some phony jewelry so she can pretend they are graduations presents. Otherwise, she will have to suffer the shame of being a poor girl in a rich girl's school that was always my experience- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” Fitzgerald's sense of being excluded from the freedom and opportunities provided by money had been further intensified by his inability to marry Zelda right away because of his failures in New York following his army discharge. Because Fitzgerald's response to wealth was complex, mixing resentment and strong attraction, his fictional treatment of his material is both profound and extensive. Beside, Fitzgerald with his great sense of pattern was trying to find a way through which he could impose order on the chaotic world he was living in. Therefore, he might have assumed in the safe and proud world of the rich above the hot struggles of the poor he could get what he had always been seeking.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, like other late 19th century Realist writers, tried to show the diverse manners, classes, and stratification of life in America and he created this picture by combining a broad variety of details derived from surveillance and documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared the objective or absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. As a result, the Realistic elements are apparent in all his works.
Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using realistic and naturalistic techniques. He is considered as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with Realism, meaning precision of observation and characterization. Moreover, what is noteworthy about this author is the influence of European Existentialisms on his canon of works and the depth of the cultural moments he capture in his art. All the way through his literary life, Fitzgerald was often regarded as a not-quite-serious literary figure. This assessment was fueled by his image as a free-spending, heavy-drinking playboy and by the material he frequently exploited and became famous for rather than because of his technical innovations: the pursuit of wealth, success, and happiness by ambitious poor boys; the romantic interests of young people; the concerns of affluent, upper-middle-class men and women. He provided memorable portraits of the other kinds of people who manifest recognizably Fitzgeraldian qualities as well. His central characters undertake processes of self-assessment, or they judge others, or they are judged by Fitzgerald himself. Many of his most complex female characters are incompetent of sharing the arrogant dreams and aspirations of the men who love them.
One of the best and the most familiar personifications of double vision in Fitzgerald's work is Nick Carraway, who either participates in and comments on the action of the novel. For Fitzgerald the American Dream was bound up inevitably with the country's history. He wrote about the rich, but his perception of the influence of money on character was complex. His works reflect his appeal to and his mistrust of the rich. Fitzgerald used a fiscal metaphor, Emotional Bankruptcy to label a theme that permeates his work. Fitzgerald expanded this idea from his individual struggles with money, personal affiliation, and internal and external obstructions to his work.
Conclusion: The Lasting Impact of Fitzgerald's Literary Style
To sum up, the foremost themes of Fitzgerald's novels derive from the declaration of tension when one idea (usually personified in a character) triumphs over another. The main denominators are the topics with which Fitzgerald deals with in all of his novels: youth, bodily attractiveness, wealth, and potential or romantic willingness—all of which are ideals to Fitzgerald. Next to these subjects are their polar opposites: wasted potential, poverty, ugliness, age. Such conflict and consequential tension is, certainly, the stuff of which all fiction is made. Symbolism in Fitzgerald's novels and short fiction is given much attention to. Fitzgerald in his mature work employed the Saturation method, mixing a diversity of styles and forms With The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald truthfully became the novelist of selection, disciplining his wealth of literary sources and his creative imagination. His writing style is impressionistic and his details evoke sensory responses in the reader. He, nevertheless, was not in essence a modernist or an experimental writer, as were many of his contemporaries. Fitzgerald's techniques and writing style were traditional because his vision of the world was at least in part drawn from pre-World War I assumption. He was beyond all, a story teller who achieved a close relationship with the reader by the voice of his fiction, which was warm, intimate, and witty. Fitzgerald has been mostly praised for his handling of point of view and structure, particularly in The Great Gatsby. In the first half of the 20th century, Fitzgerald became the most famous American writer in the world. His unique style differs distinctively from that of writers before him, and his work helped shape both the British and American literature that followed it. He was the self-styled spokesman of the Lost Generation, clearly a master of stylistic and technical devices that are often identified with great writing.
All in all, Fitzgerald's style is utterly his own and perhaps the most unique aspect of his prose. Many writers have acknowledged their respect of his style, but no writer has productively imitated him. He was undoubtedly a master of stylistic and technical devices that are often identified with great writing.
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