Historicizing “a fresh, green breast of the new world”: A Postcolonial Reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
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2017
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald presents Jay Gatsby, the eponymous hero of his novel, through images framed by the narrator, Nick Carraway. Gatsby appears as the exotic ‘other’ in the first image and a wannabe struggling to mimic the old money class of Long Island in the second. Finally, Nick creates a fully developed composite picture of Gatsby through fragments divulged in nonlinear fashion that reconcile his many faces to reveal a man greater than the sum of his flawed parts. Not only do these images reflect concepts of ‘othering,’ mimicry, and ‘unhomeliness’ found in colonial discourse, they appear in a setting where old money, new money, and no money stereotypes from the Jazz Age support such discourse. Although Fitzgerald occasionally parts the curtains to reveal the novel’s colonial undertones with allusions to the Columbus egg, early Dutch explorers, polo playing, big game hunting, the Fourth of July, and European styles that predate the American Revolution to reveal the meaning of Americanism, these undertones have gone largely undetected. My thesis demonstrates how using a postcolonial lens to examine the different incarnations of Gatsby can help disclose the meaning of ‘great’ as redefined by Nick. By revaluing Gatsby’s third and final image as ‘Jay Gatsby’ the story, Nick redefines American to include a collective identity defined by ‘otherness,’ mimicry, indeterminate ethnicity, and ‘unhomeliness.’ Recognizing the novel as postcolonial helps the reader see Gatsby as a postcolonial subject who is great because he embodies the American Dream.