The Great Gatsby. By Francis Scott Fitzgerald презентация

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a notable American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He dropped out of the University to dedicate himself to writing. Soon his literary works began bring him financial benefits.
His most remarkable works are This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934).
Fitzgerald died from heart attack in 1940 at the age of 40.
His success in the USA is comparable to Ernest Hemingway’s. Nowadays Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The Great Gatsby
The novel was published in the middle of February 1925. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.
Writing the novel, the author shifted between Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Under the Red, White, and Blue, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and The High-Bouncing Lover, but eventually the title The Great Gatsby was chosen.
I consider the title to be more unsuggestive, because basing only on the title, we can not make any suggestions about the plot until we read the story up to the end and analyze it.

The setting
The setting of the novel plays a significant part in the story, as it represents characters’ mentality and the whole atmosphere of the novel. The main action takes place in the USA, Long Island, West and East Egg in 1922. Fitzgerald called this time “Jazz Age”. This entourage is colorfully depicted in this literary work and skillfully used in the movie based on the novel.

The subject
In the novel there are several subjects that may be found. The main ones are formulated as
Why is society so rigidly classist?
What is the real point of the American Dream?
Can people really change?

The row of thematic vocabulary can help to gain a better understanding of the topic.
Dignity - достоинство
Levity - легкомыслие
Reveries - грезы
Desire - стремление
Desperation - безысходность
Revulsion - отвращение
Decline - упадок

The message
The message of the novel runs as follow: you should live in a real world and don’t give up to your blind reveries; you shouldn't change the person you are and have to fake being yourself in order to get someone’s acceptance or devotion

The plot
From my point of view, the plot is not too overloaded and tangled up, but at the same time this literary work is full of philosophical reflections and sharp observations of human’s nature that the author conveys through the presented situations. The charm of the story lies in dialogues and description of feelings of characters. The structure of the plot is closed as it consists of all elements: the exposition, the story, the climax, the denouement are represented in it.
The novel has a skillfully developed, unhurriedly-moved plot that takes our attention from the first pages. The story is told in first person narration that allows readers to get down into the atmosphere deeper. The narrator presents his memories, so the readers are given a retrospective of what happened.

The story is told by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who lives on Long Island but works in Manhattan. Carraway becomes curious about his neighbor’s Gatsby enormous mansion. Nick soon learns that Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin and the wife of one Tom Buchanan, an acquaintance of Nick’s from Yale. Buchanan takes his old friend for a day in the city, where Nick learns that Buchanan has a kept woman, Myrtle, the wife of a long island mechanic.
Spending time with Gatsby, Nick learns that he, Jay Gatz at the time, and Daisy had once been in love, but Daisy married Tom while Jay was in Europe during the Great War. In the aftermath of this, Jay Gatz abandoned his old identity, becoming Jay Gatsby and made a fortune with the help of notorious criminal Meyer Wolfsheim.
Nick manages to get Gatsby and Daisy together, and while the meeting is awkward at first, Gatsby soon relaxes and invites Nick and Daisy back to his mansion. Gatsby and Daisy begin to see each other secretly with some frequency. Nick and Gatsby also become close, as Nick is one of the only people who continues to support Gatsby despite the rumors that circulate around the man. Buchanan eventually confronts Gatsby in Manhattan about the affair, and the two argue at length about who it is that Daisy genuinely loves. Daisy claims to love both of them, but she decides to return to Long Island with Gatsby, not her husband.

The climax of the story hits us when Daisy driving Gatsby’s car accidentally kills a woman on the side of the road, and then speeds off. It turns out that this woman is Buchanan’s girlfriend Myrtle—she had only run out to see the car because she thought it was Buchanan’s.
The denouement is sharp and unpredictable. Urgently needing to settle the scores, Myrtle’s husband comes to Tom Buchanan and blames him for the death, but Buchanan informs him that it was Gatsby’s car that killed the woman. The mechanic goes to Gatsby’s house, where he shoots Gatsby and then commits suicide. Daisy refuses to confess to her crime, and only a few people, including Nick and Gatsby’s father Henry, show up for Gatsby’s funeral. Disillusioned with his time on the East coast, Nick decides to return to his home in the Midwest.

Characters
The characters are described realistically and vividly, in accordance with the spirit of 1920th in the USA. They are full-blooded and many-sided, characterized with great knowledge of a human nature. Most of the characters are given characteristics by the narrator, Nick Carraway, where Nick’s views, as critics and biographers often say, are similar to Fitzgerald’s. So, we are able to say that the author uses direct characterization.

Nick Carraway
The story's narrator. Nick rents the small house next to Gatsby's mansion in West Egg and, over the course of events, helps Gatsby reunite with Daisy (who happens to be Nick's cousin). Nick finds the East an unsettling place, so he undergoes changes and gets disillusioned.
More down-to-earth that other main characters.

Jay Gatsby
The protagonist who gives his name to the story. Gatsby is a newly wealthy Midwesterner-turned-Easterner who orders his life around one desire: to be reunited with Daisy Buchanan, the love he lost five years earlier. He is young and mysterious. His quest for the American dream leads him from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved and, eventually, to death.

Daisy Buchanan
Beautiful and mesmerizing, Daisy is the apex of sociability. Her privileged upbringing in Louisville has conditioned her to a particular lifestyle, which Tom, her husband, is able to provide her. She enraptures men, especially Gatsby, with her diaphanous nature and sultry voice. She is the object of Gatsby's desire, for good or ill, and represents women of an elite social class.

Tom Buchanan
Daisy's hulking brute of a husband. Tom comes from an old, wealthy Chicago family and takes pride in his rough ways. He commands attention through his boisterous and outspoken (even racist) behavior. He leads a life of luxury in East Egg, playing polo, riding horses, and driving fast cars. He is proud of his affairs and has had many since his marriage. Myrtle Wilson is merely the woman of the moment for Tom

Myrtle Wilson
Married lover of Tom Buchanan. Myrtle serves as a representative of the lower class. Through her affair with Tom she gains entrée into the world of the elite, and the change in her personality is remarkable. She conducts a secret life with Tom, wherein she exhibits all the power and dominance she finds lacking in her everyday life. She eventually suffers a tragic end at the hands of her lover's wife.

George Wilson
Myrtle's unassuming husband. He runs a garage and gas station in the valley of ashes and seems trapped by his position in life. Eventually, he finds out about his wife's double life and his response to it helps drive her to her death. Distraught at what happens, Wilson becomes Fitzgerald's way of expressing the despair prevalent in the seemingly trapped lower-middle class.

Conflict
In this novel we can observe several types of conflicts, such as
Man’s interior conflict (Gatsby’s and Daisy’s)
Man against values (Nick)
Man against society

10 words for better understanding the novel
Scorn – презрение
Solemn – торжественный
Immoderate – неумеренный
Flatter – льстить
Glow – светиться
Astounding – поразительный
Conceit – тщеславие
Sumptuous – роскошный
Deceiving – обманчивый
Attain – добиться

10 quotes from the novel
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity
‘They are a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

10 quotes from the novel
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
The rich get richer and the poor get children
Human sympathy has its limits

Trailor

Conclusion
To sum it all up, the novel The Great Gatsby is a remarkable literary work that was relevant not only for the Americans in late 20th and 30th. Even nowadays it gives food for reflections to readers of different nationalities and ages.