An Autobiographical Portrayal Of F Scott Fitzgerald

An Autobiographical Portrayal Of F. Scott Fitzgerald As Jay Gatsby, In The Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper

Dreaming The Impossible Dream:

An autobiographical portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald as Jay Gatsby, in The

Great Gatsby

Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul,

Minnesota, is seen today as one of the true great American novelists.

Although he lived a life filled with alcoholism, despair, and lost-love, he

managed to create the ultimate love story and seemed to pinpoint the

American Dream in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. In the novel, Jay

Gatsby is the epitome of the self-made man, in which he dedicates his

entire life to climbing the social ladder in order to gain wealth, to

ultimately win the love of a woman: something that proves to be

unattainable. As it turns out, Gatsby s excessive extravagance and love of

money, mixed with his obsession for a woman s love, is actually the

autobiographical portrayal of Fitzgerald.

While attending Princeton University, Fitzgerald struggled immensely with

his grades and spent most of his time catering to his social needs. He

became quite involved with the Princeton Triangle Club, an undergraduate

club which wrote and produced a lively musical comedy each fall, and

performed it during the Christmas vacation in a dozen major cities across

the country. Fitzgerald was also elected to Cottage, which was one of the

big four clubs at Princeton. Its lavish weekend parties in impressive

surroundings, which attracted girls from New York, Philadelphia and beyond,

may well have provided the first grain of inspiration for Fitzgerald s

portrayal of Jay Gatsby s fabulous parties on Long Island (Meyers, 27).

Although Fitzgerald was a social butterfly while at Princeton, he never

had any girlfriends. However, at a Christmas dance in St. Paul, MN during

his sophomore year, he met Ginevra King, a sophisticated sixteen-year-old

who was visiting her roommate, and immediately fell in love with her.

Although Scott loved Ginevra to the point of infatuation, she was too

self-absorbed to notice. Their one-sided romance persisted for the next two

years. Fitzgerald would send hundreds of letters, but Ginevra, who thought

them to be clever but unimportant, destroyed them in 1917. The following

year, Ginevra sent Scott a letter that announced her marriage to a naval

ensign. Just before Fitzgerald was to meet with Ginevra after a twenty-year

absence,

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he proclaimed to his daughter, with mixed feelings of regret and nostalgia:

She was the first girl I ever loved and have faithfully avoided seeing her

up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect, because she ended up by

throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference (Meyers,

30). Although heartbroken at the time, Fitzgerald answered Yeats crucial

question– Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman lost or a

woman won. — by using his lost love as imaginative inspiration. For in

his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, he recreated the elusive,

unattainable Ginevra as the beautiful and elegant Daisy Fay Buchanan.

Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald described Daisy as an almost disembodied

voice which, Gatsby realized at the end, was full of money. Fitzgerald

wrote, her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes

and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that

men who had cared for her found difficult to forget (Fitzgerald, 14). It

should be noted that, Gatsby s ability, like Fitzgerald s, to keep that

illusion perfect sustains his self-deceptive and ultimately

self-destructive quest, with the help of his own fabulous money, to win

Daisy back from her husband (Meyers, 30).

Although Ginevra King was Fitzgerald s first true love, she certainly was

not his last. In July 1918, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama with the

military, Scott met a gracious, soft-voiced girl named Zelda Sayre at a

country club dance. Scott recalled that night that, she let her long hair

hang down loose and wore a frilly dress that made her look younger than

eighteen. She came from a prominent though not wealthy family and had just

graduated from Sidney Lanier High School (Meyers, 42).

Despite Zelda s striking beauty and strong personality, she had numerous

flaws that were impossible to hide. She was often rude, selfish, sexually

promiscuous, and lacked restraint. As well, Zelda s family history of

mental illness and suicide would one day claim her. Fitzgerald was well

aware of of Zelda s character flaws, but found them

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to be provocative and exciting, for she was, to Scott s delight, an

inspiring example of the postwar modern girl (Meyers, 44). Fitzgerald was

excited– and sometimes tormented –by other men s love for Zelda, which

enhanced her worth in his eyes.

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