Category: EXPO 1213-001 Class Assignments (PRELIMS)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a glittering novel often praised for its dazzling prose and tragic romance. There is a lot more than what meets the eye however. Underneath its glamour, iconic symbolism, alluring imagery, and its ability to transport its reader to a world soaked with champagne and painted with endless celebrations, is a world full of disillusionment, pain, and trauma. This chasm of despair that is shrouded under the unassuming cloak of The Great Gatsby has been a topic discussed and extensively researched by many scholars. As I have been researching these underlying, silent themes and forces of the novel, here are some three insightful articles that offer fascinating insights into the world of Gatsby.

The Great War Beneath the Surface: Trauma & Silence in Gatsby’s World

Licari poses a thought-provoking question. What if The Great Gatsby isn’t just about love and drama? What if it’s about war and trauma?

T.S. Licari argues that The Great Gatsby quietly, yet powerfully, is crafted around the repressed psychological scars left on the men who fought in World War I. Both Gatsby and Nick are stated to be veterans of the Great War (WWI—society had no idea that it was only the first round of two), but their service is handled in a skittish manner. It gets glossed over in favor of the central conflict. Additionally, Licari draws attention towards the lyrical and poetic writing style and how it serves as a form of evasiveness; that could be interpreted as the narrator’s, Nick Carraway, symptoms of emotional and traumatic suppression being reflected in his personal account of the events of the summer of 1925. 

Most notable of all that sticks out in my opinion, is how Nick describes himself as “restless” at the beginning of the novel. The full context of the line is, “I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.” If that isn’t a cry for help or a distraction from facing what happened in the Great War, I don’t know what is.

Gatsby the Romantic Hero? Meet His Literary Twin, Lord Jim

So, it turns out that perhaps Gatsby was inspired by something that preceded him. Oh my. A classic drawing on a classic? Who would’ve thought? 

Martell and Vernon compare Gatsby to Conrad’s Jim: both are dreamers clinging to an intangible romantic ideal. For Gatsby, it’s his “unfinished” love story with Daisy before it got interrupted by unshakeable forces. For Jim, he was crushed by the existence of a world that no longer believes in heroism. In this way, both Gatsby and Jim are defined by their past failures and unrealistic futures. They reinvent themselves after failure, they construct their future under the direction of hopeless idealism, and their narrators, Nick and Marlow, share similarities too. They’re both watching their tragic heroes with a mix of awe and skepticism.

Perhaps the most compelling parallel and insight overall is that Jim and Gatsby fit the concept of Kenneth Bruffee’s concept of “elegiac romance” which is also Tracy Seely’s “modernist romance.”  In layman’s terms, an “elegiac romance” or “modernist romance”  is where the hero is already lost and remembered through a mourning narrator. Nick and Marlow don’t just share the stories of Gatsby and Marlow, they memorialize them, eulogize them, and most notably of all: they wrestle with what their failed quests mean.

For The Great Gatsby and Nick Carraway, Gatsby is treated like a beautiful, fragile relic. He’s a doomed knight in modern clothes. 

This comparison shows why Gatsby’s (and Jim’s!) stories are timeless. They’re chasing ideals rooted in a past with no place in the present or the future. He’s not just chasing Daisy. He’s chasing a previous state of self that was left behind in a world that no longer exists.

Melancholia in a Pink Suit

Wolfsdorf brings Freud into the mix (controversial guy to bring to the table, I know) to argue that Gatsby suffers from melancholia. Melancholia is a pathological form of grief in which the sufferer cannot let go of a lost love object. Hmm, sounds familiar…

According to Freud’s theory surrounding melancholia and its function in Wolfsdorf’s argument, Gatsby isn’t actually mourning Daisy; he’s psychologically imprisoned by an idealized version of her that never really existed.

How can we prove that? There’s actually an iconic significant moment from the novel itself that offers a good foundation for this assertion. It’s Gatsby’s iconic quote of, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” Wolfsdorf sees this as the observable manifestation of Gatsby’s melancholic fantasy; we can see that his obsession doesn’t allow room for healing. His dream isn’t just romantic. It’s compulsive, delusional, and tragic due to its self-destructive nature. I mean, he dies as a result of his pursuit while still engaging in melancholia by waiting on a phone call from Daisy. I think the question then becomes, “Will Gatsby be set free from his melancholia  by Daisy calling him? Or will that just add an extra set of bars?”

But the reality is that Daisy never called him. She never intended to. 

But here is what she did do.

Daisy turned to Gatsby and said, “I did love him once—but I loved you too.” This shatters Gatsby’s melancholic fantasy. She confirmed his deepest subconscious fear: his dream was never whole and never meant to be. The bullet didn’t kill Gatsby. It was Daisy.

Bibliography

Licari, T.S. “The Great Gatsby and the Suppression of War Experience.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, pp. 207-232. Penn State University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.17.1.0207

Martell, Jessica, and Vernon. “‘Of Great Gabasidy’: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, Spring 2015, pp. 56-70. Indiana University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.38.3.56

Wolfsdorf, Adam. “Mourning and Melancholia in The Great Gatsby.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, pp. 233-247. Penn State University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.17.1.0233

What if Jay Gatsby wasn’t simply a mysterious millionaire hopelessly in love? What if he is also a haunted war veteran attempting to reclaim a life destroyed by trauma and bloody politics?

Since the publishing of The Great Gatsby by the American classicist F. Scott Fitzgerald, readers across the 20th and 21st centuries have marveled at the allure of Jay Gatsby—the book whom The Great Gatsby is named after. Gatsby is a man who created his fortune and wealth to chase his dream: the hand of Daisy Buchanan. While there is no doubt that this is a tale of a hopeless romantic who wants to win back the love of life, what if his obsessive pursuit cannot simply be attributed to only romantic idealism? What if his choices are a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder born from the horrors he endured from World War I?
This proposed film adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby aims to reframe the events of Gatsby’s character arc through the lens of war and its lasting psychological scars. Drawing on historical research on WWI and modern-day understanding of PTSD in the context of war, The Ghost of War presents Gatsby not merely as a dreamer, but as a survivor of one of the most catastrophic clashing of thought and flesh. Gatsby is haunted, disillusioned, and desperately clinging to the fragments of a life he had to sacrifice when he entered the battlefield.

Reimagining the Classic

This film adaptation will incorporate multitudinous flashbacks from Gatsby’s time serving in WWI on the European battlefront. Showcasing Gatsby’s service in the form of flashbacks serve as a visceral form of context that is paramount to exhibiting his inner emotional struggles responsible for the central conflict of The Great Gatsby. His postwar pursuit is not simply a matter of the heart; it is a matter of a man attempting to resurrect his sense of purpose and wholeness before being transported to a mortal hellscape.
Through visual contrast, the film will naturally juxtapose the grim brutality of the trench warfare with the dazzling glamour of the Jazz Age. In doing so, it highlights a critical harsh truth. Not everyone drowned their bodies with endless glasses of champagne while surrounded by a community. Others bore and tended to invisible wounds in secluded, private moments. Not only does this showcase a strong visual contrast, it also exhibits the divide between class and privilege which is one of The Great Gatsby’s most iconic themes presented through the self-made wealth of Gatsby and the inherited-wealth of Tom Buchanan.

Why This Story Matters Now

This reimagining and retelling of one of America’s most iconic classics is not simply for lovers of The Great Gatsby, it’s for anyone who values historical drama, war narratives, and the human stories that lie beneath them. It’s for audiences who understand that trauma does not always assume its stereotypical appearance. It can take the form of ambition, obsession, or even love.
Perhaps most importantly, The Ghost of War attempts to speak and advocate for mental health and recognize the struggle many U.S. veterans endure when reintegrating back into a society physically untouched by war after returning from a place without peace. Gatsby becomes a solidified symbol of the lost generation and, by extension, of today’s war-torn souls who return home to a house with a room that doesn’t fit them anymore.

A Tribute to the Forgotten

By exploring the psychological cost of war and the fragile nature of the American Dream, The Ghost of War invites us to look beyond the glittering surface of Jay Gatsby. Underneath his iconic charismatic facade remains a man who is a soldier, a survivor, and haunted by an intangible ghost.