A Marxist reading of “The Great Gatsby”

Written and set during the post-World War I economic boom of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1920) can be seen as a chronicle of the American dream at a point in this nation’s history when capitalism’s promise of economic opportunity for all seemed at its peak of fulfillment. It was a time when stocks could be bought on a 10 percent margin, which means that a dollar’s worth of stocks could be purchased, on credit, for ten cents. So even the “little man” could play the stock market and hope to make his fortune there.

A Psychoanalytic reading of “The Great Gatsby”

One area of human behavior explored in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925) that has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism is found in the romantic relationships portrayed in the novel. If we don’t view the novel through a psychoanalytic lens, we found it one of the great American love stories. For many psychoanalytic literary critics, Jay Gatsby is a rather larger-than-life romantic hero. For a psychoanalytic reading the interest created by the romance between Gatsby and Daisy lies on the ways in which it mirrors all of the less appealing romantic relationships portrayed and thereby reveals a pattern of psychological behavior responsible for a good deal of the narrative progression. This pattern is grounded in the character’s fear of intimacy. This psychological problem is so pervasive in the novel The Great Gatsby’s famous love story becomes, through a psychological lens, a drama of dysfunctional love.