Talk:The Great Gatsby

The Plot Recap Makes An Unlikely Assumption

The plot recap in the article states as fact that Gatsby and Daisy, when reunited "embarked upon a sexual affair." But this is never explicitly stated or even hinted at in the actual novel. We are told only that they were lovers in the past, when they first knew each other, "and Gatsby felt married." Hemingway admired the manuscript greatly when Fitzgerald showed it to him. However, he told Fitzgerald that the novel never makes clear whether Daisy and Gatsby are sleeping together in the present. He found this a weakness. Fitzgerald replied that he agreed, but he had never made his mind up as to whether they were or not.So much of Gatsby's feeling for Daisy was a tragic version of courtly love. Fitzgerald found it entirely believable that this emotion could have remained in his head, like his own for Ginevra King. Younggoldchip (talk) 19:28, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Younggoldchip: Thank you for your insightful and knowledgeable comment. I concur the phrase should be changed. How shall we update the phrasing? I fear that replacing it "embarked upon a romance" would be misleading since we don't know if Daisy returns Gatsby's affections. We could delete the word "sexual" and leave it as "embarked upon an affair"–thus slightly more ambiguous? Let me know if you have a particular replacement in mind. — Flask (talk) 22:06, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Which was the first musical adaptation?

I noticed that the section on stage adaptations mentions the second and third musical adaptations, but I can't quite work out which is meant to be the first. Is it the opera? I suppose an opera is musical in the sense of having music, but I don't usually think of an opera as a musical. Could this wording be refined for clarity? I don't want to dive in myself because I'm not actually confident what is intended as the first. (e.g., did Gatz have music??) ~ L 🌸 (talk) 18:14, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

@LEvalyn Based on my research undertaken in the past hour, the "Stage" section is inaccurate and needs to be rewritten. A quick search of Newspapers.com indicates numerous musical adaptations of The Great Gatsby dating back to at least 1956. According to The Reporter Dispatch (Thursday, June 28, 1956, p. 6), the Yale Dramatic Association performed a musical production of The Great Gatsby in Summer 1956. The Wilmington News-Journal (May 7, 1956, p. 11) identifies this production as "the first musical adaptation of the novel."

And there are many other musical adaptations not mentioned in this article. There was a ballet adaptation in 1991 (The Cincinnati Post, October 25, 1991, p. 28) and a UK musical adaptation by Stage One in 1998 that received considerable press coverage (The Chronicle, April 17, 1998, p. 100). There also appears to be earlier opera adaptations among the number of earlier stage and musical adaptations prior to 2000.

Ultimately, I think we might do what ImaginesTigers suggested during the Featured Article review: We could create a separate Wikipedia article titled "Adaptations of The Great Gatsby." Now that the novel has fallen into the public domain, the number of adaptations will multiply in the coming decades, and there will be many future editors trying to add them to this article. — Flask (talk) 19:33, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh dear, that is a bit of a can of worms. I agree that it is probably time for a dedicated adaptation article. I took the liberty of starting one at Draft:Adaptations of the Great Gatsby, which spins out the current article content plus clumsy additions of the ones you mentioned here. I may have limited attention to work on it but will try to help! Once the spinoff is ready for mainspace, we could consider cutting down the main article to only mention adaptations which have their own articles. (I also find myself wondering if a chronological list would be worth assembling...) ~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:55, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for creating the article draft. Once my schedule clears up, I should have time to work on the draft in mid-March. — Flask (talk) 19:27, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Ignores the novel's overarching theme

This page woefully skips over this novel's overarching theme which is obviously that Jay Gatspy is trauma bonded to to Daisy due to her undiagnozed and untreated borderline personality disorder which renders her unable to love anyone because she has no self from which to love from so she marries a narcissist who doesn't love her because she can't recognize love due to her obvious personality disorder. This is evident from her shallowness, her magical thinking and her tendency to see men only as a means of supply, financial or otherwise. Daisy is fundamentally pathologically abusive. Jay on the other hand suffers from severe Codependency driving him to go to great lengths and thus, (spoiler alert) sacrificing his life for someone who can't and will never love him. The trauma bond is evident from their initial intense relationship ending in Daisy's callous discard of Gatspy when he's called-up to fight in WW1. She then marries Tom like her relationship with Gatspy meant nothing to her.

The entire novel can be summed up in the scene where Nick arranges the reunion between Daisy and Gatsby. Gatspy's out of character shaking and disheveled state in this scene is due to the cognitive dissonance due to experiencing a fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn response amplified by an overactive Adrenal medulla due to his post-war PTSD on a subconcious level while consciously beleiving that Daisy is capable of loving him. Jay knocking the clock of the mantlepiece then catches it before it smashes on the floor is a metaphore for the subconcious repetition compulsion in both characters who are trying to sub conciously recapitulate the past trauma of separation which they think is because of the war separating them but actually both characters are suffering from childhood trauma. Jay was raised by impoverished Lutherine farmers who probably shamed him a lot and made him feel like love was something that had to be earned and not given freely in a mutually reciprocal sense while Daisy raized in an upper class household probably didn't have her emotional needs met before the age of two because the upper classes outsource child rearing to nannies and later boarding school. Therefore, she has arrested development and essentially views relationships as vehicles for getting her immediate needs met much like how a baby child would and her insecure attachment style was only magnitised by the society that she grew up in.

Fitzgerald's masterpiece should not be read as a romantisization of the jazz-flapper roaring twenties but as a warning to humanity about the dangers of trauma bonds and mistaking Daisy's borderline-abuse for love but as a foreboding preminition of the 2020's where good men who are unaware of their codependency repeatedly sacrifice themselves over and over again to satiate the insatiable needs of borderline women who can never love them back. Jay Gatspy's high-risk lifestyle and chronic self-sacrifice is a form of suicide via proxy. He wanted to be shot at the end of the novel because he was in so much pain. Daisy didn't care one iota what happened to Jay in the end. She probably just bragged about it to her friends and labelled Jay a crazy sick fool that she barely had anything to do with. Daisy is an abusive coercively controlling crazymaker and there is nothing romantic about that. Wikipedia's purpose is to educate people and by not conveying Fitzgerad's true message about the lethality of trauma bonding with people who can never love you back this article is placing the lives of many men at risk. I believe The Great Gatspy is more relevant today than it has ever been but we need to understand this novel for what it truly is. A warning to humanity. Flask please rewrite this entry so that it no longer poses a danger to codependent men the world over.Blanes tree (talk) 10:49, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

You are making claims about what should and shouldn't be on pages without citing relevant informations which backs up your point. This is laughable Theobrad (talk) 12:17, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Why are you being so mean to me? I know this to be true because Frank and Zelda were friends of mine. Blanes tree (talk) 20:29, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Following my reverting Blanes tree's edit on the VFS Global article, Blanes tree stalked me to this article contrary to WP:HOUNDING. According to their Talk Page, they are engaged in similar targeting towards other editors. Setting aside the issue of WP:HOUNDING, Blane tree's claim that their personal friendship with novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (who died in 1940) supersedes needing to provide any sources and is sufficient to demand a rewrite of this Featured Article does not meet Wikipedia's guidelines to necessitate a rewrite. — Flask (talk) 23:32, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Owen Davis's stage adaptation

I have revised the paragraph about the 1926 stage adaption. When User:Laurencebeck first added the information about this production to the article in 2016 ([1]), he wrote that it "ran for 112 performances", which is correct. This was changed without explanation to "had 112 curtain calls" by User:Flask in 2021 ([2]). Not a good change. If "curtain calls" was meant literally, the claim is ridiculous; if it was intended as a synecdoche for "performances", it can only cause confusion (and indeed already has, as the addition of a wikilink to curtain call and the accompanying edit summary by a subsequent editor shows [3]). I have changed it back to "performances", expanded the paragraph to add more information about the production, and updated the citations to a more recent and authoritative source for Davis's play. Crawdad Blues (talk) 15:59, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for correcting my error (yes, it was a synecdoche), and thank you for supplying further details from the West & Daniel 2024 work. In the near future, I'll copy over this information to the Draft:Adaptations of the Great Gatsby with accreditation in my edit summary. It would be wonderful to eventually have a Wikipedia article dedicated to the original 1926 stage adaptation as well. — Flask (talk) 19:25, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

. . distant fields

Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:

     That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

     In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

     Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

     Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

     A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

           Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

     And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

           In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The word field appears in the above. The word fields appears in the below

F Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Gatsby is an American idealized conception of the already potent myth for F Scott Fitzgerald of Rupert Brooke.

. . . Laurencebeck (talk) 05:36, 11 November 2024 (UTC)