
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Part II
Wai Chee Dimock, professor at Yale, concludes her two-part discussion of The Great Gatsby in this lecture from the course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. She argues that the novel cross-maps auditory and visual fields onto its central character pairs, Daisy and Jordan Baker, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, and that these convergences and divergences carry the book's themes of accountability, illusion, and disillusion. Starting from the Jazz Age setting, she traces how sound and color attach to specific characters, then follows what happens when sound is extinguished for Nick and Gatsby near the novel's end. The lecture closes by examining the divergence between Nick and Gatsby and what Dimock calls Nick's logic of substitution. Recorded at Yale in Fall 2011, the talk is chaptered by topic and works as a close reading of the novel's formal patterns rather than a plot summary.