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Through the first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, who can both participate in Gatsby's dream of 1. 417 having Daisy's love and criticize it, Fitzgerald establishes distance from material about which he felt passionately, based loosely as it was on Fitzgerald's rejection by the wealthy Chicago debutante, Ginevra King. Though it is Gatsby who is at least superficially the hero of The Great Gatsby, ultimately it is Nick who absorbs the truth of Gatsby's story: that the ability to dream is perhaps the highest end of man, but that "the foul dust that floats in the wake" of the dream, the compromise required by materialism, threatens to destroy the romantic vision 1. Psychoanalytic criticism usually treats characters as real people possessing complex psyches. Psychoanalytic critics approach literary characters as an analyst would treat a patient, searching their dreams, past, and behavior for explanations of their fictional situations. Alternatively, some psychoanalytic critics read characters as mirrors for the audience's psychological fears and desires. Rather than representing realistic psyches then, fictional characters offer us a way to act out psychological dramas of our own in symbolic and often hyperbolic form. The classic example of this would be Freud's reading of Oedipus (and Hamlet, for that matter) as emblematizing every child's fantasy of murdering his father to possess his mother. This form of reading persists today in much Film criticism. The feminist critic Laura Mulvey is considered a pioneer in the field, having rejuvenated psychoanalytic criticism by giving it a political spin. Through the first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, who can both participate in Gatsby's dream of 1. 417 having Daisy's love and criticize it, Fitzgerald establishes distance from material about which he felt passionately, based loosely as it was on Fitzgerald's rejection by the wealthy Chicago debutante, Ginevra King.
Approximate Word count = 1051
Approximate Pages = 4.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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