UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

  

 

 

 

 

ISTANBUL UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF LETTERS

DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND LITERATURE

 

BLUE NOTES AND BROKEN DREAMS:

IMPROVISATION, ILLUSION, AND LONGING THROUGH JAZZ IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY

 

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

 

By: Ayça Söylemez

Supervisor: Berna Artan

May 2025

 

 

 

Blue Notes and Broken Dreams: Improvisation, Illusion, and Longing Through Jazz in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

 

Table of Contents

-       Introduction………………………………………………..………………………………2

-       Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………..3

Historical and Cultural Context……………………………………………………...……3

-       Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………….5

Jazz as a Narrative and Thematic Motif…………………………………………………..5

2.1  Improvisation, Rhythm, and Chronology……………………………………………..5

2.2  Polyphonic Perspectives………………………………………………………………6

2.3   Musical Imagery: Daisy’s Voice and Gatsby’s Parties……………………………….7

2.4  The Blue Note of Melancholy: Mood, Love, and Loss……………………………….8

-       Chapter 3…………………………………………………………………………………..8

Gatsby’s Love as Improvisation and Illusion…………………………………..…………8

3.1  Improvisation in Love: Fluidity and Spontaneity……………………………………..9

3.2  Illusion and Idealization: The Dream Constructed……………………………………9

3.3  Parties, Reunions, and the Plaza Hotel………………………………………………10

3.4  Cultural Reflection: Jazz and the American Dream…………………………………11

-       Chapter 4…………………………………………………………………………………12

Songs of the Jazz Age, Real Music in The Great Gatsby………………………………12

4.1  “The Sheik of Araby”: Exotic Romance and Possession…………………………….13

4.2  “The Love Nest”: Domestic Bliss and Irony…………………………...……………13

4.3  “Ain’t We Got Fun”: Class Satire and Resignation………………………………...14

4.4  “Beale Street Blues” and the Jazz Age Backdrop……………………………………15

4.5  Contextualizing the Songs: Commentary and Fitzgerald’s Vision…………………16

-       Chapter 5…………………………………………………………………………………17

Critical Reception and Personal Interpretation…………………………………………17

5.1  Early and Mid-Century Responses…………………………………………………17

5.2  Recent Criticism: Jazz, Illusion, and Cultural Context………………………………17

-       Conclusion: The Last “Note”……………………………………………………………19

-       Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...21

 

 

 

 

Blue Notes and Broken Dreams: Improvisation, Illusion, and Longing in Fitzgerald’s

The Great Gatsby

 

Introduction

Set against the intoxicating flourish of the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby stands as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork of the Jazz Age. The novel vividly conjures the era’s hedonism, booming economy, and undercurrents of disillusionment, a society of flappers and speakeasies moving to the syncopated rhythms of jazz. Fitzgerald himself became synonymous with this vibrant decade: he was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed the Jazz Age, and he even popularized that label in his own time. In other words, Gatsby and its author capture an America enchanted by music; a period of miracles, art, excess in which jazz was the soundtrack of both ecstasy and melancholy.

In The Great Gatsby, music and longing are inseparable: Nick Carraway’s narration is infused with jazz inflected imagery, and Fitzgerald frames love itself as a kind of improvisational performance. For example, Daisy’s very voice is likened to a fading melody: Nick observes it has “an arrangement of notes that will never be played again” (Fitzgerald 12), evoking jazz’s sense of one time wonder. Later, Nick describes Daisy’s world as “redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes” (Fitzgerald 151). These images literally score Daisy’s presence with music, suggesting that romantic desire in Gatsby is itself an improvised, ephemeral tune. Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy, in turn, is a hopeful improvisation built on illusion; he believes he can recreate a lost refrain with her, even though the novel reminds us that such a tune can never truly be replayed.

Jazz’s unpredictability and fleetingness mirror the fragility of Gatsby’s dreams. It can be noted that Fitzgerald portrayed abundant scenes of music in the novel and treats sound not just as background but as an atmospheric force shaping the story. Indeed, I find that in Gatsby, jazz music played a leading role on people’s daily life, the novel’s narrative and emotional pulse operates like a musical score. Scenes swell in crescendos (Gatsby’s parties, Gatsby’s hopes) and then fall silent or fade away, reflecting how his aspirations build to a climax and then dissolve. At one moment, a band on Gatsby’s lawn literally wailed the hopeless comment of the “Beale Street Blues” all night, a passage that underscores how jazz’s mournful cries echo the novel’s own unfulfilled longing. In this way, the rhythms and cadences of jazz permeate the story, so that Gatsby’s enormous dreams are as transitory and poignant as a single blue note.

My own connection to this story deepens its resonance. Growing up with jazz and Fitzgerald on my bookshelf, I have long felt the novel’s syncopated tensions as a personal refrain. Gatsby’s world of longing and excess has haunted my imagination ever since I first heard a lonely trumpet solo or read Nick’s lyrical narration. This personal engagement, my love of jazz’s blue notes and Fitzgerald’s poetic rhythms, drives my analysis. It allows me to approach the subject not only as a scholar dissecting literary technique but as a listener who still hears Gatsby’s dreams in the music between the bars, giving this thesis a voice both analytical and intimate.

Chapter 1

Historical and Cultural Context

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously dubbed the 1920s the Jazz Age, a term he helped popularize. In his retrospective 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald would later describe that decade as “an age of miracles, art, excess, and satire”. The novel The Great Gatsby is set in 1922 (just four years after the armistice) and it reflects a society transformed by the First World War. As a history of the era reminds us, America emerged from World War I as the preeminent world power, its economy booming through the 1920s with rising incomes, expanding industry, and a stock market frenzy. Newly confident, Americans embraced a hedonistic culture of jazz, nightclubs, and conspicuous consumption. Thus, the Roaring Twenties were an age of miracles indeed; one in which technology, music, and money converged to create an intoxicating social whirlwind.

Jazz music provided the very soundtrack of this era. In 1920s cities, jazz was everywhere, in clubs, on the radio, even in cartoons, and it came to symbolize the energy and contradictions of the times. Theater scholar David Savran has argued that for many Americans jazz was everything: a weltanschauung, a personal identity, a metaphysics, a mode of sociality,an entire way of being. Its improvised rhythms and syncopations captured both the exhilaration and the anxieties of modern life. Jazz fused seemingly contrary impulses: It rejected stodgy classical conventions even as it appealed across class and color lines. In Gatsby, as in real life, jazz is constant background music, a symbol of freedom and spontaneity even as it hints at underlying dissonance. (As Fitzgerald quipped, only after 1920 did the veil finally fall, the Jazz Age was in flower.)

The 1920s also saw profound social change, especially for women. With the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women won the vote and stepped more boldly into public life. Younger women adopted a new, liberated image as “flappers,” bobbing their hair, smoking, dancing the Charleston, and flaunting sexual freedom. These flappers came to be seen as the first generation of independent American women, pushing boundaries in work, fashion, and morality. Fitzgerald himself helped fashion this image: The press called him “The Creator of the Flapper” after This Side of Paradise (1920), and his stories for the “Saturday Evening Post” (later collected in “Flappers and Philosophers”) brought the jazz age lifestyle into American homes. Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott’s wife, became an archetypal flapper in the public eye, a lively symbol of the new woman’s exuberance. In short, gender roles were being redefined: women’s suffrage, birth control advocacy, and urban nightlife all encouraged a spirit of independence that irreversibly changed society.

Another defining feature of the era was Prohibition, the 1920 ban on alcohol, which inadvertently fueled criminal bootlegging and a new class of millionaires. Speakeasies proliferated in every city, and young people swarmed to underground bars for jazz, dancing, and illegal cocktails. Fitzgerald’s world (the one in which Gatsby throws his lavish, booze-soaked parties) was in large part a product of Prohibition. As scholar Sarah Churchwell notes, “the whole plot (of The Great Gatsby) is really driven by Prohibition in an important way. The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight is because Prohibition created a black market.” Out of this black market arose a new social order. Suddenly money came fast and from dubious means, allowing “upstart” bootleggers to break into New York high society overnight. The established rich (embodied by Tom and Daisy Buchanan) watched uneasily as Gatsby’s “new money” shattered old class barriers. Indeed, one historian observes that Prohibition’s unintended consequences included accelerated upward mobility, an army of nouveau riche who splashed their newfound wealth in ways that scandalized traditional elites. In Gatsby’s world, Daisy’s voice is “full of money” (Fitzgerald 120), precisely because America had become obsessed with luxury and status during these years.

The economic prosperity of the 1920s was accompanied by a consumer revolution. Mass production and easy credit made modern conveniences and fashionable goods accessible to many Americans. New technologies (automobiles, radio, electric vacuums, ready-made clothing) transformed daily life. On that time period, it was noted that by decade’s end Americans were overwhelmed by the rise of a modern consumer culture. For example, radios, phonographs, and silent film stars became national obsessions, while Henry Ford’s moving assembly line put a car in nearly every driveway. Urbanites drank fresh orange juice year round and followed gossip columns beneath neon billboards, small miracles that only a few decades earlier would have seemed impossible. This wholesale embrace of material goods fed the era’s optimism but also its sense of instability: People enthusiastically bought the American Dream, even if it turned out to be more myth than reality.

World War I casts a long shadow over this scene. Both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are veterans of the Great War, a fact that inaugurates Gatsby’s reinvention from an Midwestern “nobody” into a fabulously rich Long Island socialite. The war left Europe devastated and Americans wealthy, and it also left many young people feeling disoriented. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries reached postwar life with both cynicism and creativity. In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” he recalls that the events of 1919 (labor strikes, political scandals, race riots) “left us cynical rather than revolutionary,” as the idealism of wartime gave way to a hedonistic retreat. The generation that had fought or awaited peace was eager to decide on pleasure, as Fitzgerald wrote, an America isolated during the European War that now threw off old restraints and set about reinventing itself. This mix of disillusionment and exuberance is felt in Gatsby: The characters’ frantic partying and reckless behavior can be seen as compensation for war’s losses, even as their romantic longings betray a desperate yearning for something lost.

Finally, F. Scott Fitzgerald himself personified the age’s contradictions. By the mid 1920s he was already famous as the chronicler of youth and modernity. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, crowned his reputation, but decades earlier he had written stories about jazz, flappers, and the discontents of the nouveau riche. He lived and breathed the Jazz Age: Joining the army (only to see the Armistice in 1918), marrying Zelda Sayre (the quintessential flapper) in 1920, and moving in circles of wealth and intoxication in both New York and Paris. Fitzgerald sometimes tongue in cheek referred to himself as the Jazz Age author; even the flapper mythos was partly his own creation, as the press dubbed him “The Creator of the Flapper” based on his early work. His essays and letters reflect a keen awareness of his historical moment. He pointedly remarked that 1920 was the year the veil finally fell and the era’s wildness was in flower, an image that encapsulates both the freedom and the transience of the time.

Together, these social and historical forces created the charged emotional backdrop of The Great Gatsby. Jazz’s improvisational spirit mirrors the novel’s loose, impressionistic narrative and the characters’ spontaneous bursts of hope and desire. The era’s consumerism and class upheaval illuminate Gatsby’s illusory dream of recapturing the past and remaking himself, a dream built as much on fantasy as on fortune. Gender roles in flux help explain the novel’s tense marriages and restless courtships: Daisy is alternately emancipated and trapped, embodying the decade’s mix of liberation and constraint. In these ways, the Jazz Age’s music, politics, and social moods infuse the novel’s atmosphere. They lay the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s themes of improvisation (in life as in jazz), longing (for an idealized love or time), and illusion (the belief that a party can last forever or a past love be relived). Thus Chapter One has traced how the 1920s (from war’s aftermath to speakeasy scandals, from flapper frolics to stock-market frenzy) shaped the luminous, tragic world of The Great Gatsby.

 

Chapter 2

Jazz as a Narrative and Thematic Motif

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is not merely set in the Jazz Age, its narrative pulse and imagery itself evoke jazz music. The novel’s structure often unfolds like an improvisation: Crucial details arrive unexpectedly, off the main beat, and the chronology bends as memory and present intertwine. As observed, Fitzgerald employs a kind of narrative syncopation, slipping key information on the off-beat to the reader’s ear. In this way, Gatsby’s story unfolds with the same restless energy and spontaneity of a jazz solo. Even the tenor of Daisy’s voice (“low, thrilling,” as I put it) acts like a musical refrain that anchors the romantic narrative theme. Yet beneath these bright notes lie blue notes of longing and loss: As Fitzgerald’s world swirls in “yellow cocktail music,” (Fitzgerald 42) each burst of laughter and dancing is shadowed by melancholy. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald constantly draws on jazz elements (improvisation, syncopation, polyphony, and the somber tonalities of the blues) to shape his storytelling.

2.1: Improvisation, Rhythm, and Chronology

Nick Carraway’s narration often skips ahead and then circles back in a manner that feels spontaneously improvised. The chronological unfolding of events is not strictly linear but is punctuated by flashbacks and ellipses, as Gatsby’s past and the characters’ memories intrude into the present. Analyses of Gatsby’s era note that the twenties were an hour of endless possibilities reminiscent of a jazz improvisation, and indeed, Gatsby’s narrative mirrors this: Scenes segue suddenly from one setting to another, and revelatory details (like Jordan’s tacit admission about Daisy) arrive off-beat. In the climactic chapter, for example, Nick overhears Daisy’s indiscreet voice from upstairs and begins, “She’s got an indiscreet voice,” (Fitzgerald 120) only to have Gatsby interject, “Her voice is full of money.” (Fitzgerald 120) This revelation is slipped casually into conversation, off-center in the scene, yet it reshapes our understanding of Daisy’s allure. Such moments exemplify Fitzgerald’s syncopated pacing: ınformation is delivered subtly, not with a trumpet fanfare, but like a muted horn sounding under the main melody (much as Tom Phillips describes Fitzgerald’s method). In a similar vein, Fitzgerald sometimes moves abruptly from the intoxicated euphoria of a party to the stillness of dawn or the shock of violence, mimicking the tempo shifts of a jazz composition. The ebullient and restless psychology of the Jazz Age is embodied by Fitzgerald’s writing approach towards setting and chronology, so that time itself seems elastic and improvisational, bending to the characters’ emotions rather than following a strict order.

This improvisational rhythm extends to the novel’s tone. Bright, vivacious scenes (for example, Gatsby’s sparkling summer parties) can shift without warning into quiet reverie or foreboding gloom. After a night of raucous celebration, Nick might suddenly recall a solemn detail or foreshadow tragedy, as if the music has turned from a fast swing tune into a slow, mournful blues. In this way, Fitzgerald’s pacing and temporal structure reflect jazz’s syncopation: notes (or narrative beats) arrive in unexpected places, and what seems like casual background detail can later resolve into a motif. Through these techniques, the novel’s narrative “beat” itself feels jazz-like; irregular, shifting, and full of subtle echoes.

2.2: Polyphonic Perspectives

Jazz is inherently polyphonic, with multiple instruments weaving independent lines into a harmonious whole. Likewise, Gatsby is rich in overlapping voices and social registers. Though Nick Carraway serves as the single narrator, the novel incorporates a chorus of character perspectives and “voices”: The patrician West Egg elite, the newly rich denizens of East Egg, the rowdy partygoers, and even the forlorn figures in the Valley of Ashes. These disparate voices and dialects mingle in the text much as instruments do in a jazz ensemble. At Gatsby’s parties, for example, Fitzgerald describes an “opera of voices” (Fitzgerald 42) that suddenly “pitches a key higher,” (Fitzgerald 42) as throngs of revelers stream in and out. The result is a scene of layered sound: Laughter, conversation, and music overlap fluidly. The groups of guests “swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath,” (Fitzgerald 42) creating a “sea-change of faces and voices” (Fitzgerald 42) under the shifting lights. This imagery of constant movement and overlapping chatter evokes the collective improvisation of a jazz band, where each part contributes to the vibrant whole.

Moreover, the characters themselves often speak in a way that carries traces of musical flow. Jordan Baker’s laconic, trailing speech, Myrtle Wilson’s urgent shrieks, Tom Buchanan’s brusque interruptions; together they create a polyglossia that underlines the heterogeneity of the Jazz Age society. Fitzgerald’s prose does not present one unified style, but rather incorporates these varied registers, enriching the texture. This heteroglossia echoes Bakhtin’s notion of the novel as a “super-genre” containing multiple voices; here the effect resembles polyphony or counterpoint. Even the narrative occasionally suggests multiple storylines at once (Gatsby’s history contrasted with the Buchanans’ marital strife, or the contrast between East Egg finery and West Egg exuberance) much as jazz can layer a foreground melody over a wandering bass line. In all of these ways, the polyphonic quality of jazz music is mirrored in the novel’s narrative layers, with each character’s voice contributing to the overall “sound” of the story.

2.3: Musical Imagery: Daisy’s Voice and Gatsby’s Parties

Fitzgerald famously infuses his prose with musical imagery, treating sound and rhythm as tangible elements of the novel’s atmosphere. The most overt example is Daisy Buchanan’s voice, which becomes a leitmotif of the narrative. Gatsby first hears Daisy call across the lawn, and later Nick notes that her tone carries an almost tangible quality. In one key passage Nick marvels, “Her voice is full of money,” (Fitzgerald 120) immediately understanding Gatsby’s intuition. He reflects that this “inexhaustible charm” of her voice “rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”(Fitzgerald 120). Here Daisy’s speech is not just described as attractive; it is explicitly musical. The comparison to cymbals (percussion instruments that punctuate jazz rhythms) suggests that Daisy’s presence rings out like a note above the band. The “jingle” evokes both the tinkle of currency and the clear tone of bells, linking wealth to melody. Thus, Daisy’s voice operates as a seductive soundtrack: To Gatsby it sounds like riches and glamour, while to the reader it rings like a fragile, shimmering song. Phillips even notes that Daisy’s voice holds the reader’s attention on the romantic melody of the story, while Fitzgerald “in the background, off the beat, constructs and deconstructs a jazz history of the world.”

Gatsby’s parties themselves are second only to Daisy in their musical emphasis. Fitzgerald almost never shows the band playing (he rarely names songs) but he evokes music in lush, visual terms. In Chapter Three, as night falls Nick observes that “the lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.” (Fitzgerald 42). This synesthetic line is deeply evocative: The music is “yellow,” a warm, luminous color; voices become an “opera” rising in pitch; and light intensifies. The imagery is both auditory and visual, blending senses like a musical composition blends notes. Other scenes continue this theme: At Gatsby’s mansion men and girls “came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” (Fitzgerald 41) as though bathed in the ambient glow of a jazzy night. The parties are described through fragments of sound and color; laughter spilling minute by minute, drinks poured out at a cheerful word, bodies gliding through crowds as if in dance. In each case, Fitzgerald uses musical terms (“opera,” “laughter spilled with prodigality”) to make the reader hear the scene.

At the same time, the musical atmosphere often underscores the deeper currents of the story. The same passage that depicts vibrant music also conveys an inherent transience: People are wanderers who “glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices,” (Fitzgerald 42). The party-goers are likened to a fluid, interchangeable chorus, suggesting both the excitement and the superficiality of their milieu. Even as the orchestra plays, Nick’s narrative hints at an undercurrent of decay and repetition. In this way, Gatsby’s parties become a kind of jazz background track: Exuberant on the surface, but with rhythms and overtones that later feel hollow. As Niranjan Goswami observes, “The melancholy tone of jazz music can best be heard in Gatsby’s parties,” beneath the opulent consumerism, violent drinking and dispirited humanity. Indeed, Gatsby’s revelries, like a raucous swing tune, eventually give way to stillness and emptiness when the band stops playing and guests slip away. Through musical imagery the novel thus ties Gatsby’s glitzy world to the emotional truths of its characters: Daisy’s voice lures Gatsby like a wistful jazz melody, and the glitter of the dance floor underscores his illusory dream.

2.4: The Blue Note of Melancholy: Mood, Love, and Loss

If jazz is improvisational and syncopated, it is also famously bittersweet, the “blue notes” of sorrow that haunt many jazz standards. The Great Gatsby is suffused with this bittersweet mood. Joyous moments frequently slide into melancholy as Fitzgerald shifts the tone like a musician changing key. Early summer parties blaze with color and sound, but by autumn those same scenes are tinged with dampness and introspection. After Myrtle Wilson’s death, for example, the revelry abruptly ends and an oppressive silence falls: Nick notes that on the following Sunday even Gatsby was not there, as if even the music had faltered. The narrative’s lyricism grows elegiac. In the novel’s final image Nick gazes at the green light across the water and imagines Gatsby reaching out to it through time, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” (Fitzgerald 180) The line reads like the final fading chords of a blues ballad: Mournful, beautiful, and ultimately unfulfilled.

Scholars have noted this poignancy. Fitzgerald was, as Goswami writes, “Not only a representative of the Jazz Age but became the Age,” yet he also understood its disillusionment. The novel’s bright exterior gradually reveals how hollow the glamour is: Gatsby’s dazzling parties were, in his mind, merely a means to a tragic end. In this sense, the jazz motifs themselves mirror the emotional arc of the story. Just as a jazz piece might alternate between major-key exuberance and minor-key blues, Gatsby alternates between scenes of gaiety (a clarion trumpet blast) and moments of heartbreak (a plaintive, slow saxophone cry). Fitzgerald even associates specific melodic connotations with characters: Daisy’s voice, rich and high, symbolizes wealth and desirability, but it also suggests a treble call that recedes from Gatsby’s reach. Gatsby’s own longing becomes a kind of blues riff on lost time and love. As I put it, the “noise” of the party (the jazz age excess) is ultimately revealed as only of decadence until the profound emotional significance of Gatsby’s dream comes into focus.

The Great Gatsby consistently casts jazz as both form and symbol. The novel’s rhythm and structure reflect jazz’s improvisation and syncopation; its ensemble of characters creates a literary polyphony; and its images of music and sound capture the emotional coloring of its themes. Through parties and voices Fitzgerald composes a narrative that echoes the era’s music: vibrant and innovative on the surface, yet threaded through with the bittersweet nostalgia of unrequited love and vanished dreams. In doing so, the jazz motif deepens our understanding of the novel’s core impulses (improvisation of identity, allure of illusion, and the melancholy truth beneath the glamour) ensuring that Fitzgerald’s prose itself seems to play like a jazz melody on the page.

 

Chapter 3

Gatsby’s Love as Improvisation and Illusion

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is often hailed as the quintessential American novel of longing and unfulfilled desire, and nowhere is this more evident than in Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy Buchanan. Much like the improvisational spirit of jazz that dominates the cultural landscape of the 1920s, Gatsby’s romantic pursuit is fluid, spontaneous, and constructed on illusion. His love for Daisy is not grounded in the tangible but is instead composed of idealization and memory, shaped by Gatsby’s relentless improvisation of their shared past. In many ways, his pursuit mirrors a jazz composition: It is lyrical, expressive, and fleeting, but always just beyond grasp. Through his portrayal of Gatsby’s longing, Fitzgerald crafts a narrative that reflects the ephemerality of jazz music, where beauty is often synonymous with transience and the line between reality and fantasy blurs into musical rhythm.

3.1: Improvisation in Love: Fluidity and Spontaneity

One of the defining characteristics of jazz is its improvisational quality; a spontaneous creation in the moment, responsive and unrehearsed. Gatsby’s love for Daisy is marked by this same fluidity. His entire life is an elaborate improvisation aimed at winning her back, from his reinvention as a wealthy socialite to the grandiose parties he throws every weekend in the hope that she might wander in. Much like a jazz musician riffing off a theme, Gatsby continuously improvises his life’s narrative, layering fantasy upon fantasy until it becomes impossible to distinguish performance from reality.

The most striking example of this occurs during Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy at Nick Carraway’s cottage. Gatsby’s nervousness and rehearsed spontaneity are reminiscent of a jazz performer anxiously awaiting the first note. When Daisy arrives, Gatsby initially panics, almost abandoning the performance he had meticulously constructed. Nick describes him as “pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets,” (Fitzgerald 86). Yet, as the conversation progresses, Gatsby finds his rhythm, his confidence returning in bursts, mirroring the dynamic rise and fall of a jazz solo.

Gatsby’s orchestration of his life around Daisy, like the jazz musicians of the era, is predicated on a kind of artistic spontaneity. He buys his mansion with the express purpose of being near her, throws lavish parties with the unspoken hope that she will attend, and designs every aspect of his persona to fit an idealized version of himself that he believes Daisy desires. Each of these choices is a note in his performance, an impromptu decision designed to keep the music of their romance alive, even if it means continually altering the tune.

3.2: Illusion and Idealization: The Dream Constructed

In jazz, improvisation is often built upon a familiar melody, something that the artist embellishes and reinvents as the piece unfolds. Gatsby’s idealization of Daisy functions in much the same way. His version of Daisy is not based on the woman she is but rather on the memory of a melody, an idealized note that he has carried with him since their first encounter. Fitzgerald captures this perfectly when Gatsby confesses to Nick that his love for Daisy was like “the following of a grail,” (Fitzgerald 149). For Gatsby, Daisy is less a person and more a symbol of everything he desires: Wealth, status, and a return to the past. His obsession with repeating the past, famously declaring, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” (Fitzgerald 110), illustrates the extent of his illusion. Much like a jazz riff that circles back to its root melody, Gatsby attempts to improvise his life into a narrative where Daisy remains suspended in time, unchanging and perfect.

This illusion reaches its height during Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion. Nick reflects that “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams-not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.” (Fitzgerald 96). Gatsby’s “creative passion” (Fitzgerald 96) resembles the intensity of a jazz solo: Dazzling, unpredictable, and entirely self composed. The line “no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart,” (Fitzgerald 96) reveals that Gatsby’s dream was never really about Daisy; it was about the fantasy he built, note by note, in isolation. Like a musician rehearsing an impossible melody, he has created a version of love too elaborate to exist in real time.

Fitzgerald uses musical imagery to underscore this fantasy. Daisy’s voice is famously described as “full of money,” shimmering with the promise of wealth and allure (Fitzgerald 120). This metaphorical language is not coincidental; it links Daisy’s very presence to jazz age opulence, marking her as the embodiment of Gatsby’s dreams. Like a refrain in a jazz standard, her voice recurs throughout the narrative, each time evoking Gatsby’s longing and nostalgia. But as Fitzgerald subtly hints, this melody is one that only Gatsby can hear; to everyone else, Daisy’s charm is superficial, her allure empty of substance. The illusion is Gatsby’s alone, an internal performance sustained by his longing.

3.3: Parties, Reunions, and the Plaza Hotel

Three key scenes in the novel capture the improvisational and illusory nature of Gatsby’s love: His extravagant parties, the reunion with Daisy, and the climactic argument at the Plaza Hotel.

The Parties

Gatsby’s parties are spectacles of improvisation, chaotic and unstructured, mirroring jazz’s spontaneous nature. Fitzgerald describes them as “yellow cocktail music” (Fitzgerald 42) that seems to play without end, a perpetual performance aimed at drawing Daisy back into Gatsby’s life. Nick captures the ecstatic rise of the scene: “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.” (Fitzgerald 42). As Nick observes, “Men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” (Fitzgerald 41), evoking the weightless, swirling motion of jazz improvisation; beautiful, chaotic, and quickly gone. The music, the lights, and the unceasing flow of alcohol are orchestrated in an endless riff, a live jazz composition that Gatsby hopes will crescendo with Daisy’s arrival. Yet, like jazz, the parties are transient; they exist only in the moment, vanishing without trace as the dawn arrives, symbolizing the fragility of Gatsby’s dream.

The Reunion at Nick’s House

Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy is scripted and yet improvised. He has meticulously planned every detail, yet when the moment arrives, the spontaneity of human emotion disrupts his performance. His nervousness, the awkward silences, and the sudden bursts of emotion are Fitzgerald’s way of introducing jazz-like unpredictability into their encounter. The rhythm of their dialogue mirrors the tempo of jazz; hesitant at first, then fluid and rapid as they reconnect.

Their moment of emotional intimacy unfolds with a quiet intensity. “They were sitting at either end of the couch, looking at each other as if some question had been asked, or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears, and when I came in she jumped up and began to wipe it with her handkerchief before a mirror.” (Fitzgerald 89). This fragile moment captures the improvisational vulnerability of jazz: An unscripted interlude where reality begins to overtake performance. Daisy’s tears, like a blue note breaking through a bright melody, suggest that the emotional toll of Gatsby’s dream is already being felt. The illusion is momentarily shared, but also visibly starting to dissolve.

The Plaza Hotel Argument

The illusion finally unravels during the climactic confrontation between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan at the Plaza Hotel. Here, Gatsby’s improvisation collapses under the weight of reality. He tries to force the moment into harmony, declaring to Tom, “Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She never loved you. She loves me!” (Fitzgerald 130). This isn’t a statement; it is a musical cue, demanding that Daisy echo the melody he’s composed in his mind over the years. But Daisy cannot keep up with his rhythm.

Her voice, once Gatsby’s symbol of wealth and longing, wavers and cracks. “Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now-isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past” (Fitzgerald 133). Instead of delivering Gatsby’s desired crescendo, Daisy sings a different tune; ambivalent, human, and off-key. In this moment, her emotional improvisation disrupts Gatsby’s arrangement. His idealized score demands purity; she offers complexity.

Gatsby makes one final attempt to salvage the performance, clinging to the narrative he has rehearsed: “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!” (Fitzgerald 131). But by then, the improvisation has already collapsed into dissonance. The chorus is no longer in sync. Daisy, caught between two versions of the past, withdraws. The climactic confrontation, meant to be Gatsby’s triumphant reprise, ends on a jarring and unresolved note. His jazz composition (his life built around Daisy) does not conclude with harmony, but with silence.

3.4: Cultural Reflection: Jazz and the American Dream

Gatsby’s love, like jazz itself, is an American improvisation; a dream of self creation that promises transcendence but often collapses under its own weight. His pursuit of Daisy symbolizes the larger cultural ambition of the Jazz Age: To live in a perpetual crescendo of wealth, beauty, and joy. Yet, as Fitzgerald illustrates, this dream is as fleeting as a saxophone’s cry in the night, momentarily beautiful but ultimately ephemeral.

Jazz’s influence on Gatsby’s conception of love reflects the broader cultural illusions of the 1920s. It is an age that believed in reinvention, that imagined wealth and status could be conjured up from nothing, much as a jazz musician creates melody from silence. As Nick observes, “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” (Fitzgerald 98). Gatsby’s entire persona is an improvisation, a self authored solo composed from desire, memory, and ambition.

In Gatsby’s dream, Daisy is a perfect, unchanging refrain; yet, like a fading jazz standard, the illusion disintegrates under the harsh light of reality. As Gatsby faces the limits of his fantasy, the narrative turns elegiac: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortitously about…” (Fitzgerald 161). This image captures the emotional collapse of the American Dream; a melody that never resolves, a dream that vanishes like a blue note in the night air.

 

Chapter 4

 Songs of the Jazz Age, Real Music in The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald peppers The Great Gatsby with the era’s actual popular tunes to root his fiction in the Jazz Age zeitgeist. The novel abounds in jazz bands and dance-hall music, but most striking are the few named songs (snippets of lyrics) that signal the hopes and ironies of Gatsby’s world. In key scenes, Fitzgerald quotes real 1920s songs, conjuring their cultural resonance. These songs serve as 1920s “soundtrack” to Gatsby’s drama: They reflect the intoxicating optimism of prosperity even as they hint at its hollowness. For example, children singing “The Sheik of Araby” outside Gatsby’s house herald his grand but dangerous dream of possessive love. Later, a plangent piano rendition of “The Love Nest” gives way to Gatsby’s offhand sing-song of “Ain’t We Got Fun”, pairing romantic aspiration with bitter class satire. And in a memory of Daisy’s youth, saxophones wail the old “Beale Street Blues,” underscoring the melancholy beneath her glittering world. Each song is authentically of the 1920s and loaded with thematic freight: together they illustrate how Fitzgerald used real Jazz Age music (and its lyrics) to deepen motifs of love, class, and illusion in the novel.

“The Sheik of Araby” (1921), sung by children in Central Park as Nick and Jordan drive home, its chorus “Your love belongs to me” eerily mirrors Gatsby’s goal of reclaiming Daisy. “The Love Nest” (1920), a sentimental song about a humble lovers’ home “better than a palace with a gilded dome,” played on piano by Gatsby’s boarder to sooth Daisy’s nerves. “Ain’t We Got Fun” (1921), a jaunty foxtrot celebrating carefree survival in hard times, whose refrain “The rich get richer and the poor get children” Gatsby cheerfully croons to Daisy, undercutting the romance with a wry class commentary. “Beale Street Blues” (1917), a blues number (by W.C. Handy) that Fitzgerald invokes indirectly; in Daisy’s Louisville youth, “saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’”, hinting at the sorrow beneath her gilded life. Together, these songs (drawn from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and the African-American blues tradition) anchor Gatsby’s private illusions in the specific culture of 1920s New York. They tie Fitzgerald’s characters to the real Jazz Age around them, even as their lyrics underscore contradictions: For example, how a love nest can outshine a palace, or how fun can mask poverty. In what follows we examine each song’s origin, popularity, and lyrical meaning, and show how Fitzgerald deploys it to illuminate his themes.

4.1: “The Sheik of Araby”: Exotic Romance and Possession

Fitzgerald opens Chapter Four with four bars of “The Sheik of Araby” floating on the summer air:

“I’m the Sheik of Araby. / Your love belongs to me. / At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep.”

This 1921 Tin Pan Alley hit (words by Harry B. Smith and Francis Wheeler, music by Ted Snyder) was itself a riff on Rudolph Valentino’s wildly popular film The Sheik. It became a jazz standard, heard in vaudeville and on dance bands. Fitzgerald uses the children’s chant of its chorus to convey Gatsby’s obsession. As Nick later realizes, Gatsby literally bought his mansion so that Daisy would be just across the bay in other words, so her love would belong to him. The song’s proud, even violent sounding lyric (“Your love belongs to me”) echoes Gatsby’s view of Daisy as something to be claimed. An Owl Eyes footnote points out this note of danger: the song’s verse ends with “soon he will conquer love by fear,” suggesting that Gatsby’s romantic quest harbors a coercive edge. Thus even as the melody feels playful, the words foreshadow a darker truth about Gatsby’s determination.

Historically, “The Sheik of Araby” epitomized 1920s pop exoticism. It was timely: Published in 1921, the year of Valentino’s desert romance, and soon adopted by New Orleans jazz bands as a rollicking standard. Fitzgerald’s readers would have immediately recognized it. By citing a hit song so brashly possessive, the novel winks at its moment. In that twilight scene, Nick calls the chance echo of Daisy’s old wedding vow a strange coincidence but Jordan insists that it was not a coincidence at all. The lyric is Gatsby’s orchestrated cue. In short, “The Sheik of Araby” bridges Gatsby’s personal fantasy and the public imagination of the Jazz Age: An exoticized, hyper-masculine image derived from Hollywood that Gatsby identifies with himself. The very phrasing of the song mirrors Gatsby’s intent to win back Daisy’s love, while also hinting that his mission poses a threat to Daisy. In this way, Fitzgerald uses a contemporary tune both literally (as children’s singing) and thematically, linking Gatsby’s illusion to a piece of real 1920s culture.

4.2: “The Love Nest”: Domestic Bliss and Irony

Later, when Gatsby finally reunites with Daisy, he awkwardly suggests music. Klipspringer the pianist “returned in a few minutes” (Fitzgerald 95) at Gatsby’s call, and after a moment played “The Love Nest”. Written by Otto Harbach and Louis A. Hirsch for the 1920 musical Mary, “The Love Nest” was already a Tin Pan Alley favorite by 1920. Its lyrics extol the charm of a simple, cozy home:

“Just a love nest, cozy and warm / Dream room for two. / Better than a palace with a gilded dome, / Is a love nest you can call home.”

This chorus (about a modest “love nest” being more precious than the grandest mansion) resonates painfully with Gatsby’s own situation. Gatsby owns a literal “palace with a gilded dome” (his opulent mansion), but it has never been home to Daisy. The lyric’s contrast underscores Gatsby’s folly: He built a gaudy house (for ostentation and to impress) instead of building something like the tender “nest” Daisy actually yearned for. In the music room, Klipspringer plays these words as rain falls, transforming Gatsby’s anxiety into a romantic mood. Nick reports quietly: “When Klipspringer had played ‘The Love Nest’ he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.” (Fitzgerald 95). The atmosphere is intimate yet fraught: The song speaks of domestic comfort where some rambler roses twine, even as Gatsby’s dream is still unconsummated.

Culturally, “The Love Nest” was known as an affectionate standard. It became popular enough to be the theme of the Burns and Allen radio show in the 1930s. By 1925, its gentle message about love over materialism would have been familiar. Fitzgerald quotes only its title in the text (through Nick’s narration), but the novelty lies in the lyric’s resonance. The Weebly analysis of Gatsby suggests the song symbolizes Daisy’s indecision, whether to remain in Tom’s rich world or seek a new life with Gatsby. Indeed, as Daisy sits sobbing earlier and now faces this song’s tenderness, Gatsby’s mansion momentarily seems just a potential nest. The song’s very notion (building not for pride but for love) contrasts with Gatsby’s all-show lifestyle. In short, by having Klipspringer play “The Love Nest”, Fitzgerald threads a 1920s popular tune that idealizes the home Daisy loves, heightening the poignancy of Gatsby’s empty display.

4.3: “Ain’t We Got Fun”: Class Satire and Satirical Resignation

As Daisy and Gatsby relax, Gatsby spontaneously sings the refrain of another 1920s hit on the piano. After Klipspringer says he can not play well, Gatsby snaps, “Play!” (Fitzgerald 95) and then himself croons:

“In the morning, / In the evening, / Ain’t we got fun“

And soon following,

“One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer / The rich get richer and the poor get children”

These lines come from the song “Ain’t We Got Fun” (1921) by Richard Whiting, Raymond Egan, and Gus Kahn. A lively foxtrot, it was popular in the early 1920s, recorded by many artists and alluding to the hard times after World War I. Its chorus cheerfully declares that despite poverty,

“not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun?”

 Famously it also popularized the zinger,

“the rich get richer and the poor get children.”

 Fitzgerald’s use of this song at Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion is richly ironic. In context, Gatsby is affluent and Daisy is discontented in wealth; the song’s satirical line “rich get richer” played to Daisy almost taunts her privileged class, while “poor get children” wryly points to her being a poor, unhappy mother in a loveless marriage. Nick observes that as Gatsby sings, “Outside the wind was loud, and excitement was generating on the air.”, suggesting a turning point in Gatsby’s hope.

It is important to note that “Ain’t We Got Fun” is symbolic for the Roaring Twenties in its cavalier attitude toward poverty. Adam Perlmutter points out that this satirical foxtrot speaks to a growing divide between social classes in the Roaring Twenties. Indeed, the lyric’s upbeat melody belies its biting humor about class. In Gatsby’s scene, the song both lightens the mood (suggesting Daisy and Gatsby can yet play) and underscores the novel’s themes. Gatsby has literally become rich, singing “the rich get richer” to a Daisy who once spurned him for being poor. And Daisy, who now has a child with Tom, hears “the poor get children,” a mordant joke at her state. This layering intensifies the novel’s irony: The so called joyous Jazz Age tune is actually a cutting social commentary. Fitzgerald therefore inserts the actual chorus into the text to bring that tension into a private moment. It can be observed that Fitzgerald might have expected readers to catch this bitter humor: The song is very mocking towards Daisy since she had rejected Gatsby due to his poverty, yet here they “ain’t got fun” together in her wealth.

It is fitting that Fitzgerald gives this lyric to Gatsby, the man who has striven to transcend class boundaries. Sung in the rain after years apart, it illustrates Gatsby’s creative passion decking out his love with every feather of fantasy; yet even as Gatsby hopes for a miracle reunion, the song’s words prick his illusion with truth about money and social order. In short, “Ain’t We Got Fun” is both celebration and confession: It showcases the decade’s devil may care spirit even as it winks at the inequality all around, perfectly mirroring Gatsby’s own situation.

4.4: “Beale Street Blues” and the Jazz Age Backdrop

Beyond these foreground songs, Fitzgerald also alludes to the broader soundscape of the era. In Chapter Eight, he famously describes Daisy’s Louisville coming of age amid jazz orchestras and dance nights. “For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.” (Fitzgerald 150-151). In that passage, the actual song named is W.C. Handy’s “Beale Street Blues”  Nick writes: “All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust.” (Fitzgerald 151). Handy’s 1917 piece celebrated a famous Black music scene (Beale Street in Memphis), and its lyrics evoke longing for love “there on Beale Street.” Fitzgerald never prints the lyric, but by invoking it Nick connects Daisy’s jazz age revelry with an older, mournful blues tradition. The visual of “saxophones wailed” suggests that even amid spring break shenanigans, a note of tragedy underlies the gaiety.

This reference underlines a thematic contrast: Daisy’s life may glitter, but under the surface her world is tinged with sorrow. In effect, the joyous context of jazz dancing at the country club is here punctured by the sound of blues. Fitzgerald’s mention of “Beale Street Blues” is one more example of his musical layering: He does not need Daisy to hum the tune, because the phrase alone conjures the era’s cultural crossroads. He thereby acknowledges how jazz and blues were inseparable in the popular consciousness. As Gabrielle Bellot observes, the Jazz Age was an age of excess and an age of satire, in which the music (“jazz, so frequently alluded to in his own writing”) became shorthand for the decade. By weaving in even a single title like “Beale Street Blues,” Fitzgerald signals that Gatsby’s story takes place within that soundtrack of “new tunes.” The ghostly echoes of blues serve as a counterpoint to the novel’s exuberance, much as “Ain’t We Got Fun” undercuts its dance-band rhythm with class commentary.

Other unnamed musical references further color the scene: Gatsby’s legendary parties ring with banjos, saxophones, and novel compositions (the fictional “Tostoff’s Jazz History” in one draft). Critics note that Fitzgerald’s own life intersected with contemporary music (he befriended composer George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue debuted in 1924). Though these facts lie outside the text, one can see Fitzgerald alluding musically: The Great Gatsby is literally full of the era’s tunes. Even the electric phonographs and jazz orchestras at West Egg evoke a world where improvisation and spontaneity are prized, just as Gatsby improvises a life of illusion. The novel’s characters are constantly surrounded by music: It sets the mood at Gatsby’s lawn and New York speakeasies, and it inflects Daisy’s memories.

4.5: Contextualizing the Songs: Contemporary Commentary and Fitzgerald’s Vision

Fitzgerald’s deployment of real songs did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries. Modern readers benefit from understanding these tunes as critics did at the time. For instance, George Orwell (writing about the 1920s) cited “Ain’t We Got Fun” as emblematic of working class sentiment after WWI; the refrain “the rich get richer”, Orwell warned, could make people conclude that the song revealed a certain fatalism about poverty. In Gatsby, that fatalism is echoed: Daisy hears the lyric about rich and poor just after stormy doubts have cleared.

Fitzgerald himself recognized music’s role in defining the era. He famously termed the 1920s the Jazz Age, writing later that the decade was an age of miracles, of excess, and of satire, characterized above all by the jazz music he so often mentioned. In “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) Fitzgerald explained that the period defied precise definition but that the jazz music was its hallmark. In Gatsby, he realizes this by letting jazz themes saturate the text: The songs of the day, the throb of horns, and even the phonograph soundscape all signal how music creates atmosphere. Fellow musicians of the time (jazz bandleaders, singers and Tin Pan Alley composers) would have recognized their work immortalized in Fitzgerald’s pages. “The Ukulele Magazine” notes that the line “rich get richer, poor get poorer” was practically coined by “Ain’t We Got Fun”, making Fitzgerald’s reference a direct commentary on his own social milieu. And critics have pointed out that the lyrics of “The Sheik of Araby” (particularly its climactic “conquer love by fear”) cast Gatsby’s quest in a quasi-Orientalist light, as if he were a desert prince chasing an unattainable bride. All of this shows that Fitzgerald meant his songs to be read on both planes, as contemporary entertainment and as narrative symbol.

Thus, the inclusion of “The Sheik of Araby”, “The Love Nest”, “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “Beale Street Blues” does more than add historical color. Each tune amplifies a thread in the novel: Romantic fantasy, yearning for home, class irony, and underlying sorrow, respectively. By analyzing their background and lyrics, we see how Fitzgerald used authentic Jazz Age music to mirror his characters’ inner worlds. The upbeat rhythms and seductive melodies of the Roaring Twenties are thus cast against the broken dreams behind the parties. As Nick observes in the finale, Daisy and Gatsby become two voices in “intense life”; but it is Gatsby’s own “deathless song,” (Fitzgerald 96) namely Daisy’s voice, that ultimately fixes him to reality. In this chapter, real period songs appear as both literal and symbolic “blue notes” in Gatsby’s score; notes of desire and irony that define the improvisational, illusion-laden Jazz Age he inhabits.

 

 

Chapter 5

Critical Reception and Personal Interpretation

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become a cornerstone of American literature, though its path to recognition was neither immediate nor linear. The novel’s initial reception was modest; while some contemporary reviewers praised its style and subtlety, others found it underwhelming or even puzzling. Over time, however, critical perspectives evolved, and Gatsby came to be viewed as one of the most insightful examinations of modern identity, longing, and illusion; especially in the context of the American Dream. In more recent decades, scholars have increasingly turned to The Great Gatsby’s soundscape: The role of music, rhythm, voice, and atmosphere in shaping its emotional world. This critical conversation has laid the foundation for the ideas explored in this thesis, yet I also find that Gatsby’s musicality, and particularly his longing through jazz-like improvisation, can be read with even more emotional depth than most criticism allows.

5.1: Early and Mid-Century Responses: Form, Idealism, and the Dream

One of the earliest major critics to elevate Gatsby’s literary stature was Lionel Trilling, who, in the 1940s, characterized Gatsby as “a figure of moral beauty” and emphasized his incorruptible dream. Trilling argued that Gatsby’s heightened sensitivity to the promises of life made him a uniquely American tragic hero-naive, doomed, but somehow beautiful in failure. He praised Fitzgerald’s noble prose and called the novel a work of art so thoroughly realized that we lose all sense of effort in it. Trilling’s reading cast Gatsby as an emblem of American idealism, echoing Fitzgerald’s own suggestion that Gatsby was a man who believed in the green light.

This moral and symbolic interpretation shaped much of the mid-century canonization of the novel. Gatsby became not merely a romantic or a criminal, but the embodiment of the American spirit: Both its yearning and its blindness. And while this remains a dominant view, it leaves out, I think, the rich emotional improvisation that makes Gatsby’s dream feel so alive. For me, Gatsby is not simply the victim of a false ideal, he is also an artist of longing, someone who turns his entire life into an aesthetic performance. That aspect deserves greater attention.

5.2: Recent Criticism: Jazz, Illusion, and Cultural Context

In the 21st century, critics have returned to Fitzgerald’s cultural moment to unpack the aesthetic world of The Great Gatsby, especially its connection to music. Sarah Churchwell, in her book “Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby”, emphasizes how Fitzgerald embedded popular culture (headlines, films, slang, and music) into the novel’s structure. She argues that the novel is orchestrated like a piece of music, full of sonic texture and rhythm, and suggests that Gatsby’s longing is expressed not only through language but through atmospheric sound: Parties, phonographs, jazz, and silence. Churchwell’s analysis makes it clear that Fitzgerald used the sonic environment of the 1920s as much as its social one to craft Gatsby’s emotional world.

Andrew Delbanco, in his critical essay “The Connoisseur of Desire,” also turns to Fitzgerald’s stylistic power. He notes that the novel’s great subject is anticipation, that feeling of always yearning for something that never fully arrives. He writes that “Anticipation is never more alive than in Gatsby,” and highlights how Fitzgerald sustains a mood of restless desire throughout. While Delbanco does not explicitly use the language of music, his focus on rhythm, delay, and emotional build-up aligns perfectly with a jazz inflected reading.

To me, both Churchwell and Delbanco approach something vital about the novel: Its form reflects its feelings. The way Fitzgerald arranges sentences (long, winding, breathless) often mimics a jazz solo, full of suspended tension and unresolved phrases. Gatsby’s love for Daisy, too, is like a musical refrain: He hears it over and over, embellishing it, never quite letting it end.

What I hope to contribute through this thesis is a closer linking of Gatsby’s romantic fantasy to the cultural logic of jazz; not just as an era or backdrop, but as a mode of feeling and expression. Jazz, in its purest form, is about improvisation, about shaping beauty in real time, without a blueprint. That’s what Gatsby does. He does not pursue Daisy methodically or logically; he feels his way toward her, building a dream out of scattered memories, shimmering fragments of the past, and theatrical gestures. Just as a jazz musician returns to a single melodic line and varies it, Gatsby keeps coming back to Daisy, changing the story, hoping to make it sing.

This improvisation is not merely narrative, it is emotional. It explains why Gatsby is never quite still, never truly present. Like a musician anticipating the next beat, he lives in a state of “about to be”. He believes that with enough rhythm, beauty, and timing, the world will finally align. But it never does. And that is the tragedy. Gatsby is less a fool than a performer who cannot stop playing, even when the stage is empty.

One can read The Great Gatsby but cannot hear it until they encounter it through jazz. Listening to the songs Fitzgerald quoted (“The Sheik of Araby”, “Ain’t We Got Fun”) I realized that the novel was not just about loss or glamour, but about sound: The mood shaping power of melody, rhythm, voice, and silence. Daisy’s voice is not just alluring, it is a score that Gatsby cannot stop chasing. The parties at West Egg are not just excessive; they are a kind of jazz improvisation, wild and beautiful but fleeting. That discovery gave the novel an emotional weight I had not noticed before. It began to sound like longing. It began to sound like me.

This is why I have written about Gatsby through the lens of jazz; not to reduce the novel to a musical metaphor, but to show how Fitzgerald used music to write about love in its most expressive, most ephemeral form. Love as improvisation. Love as illusion. Love as a song you cannot forget, even when it is over.

 

Conclusion: The Last “Note”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is often praised for its lyrical prose and haunting vision of the American Dream. But at its heart, the novel is also a composition; a kind of emotional jazz score, improvised line by line, phrase by phrase, through the music of language, the rhythm of memory, and the silences that surround longing. In this thesis, I have explored how Fitzgerald uses the soundscape of the Jazz Age not only as historical background, but as the emotional infrastructure of Gatsby’s dream. Love, in Gatsby’s world, is not rational or stable; it is performed, like jazz. It is composed of gestures, voice, echo, and rhythm. And like any jazz piece, it is fleeting.

From the historical and cultural dynamics of the 1920s (its intoxicating embrace of freedom, pleasure, and reinvention) to Fitzgerald’s personal life and evolving voice as a writer, Gatsby’s story is the culmination of a decade that danced toward beauty even as it collapsed under its illusions. Chapter by chapter, we saw how jazz shaped not just the surface of the novel but its inner core. The improvisational rhythm of Nick’s narration, the polyphony of voices at Gatsby’s parties, the moments of sudden silence and discord, each reveals a structure built on musical logic. Jazz does not offer resolution; neither does Gatsby’s love. Both linger in the air after their final note.

Gatsby’s love for Daisy, too, is a melody he cannot stop playing. It begins with a simple theme (boy meets girl) but grows into a fantastical arrangement, full of ornament and memory. Like a jazz solo that circles back to its motif, Gatsby keeps returning to the past, embellishing it until he no longer hears the difference between what was and what could have been. In this reading, Gatsby is not just a man in love; he is a man composing love, hoping that with enough rhythm, enough belief, the music will become real.

The real songs Fitzgerald includes in the novel (“The Sheik of Araby”, “Ain’t We Got Fun” ,“The Love Nest” and “Beale Street Blues”) are not incidental. They are emotionally strategic. Each one echoes the themes at play: Possessiveness, satire, domestic yearning, and melancholy. By quoting the music of his era, Fitzgerald anchors Gatsby’s dream in a specific sound world. These lyrics act like refrains in a symphony of illusion: They highlight what is beautiful, what is broken, and what cannot be reclaimed.

In writing this thesis, I have not only analyzed a literary text, I have listened to it. I have followed its changes in tempo, its improvisations, its silences. As a reader who loves jazz, I have heard in Gatsby’s story something deeply familiar: The fragile hope that a single moment of beauty can last forever. Fitzgerald captures that hope and lets it shimmer on the page, even as it dissolves.

Nick’s final image, of Gatsby reaching out toward the green light, remains one of the most enduring symbols in American literature. But I believe the novel’s true final note is not visual, but musical. It is the quietness after the last chord, the echo of Daisy’s voice in Gatsby’s mind, the moment when the party is over and the lights have gone out. That sound (part memory, part silence) is where Fitzgerald leaves us. It is where Gatsby lives on.

And maybe that is why this story, like a beloved record, keeps playing. Because in its improvisation, in its longing, in its blue notes and broken dreams, The Great Gatsby still sings. Just like life itself, everything Jay Gatsby did was out of love, with love, for love.

 

 

Works Cited

The Great Gatsby. By F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karbon books, 2018.

Churchwell, Sarah. Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. Penguin Press, 2014.

Curnutt, Kirk. The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Delbanco, Andrew. “The Connoisseur of Desire.” The New York Review of Books, 2025.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Echoes of the Jazz Age. 1931. Reprinted in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New Directions, 1945.

Gopnik, Adam. “As Big as the Ritz: The Mythology of the Fitzgeralds.” The New Yorker, 2014.

Goswami, Niranjan. “Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” In The American Novel from Hawthorne to Heller: Cultural Contexts and Critical Perspectives, edited by Ashok K. Mohapatra et al., Macmillan, 2020.

Prigozy, Ruth, editor. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Smith, Harry B., Francis Wheeler, and Ted Snyder. “The Sheik of Araby.” 1921.

Whiting, Richard, Raymond Egan, and Gus Kahn. “Ain’t We Got Fun” 1921.

Harbach, Otto, and Louis A. Hirsch. “The Love Nest.” 1920.

Handy, W.C. “Beale Street Blues.” 1917.

Tredell, Nicolas. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Reader’s Guide. Bloomsbury Academic, 2007.

Trilling, Lionel. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, New York Review Books Classics, 2008.