Literary Legacies: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Porter, Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, is largely autobiographical. Born into a middle-class family in Minnesota, Fitzgerald felt inferior to the much richer parts of his extended family. This feeling of inferiority became an important theme in his work. Clever and ambitious, he managed to get a scholarship and went to an elite university, Princeton. He wanted to be on the American football team, believing it was the only way to be popular, but he eventually joined the Drama Club. His great intelligence and artistic sensibility—that mixture—is a significant component of The Great Gatsby.
When he finished university, he decided to be a war hero because he couldn’t be a football player. He volunteered for the Army as an officer trainee due to his scholarship and was sent to Alabama for training. While training to be an officer in a Southern territory, he and his fellows were very popular with young local girls, known as “Southern Belles.” One of these Southern Belles in Alabama, Zelda Sayre, was the most beautiful and popular, and he based the character of Daisy on her. They fell in love with each other, but Zelda also came from one of the most important families in Alabama and had a lot of money. She loved Scott, and she loved money.
He finished his officer training and went to New York, and the war ended. Zelda told him she loved him but that he didn’t have enough money to give her the life she was used to. Determined to win the girl and earn money, he stayed in New York and worked very hard writing a novel: This Side of Paradise (1920). This pseudo-autobiographical work about American university life, student experiences, and campus culture was a tremendous success. So, Zelda came back to him; now she wanted to marry him because he was successful and had money. They married eventually.
Theirs was a kind of love-hate relationship, with many problems stemming from Fitzgerald’s feelings of inferiority; he thought she was superior to him. He always felt insecure about this and thought anyone from her class could take her away from him. She was quite artificial but also had artistic ambitions. After getting married, she wanted to be a writer, leading to a kind of competition between them. In order to keep her, he had to keep earning money by writing novels. But she wanted a life full of parties. How could he write and party with her, and still provide for her? That lifestyle required a lot of money and many books. For this reason, he wrote many collections of short stories, which were easier to write and sell, providing easy money. He wrote two collections of short stories:
- Flappers and Philosophers (1921): Flappers referred to the new women of the 1920s: those who danced the Charleston, had short hair, wore short skirts, smoked, and danced. They were two totally different types of people.
- Tales of the Jazz Age (1922): This era was also known as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age.
Fitzgerald was also an expatriate. For financial reasons, he took Zelda to Europe, where it was easier to earn money and keep Zelda happy. Paris was an important city for them. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925. Other notable works include Tender Is the Night (1934) and The Last Tycoon (1941), which was published posthumously and was incomplete. It was the first serious novel about the film industry in Hollywood.
He returned to the USA for writing because it was easier to earn money in the film industry. He separated from Zelda. In 1930, Zelda suffered a significant mental breakdown, frustrated in her ambition to become a writer. She started painting and dancing. Due to a combination of her lifestyle, frustration, and clashes with her husband, she was institutionalized until her death. Fitzgerald had a relationship with a Hollywood journalist. He was still married to Zelda when she died tragically in a fire.
He also suffered a nervous breakdown after their separation but overcame it by isolating himself from society in North Carolina for six weeks, during which he recovered. In 1936, he wrote a series of confessional articles during that period of isolation, titled The Crack-Up, explaining the reasons for his breakdown, how he overcame it, and his inferiority complex. In many ways, Daisy is based on Zelda, just as Gatsby is based on Fitzgerald. The author imagines what might have happened in their relationship.
Analysis of The Great Gatsby
There’s another important character, Nick Carraway, the novel’s innovative third-person narrator. He narrates a story in which he participates; however, the narrative primarily focuses on his acquaintance with Gatsby and the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. He doesn’t know many facts about Gatsby; his knowledge of the characters he discusses is limited, and he gains information from others. This is an innovative technique. He is primarily the storyteller, and there are two main narrative threads involving Carraway: the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, and the relationship between Jordan and Nick.
Gatsby’s trajectory is a tragedy. First, he is with his love, and then everything declines. Nick is the only one who moves in the opposite direction, ascending. If we only consider Gatsby, the novel is pessimistic, but Nick’s presence introduces a nuanced perspective, as he learns from Gatsby’s mistakes. It’s also a novel of growth. Gatsby doesn’t change; he is incapable of it. Nick, on the other hand, evolves throughout the novel.
General Aspects of The Great Gatsby (1925)
It is very close to a perfect novel. The use of the first-person narrator is more innovative than it seems.
Motifs: Colors
The novel makes clever use of motifs, particularly colors. For example, Gatsby’s bright yellow car, and when Nick first sees Gatsby, he’s looking at the green light. What associations do we usually have with green? Hope, nature, money. What are dollars made of? Paper, which comes from wood, which comes from trees. If you want money, you might destroy nature. This relationship is embedded in the color symbolism.
Motifs: Image Clusters
The word “promise” is repeated as both a noun and a verb; “shine” as a verb and adjective. These two words are crucial when Nick describes Daisy. The word “dream” refers to the New American Dream.
Symmetry
Who are the Buchanans? Tom and Daisy. They belong to the “Old Money” class. Tom comes from a rich family from Chicago, and Daisy also came from a wealthy family. Then we have Gatsby, who is “New Money.” Gatsby is a self-made man in many ways, including his own name; he literally recreates himself.
Gatsby is in love with Daisy, and as the novel progresses, Daisy seems to be in love with Gatsby (real love or not?). Gatsby’s whole life is focused on winning Daisy’s heart. His ascension is driven by his desire to replace Tom and marry Daisy. Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, is married to Wilson, who owns the gas station. She is poor and strangely attractive to Tom. There is also a relationship between Tom and Myrtle, as she would like to marry Tom and take Daisy’s place. In both cases, we have characters from lower classes who want to ascend in the social classes. Myrtle is killed by Gatsby, and both of them eventually die. There is a symmetry between their deaths. Wilson kills Gatsby because Tom tells him Gatsby killed his wife. Tom is protecting himself, as Wilson is unaware of the affair.
The “Old Money” characters, Daisy and Tom, live in East Egg, while Gatsby and Nick live in West Egg. The location is Long Island. People with “New Money” tend to live in West Egg. Nick’s immediate family doesn’t have much money; they are from the Midwest. The contrast between East and West Eggs reproduces the differences between America and Europe in the 19th century. East represents the corrupted world, and West represents the New World. This is also reflected in the differences between New York and the Midwest, where Nick is from. Nick’s disillusionment with human nature leads him back to the Midwest. He goes to New York to learn the bond business, intending to work on Wall Street to make money—his main motivation. But at the end of the book, he decides against it.
None of the characters develop or change, except Nick. He is the only exception. At the beginning, Nick acts as a kind of intermediary between the Buchanans and Gatsby; he is Daisy’s cousin. He, at first, doesn’t like Gatsby, but by the end, he admires Gatsby immensely and is completely fed up with the Buchanans.
Detailed Analysis of The Great Gatsby
The epigraph at the beginning is Gatsby himself. He is a projection of Fitzgerald, who had two different sides: a materialistic side and a sensitive/artistic side. Gatsby represents the materialistic side, and Nick represents the sensitive part (as the narrator). Together, they are a projection of Fitzgerald.
Chapter 1
The narrative is already hinting at how the book ends. The only person who is “saved” is Gatsby. The narrative discusses his gestures, personality, and the face he presented to society. Nick first thinks Gatsby is a very artificial person: nobody knows where his money comes from, nobody truly knows Gatsby, and nobody knows why he hosts his parties. The only reason for celebrating the parties is the hope that Daisy might attend, so he could meet her. This artificiality of Gatsby is called “scorn.” But other qualities, such as his sensibility and romantic hope for his love, show another side of him.
Nick is capable of learning and growing. What about Daisy? When he arrives at the Buchanans’ home, specifically in the room where Daisy and Miss Baker are, he describes the girls as “motionless” statues. The image of the “attached balloon” symbolizes their unwillingness to grow. The image of the balloon is repeated. Daisy’s laugh is described as “absurd” and “charming.” Her voice is a symbol in the novel, described as “low” and “thrilling.” Her eyes are described as “bright,” related to shine, shining like gold and silver. Daisy’s voice and her face are full of promises. What did he just tell us about Gatsby? His sensitivity to promises and hope. It’s just what he is looking for.
When he goes with Tom to Manhattan to visit his mistress, they pass through the Valley of Ashes, a terrible place that reminds him of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Fitzgerald admired Eliot’s work. The realistic image of a deserted short road, with the poster of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—eyes with no face—evokes Eliot. The name “T. J. Eckleburg” sounds like T.S. Eliot: two syllables, two consonants, one “T,” and a surname beginning with “E” and three syllables. “The man who cannot wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there is no eye” by Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
This marks the beginning of Nick’s decline in human nature, when he learns Tom has a mistress. Tom has an apartment in New York for him and Myrtle, where she hosts parties. This is a kind of parody of Gatsby’s parties, as Myrtle tries to show she can live with elegance and entertain her own guests. Nick is both fascinated and disgusted by the whole thing. Myrtle presumes she’s the woman Tom truly loves, and that afternoon, Tom hits her in the face. That day, Tom gave her a present: a dog (named “Bitch”). Tom gave a $300,000 necklace to Daisy, which is similar to the dog he gave Myrtle, implying she is also a possession for him.
Nick meeting Gatsby: Gatsby knows exactly where Daisy lives, and for that reason, he tries to reach the green light, where Daisy is—a very romantic idea related to the American Dream.
Chapter 5
When Nick first sees Gatsby, in Chapter 5, Gatsby asks Nick to invite his cousin Daisy to tea so he can come to Nick’s house and meet her. Gatsby covers the house with flowers and is very nervous about meeting Daisy. He leaves because they are together, and he feels he is not needed there. A growing difference emerges between Nick and Gatsby. Nick understands much more about Daisy than Gatsby is capable of. Gatsby’s imagination is related to the American Dream and the difference between reality and dream. Daisy’s voice is described as a “deathless song,” full of money. The power of her voice—the promises and the money—is all contained within it. At the party, Gatsby is described as someone always upstairs and alone. When Nick says goodbye to him, as the last person to leave, he looks back and sees Gatsby standing alone, a dark figure with light behind him—a lonely figure, even before he meets Daisy.
Chapter 6
Gatsby is a mixture of positive and negative qualities. He is literally a self-made man. Nick provides information about Gatsby’s past. There are only rumors about his past; Gatsby’s name isn’t even Jay Gatsby. His real name is James Gatz. He was poor but saved a wealthy man, and then he began to ascend socially. However, when the man died, his family inherited all the money. Where does his fortune come from? Bootleg alcohol, probably the business Gatsby is in. He made his own money. In contrast, Tom was born with his. Nick is not a totally reliable narrator. He doesn’t know everything; he gathers information and constructs the story, but not everything is the truth.
At 17 years old, he creates his own identity, breaking away from the past and forging a new, very American identity. But he doesn’t change or develop; he still maintains the ideas he had at 17, even in his relationship with Daisy. He gave her an ultimatum: Tom or him? She loves both of them, and he cannot live with that; he only wanted her to love him. At the end of the chapter, Gatsby notices something is not right and talks with Nick about Daisy. The mention of the “past” relates to his mindset, that of a 17-year-old boy. Gatsby wants to keep thinking the same way and not change. Here we see the difference in growth between them: maturity versus immaturity. The moment of decision for Gatsby is when he meets Daisy and kisses her. He has to choose between his idealized visions and her reality. He kisses her, and that marks the end of his spiritual youth. The dream is incarnated in a physical being, Daisy. Nick understands this moment.
The last paragraph of this chapter contains a kind of passage repeated over and over again in American literature, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, conveying the idea of the novel communicating with us. Paradox: like the American Dream, Daisy offers something to Gatsby and then takes it away again. The only way to truly “have” a dream is not to realize it, because once it becomes reality, a dream is only an illusion.
Chapter 7
This is the climax of the novel. It is the day when all the characters cross a borderline. When they go to New York, Gatsby and Tom fight for Daisy, and all the characters are reunited in the room. Also, when they leave the city, Myrtle dies. Both Gatsby and Tom change before going to New York. Tom feels insecure when they are in New York, sensing he’s losing his power, and also because Myrtle and Wilson are going to move on. So he has two problems: he thinks Daisy is having an affair, and his own affair is ending, so he will lose her.
Myrtle sees a big yellow car when Gatsby is driving back to Long Island, and she runs in front of it, thinking it’s Tom and he’s going to pick her up. This is because when they were going to New York, Tom was driving Gatsby’s yellow car, and she saw him. Is Gatsby telling the truth? Was Daisy driving the car, or was it an accident? Perhaps Daisy knew who Myrtle was and intentionally killed her because she wanted to be in Daisy’s place. This is one of the most obscure points of the novel. Wilson thinks Tom was driving the yellow car, but Tom says it was Gatsby; for this reason, Wilson shoots Gatsby at the end. Tom has told Daisy he’s going to take care of her.
In the hotel room, Gatsby says Daisy doesn’t love Tom, and here the argument begins. Nick observes as Daisy starts to waver, marking the second moment she has to make a decision (the first being when she was going to marry). Is Daisy as bad as Tom, or not? She is the same, because if she were better, she would have the moral courage to stop the marriage and admit who she is truly in love with. She lacks moral courage. Is she really in love with Gatsby, or does she only try to make Tom jealous because she knows he has an affair and uses Gatsby? She refuses to love only Gatsby. He is figuratively dead. Tom gains control, and Gatsby sits on an armchair. The dream dies when she says she loves him but also loves Tom. This is the real climax where the power balance changes.
Nick’s relationship with Jordan parallels the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy. At the end of the chapter, Nick goes to Tom and Daisy’s house and finds Gatsby standing outside, underneath a tree, looking through a window. He tells Nick he wants to protect Daisy; she was driving the car, and he wants to claim he was the one driving to protect her. On the last page, Nick doesn’t know what they’re saying. Has she confessed she was driving the car? Tom knows it, and even though Gatsby is not guilty, Tom tells Wilson the next morning that Gatsby was the guilty one. Gatsby feels he needs to protect her, unless she’s planning to frame him as the guilty party with Tom. Nick knows much more than Gatsby. The next day, Gatsby is at home on purpose, waiting for her telephone call, when he is killed.
The literal, spiritual, and moral climax is the confrontation between Tom and Gatsby. Falling action: who takes responsibility by the end of the novel? Nick. That is something Nick learns. It’s quite sad. Gatsby hosts parties for many people, yet by the end of the novel, only Nick, Gatsby’s father, and another man attend Gatsby’s funeral. Notice Gatsby’s childhood references to the American experience: Benjamin Franklin (Gatsby wrote a kind of list like him, creating himself. His error was creating a 17-year-old identity and not being able to change). The last time Nick sees Gatsby, Nick tells him, “You’re better than all the rest…” Nick goes to another extreme; what he admires about Gatsby is his ability to hope, which contrasts with the rest of the novel, except for Nick himself. The romantic essence of hope (Gatsby); the Buchanans are now the ones who are important.
Responsibility leads to maturity. Nick telephones Jordan because he doesn’t want to leave any loose ends or lack closure, despite their lack of intimate mutual interest; officially, they hadn’t broken up. Nick shows growth because he takes the responsibility to say goodbye to Jordan, stating he would never date a careless driver. This is a reference to Daisy, who kills Myrtle; that kind of driver is dangerous. And because Jordan is from the same class, he thinks the same of her. Jordan is a golfer, and she represents the same cynicism and irresponsibility as the Buchanans, albeit on a smaller scale, due to her cheating scandal.
It’s a kind of Modern tragedy if we only focus on Gatsby. In classical tragedy, we have a noble hero. Gatsby represents the death of the American Dream. His dream was noble, his sensibility to promises—a tragic American Dream. His trajectory goes down, but in Nick’s case, he ascends. He observes the story and discerns what is bad and good in Gatsby; we can assume Nick learns the lessons Gatsby is incapable of learning.
Chapter 9
Daisy is compared to a dog when she kills Myrtle with the car. The word “careless” (referring to the use of money at that time) is important at the end of the chapter and the novel. Nick has to clean up the mess. Disillusionment at the end on Nick’s part; he doesn’t want to be associated with society. Gatsby’s death could symbolize the death of the American Dream, except for Nick.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Ernest Hemingway was an overwhelming figure, reminiscent of Picasso for being a male chauvinist. He was a very prolific artist, quite insecure, and tended to destroy people, especially women, who were close to him. His life was as interesting as his work. In 1961, he committed suicide with a shotgun, which is significant. His father also committed suicide. He was a doctor born in Michigan, a Midwestern state. His father taught him how to hunt and fish; as he got older, he participated in outdoor activities like hunting, which he associated with “manhood.”
He had a pretty normal childhood: intelligent, extroverted, and quite good-looking. He was too intelligent to go to university and had no interest in it. He was interested in journalism and writing. His novel A Farewell to Arms is an example of a pseudo-autobiographical novel. He wanted to be where the action was. At 19, during the First World War, he wanted to go there. He didn’t want to join the American army, so he became an ambulance driver to go to Europe and participate in the war (like E.E. Cummings in France).
Hemingway went to Italy, joining a small ambulance corps. He was wounded in the First World War and received a medal for bravery from the Italian government (reminiscent of The Red Badge of Courage), not only for being wounded but also for his bravery. He went to the trenches taking a bicycle, and a bomb exploded very close to him. They were knocked out of the trenches by the explosion. He forced himself to save an Italian soldier when the forces were attacking; for this reason, he received the medal for bravery. He was not conscious, so officially Hemingway is a hero for the Italian army, but on the other hand, he doesn’t know if he’s a hero or not. The idea of courage is closely associated with proving his manhood, related to fishing and hunting during his childhood.
He was seriously wounded, put in an ambulance, and went to a hospital. Here is where his love story begins: Agnes von Kurowsky, who was seven or eight years older than him. He’s a handsome young boy who has been wounded, and we have the attractive nurse, in the middle of the war—one of the two main plots in the novel (a war story and a love story). They fell in love, but he had a semi-serious girlfriend before; the nurse was his first serious girlfriend. He was much more in love with her than she was with him. After he recovered enough, he went back to the United States, very proud but writing love letters to Agnes. She writes him “Dear John” letters, having fallen in love with an Italian officer. Hemingway is heartbroken and feels he cannot fall in love again. It took him 10 years to recover from the wounds and write about it, resulting in A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
Key Themes
Important themes to see: courage (related to The Red Badge of Courage); wounds (he received a relatively serious physical wound and a deeper, stronger emotional wound because of Agnes. It was easier for him to overcome the first one; the main character in the novel receives the same two wounds); and disillusionment of the Lost Generation (A Farewell to Arms is the most pessimistic novel of the Lost Generation). Are there some optimistic novels? Does something provide hope, or is it just pessimistic? Or do we have despair? The figure of Catherine is perhaps the most important in the whole novel. Which one is the strongest: Frederic or Catherine? Both of them are fools; he is a fool, and she has more experience. It’s a novel of growth, and Frederic learns a lot from various teachers: the Priest, Rinaldi, and his main teacher, Catherine. What does she teach him? Is it positive or negative?
It took him ten years to heal the wounds. What happened? He went to Paris because life was cheaper, and there were a lot of interesting people there. Working as a journalist, it didn’t take long to know everybody: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Fitzgerald. He established interesting friendships. He got involved in the intellectual world in Paris. In 1925, In Our Time, a collection of short stories, was published. He was a brilliant short-story writer, one of the best. Many of them were extremely short; it was his best collection of short stories. Quite experimental.
His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), was based on his own experience—a pseudo-autobiographical novel. The main character is Jake Barnes, an American journalist living in Paris. He participated in the war and was wounded (the wound is not explicitly described, but it makes it impossible for him to have sex). He cannot make love but is in love with a married aristocrat; she claims to love him too. She has affairs with other men, but she comes around to Jake and tells him about her other affairs. It’s like a shot to him: strong on the outside, weak on the inside. The background of this novel is the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, another celebration for him. Hemingway was the first American to truly discover Spain. He loved fishing and heard from others in Paris that the rivers in Spain were great for fishing, so he went in summer to Pamplona, also for bullfighting. He was attracted to everything bullfighting represents, a reflection of his “code hero” (a person who is close to death but maintains calm and acts with grace). When he went to Paris, he talked about this and went the following year with a group of friends. What happens there forms the background of the novel. This novel was also quite successful and allowed him to work on the novel that would make his name: A Farewell to Arms.
Code Hero
Hemingway’s code heroes are characters who lived under a kind of moral code: courage, wounds, bravery. They exhibit grace under pressure: the ability to function better in very difficult situations, confronting life and fears. This kind of character, strong on the outside and vulnerable on the inside, became the figure of the detective we know today. A Farewell to Arms (1929) features war and love as two central plot lines. The title suggests a goodbye to weapons, and perhaps also to other “arms”—those that can embrace you. Here, the code hero is very present. However, should we think of the code hero as Frederic or Catherine? Who shows grace under pressure? In his family, his mother was the dominant one, who dressed him as a girl when he was little. He made many physical efforts to prove his masculinity, to demonstrate he’s not a girl but a boy, a man.
The Iceberg Principle
Hemingway developed this style of writing in his early works. Its origin lies in his journalistic style: direct and clear. Relatively simple, he takes journalistic simplicity a step further. He applies this concept, another Modernist innovation: visualize an iceberg, where only the tip is visible (1/6 visible, the rest below the water). This metaphor applies to his style, with A Farewell to Arms being a prime example. We also have a first-person narrator, with many similarities to The Great Gatsby. What Henry tells us is the surface. “If the story is good, the reader will know what’s under the surface.”
An example of the Iceberg Principle is Hills Like White Elephants. He wants her to have an abortion, but she doesn’t want to. He’s the dominant character; the woman follows him. Extreme minimalism, which fits perfectly with Henry’s emotional state. All he does is tell where they are, using simple and direct sentences, and very few complex ones. He’s telling the story of a dramatic event; he wants to avoid feelings because he is in pain, but all he can do is talk about physical surfaces—what he saw, what he did. But nothing that goes beneath this. There’s an emotional reason to use the Iceberg Principle. The final dialogue is true poetry.
Other works include:
- To Have and Have Not (1937)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), based on his own experience in Valencia. He was there during the Civil War, having come to Spain as a journalist.
He participated as a journalist in the Second World War. He participated in combat and claimed to help with military strategies. As he got older, he lost his mental balance and began to feel depressed. He started to decline in his 50s, drinking too much, and obsessing about maleness. He had serious head injuries: once in Paris, walking towards the bathroom, a thick glass fell onto his head. A really strong contusion, and other, more significant wounds from a plane crash in Africa (while hunting); the plane crashed, and he used his head to break the glass of the plane. He had a death wish, inherited from his father. A few days before his suicide, he visited a psychologist.
Analysis of A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Hemingway became a very close friend of Cano (a photographer in bullfighting). Cano didn’t speak any English, and Hemingway really liked him. The novel features Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Her nationality is not explicitly stated. Two plot lines: war and love. They are parallel, and Catherine and Frederic are involved in both. We can also read this novel as a novel of growth. Catherine is already ahead of Henry, with much more experience (like Agnes with Hemingway).
Courage and Responsibility
The aspect of courage: dealing with his wounds, both physical and emotional. The war story is very similar to the love story. Courage means two things: courage in the sense of facing death, your fears, the physical wounds… And on the other hand, facing life, growing up, acknowledging your own mortality. Life here is closely related to love. Frederic is also going to have to make a choice in the novel; this results in another important quality of adulthood: responsibility. He is going to choose between two responsibilities: his responsibility to the war and his responsibility to Catherine. Apart from growing up, he’s learning to be unselfish. Selfishness is the opposite of generosity. He puts others before himself, showing humility and selflessness. Immaturity is a selfish quality. When he meets Catherine, he starts changing; he learns from her. Why does Catherine fall in love with him if he doesn’t have experience and is immature? Hemingway is making fun of Frederic. At the end of the novel, is he as selfless as Catherine?
The story of the novel really begins in Chapter 2; the function of the first chapter is to introduce the basic ideas and the overall structure of the novel. We have two halves: the first half is life-dominated, and the second half is death-dominated. Rain is a very important symbol, an image that represents more than what it is. We usually associate rain with life, but in this case, rain functions as a symbol of death. Life confronted with death, a juxtaposition. At first, it’s dusty, and when it starts to rain, it becomes muddy. The style is simple and direct. We don’t know what’s going to happen: this is the effect of the Iceberg Principle. There are two traumatic wounds in the novel: one physical and one emotional. He’s driven to talk about the emotional wound, though he talks indirectly. What’s beneath the surface: the woman he loves is pregnant with a baby, and we don’t know more. We don’t know how much time has passed between the narration (when he tells the story) and the events of the story. He has to talk about it but also tries to avoid it.
The novel is divided into five books, almost like the five acts of a classical tragedy. The author goes back and forth between two lines: the military action and the love story with Catherine. The first book introduces the characters. Henry drinks a lot, and his relationship with the Priest is notable (he likes him and doesn’t make fun of him for wearing a dress). Several teachers for him: the Priest, Rinaldi, and Catherine.
Chapter 3
Henry tries to justify why he doesn’t go to the mountain. The mountains are up, and the city is down. One of the things he likes is drinking and women. These are signs of immaturity. The Priest knows what maturity is, unlike Henry. This relates to the novel of growth: the Priest knows many lessons, but Henry doesn’t. He learns but also forgets.
Chapter 4
This is the moment when both of them kissed. Usually, he says no, but here he’s telling her yes. To demonstrate how much more advanced Catherine is than him, a comparison with a chess game is apt: he lies to her, saying he loves her. She knows it, and he keeps lying, but she knows the truth and catches him in his lie. She’s teaching him; she knows much more about life.
Chapter 11
Discussion about going to the Abruzzi. Also about God and his faith. There’s a lesson he learns but also forgets: when you love, you wish to do things for the other person. If you’re selfish, you want people for yourself. Has he grown by the end?
Frederic meeting Catherine: she’s a beautiful nurse, not a prostitute. He’s kind of cynical at first with her. Game metaphor: at first, he knows he’s playing a game with her; he knows he’s manipulating her because she’s nicer than “professional” girls. Little by little, he gets more and more emotionally involved with her. Henry is uninvolved (we don’t know much about him; he’s not involved in the war and doesn’t want to get involved with Catherine, showing immaturity, lack of involvement, and lack of self-knowledge). He only lets things happen.
Chapter 18
There are two ideal situations: one when they play games, and the other when they are skiing in Switzerland. Another theme of the book is the difference between day and night. For him, the nights are much better than the days. Here we have a reversal of normal expectations: he wants to get married, but she doesn’t. Usually, it’s the other way around, especially for someone like Frederic, who is very immature. His personality changes so much (he wants to be married, and then he doesn’t). Here is the big surprise: “there isn’t any me…” “There’s no me, I am you.” This repetition appears in the chapter. She apparently knows what she wants; why does she negate herself, especially with someone who is much less mature? Is it because she’s crazy?
At the end of Chapter 16, she asks him about women before her, and her attitude is much more mature than his. She has been married before him, and she hadn’t had sex with her former husband. Why is she intent on getting married, and why does she say “there’s not me”? Maybe she’s playing a game with him. This is an indication of his insecurity; he wants to marry her in order to control her. Why does she negate herself? This is an important moment when Frederic is learning something: “there’s no separate me,” marking the beginning of one of the most ambiguous moments of the novel. We can begin to think forward to “a separate peace” later in the novel. “No separate me” is a step forward in their decision for a separate peace; they think together about escaping. The separate peace they form is that the two of them decide to live in a bubble (Switzerland), forgetting about the world—something the priest says: love is sacrificing. She’s sacrificing herself for her love, though she knows he’s inferior. On the other hand, why is it intelligent? It is ambiguous (“I’m nothing”); you can think about it as positive or negative. Positive: love is better than killing. But what happens if they have sex? There’s a baby; their bubble is very artificial and is broken by the baby. The ambiguities are very rich in the novel. Later she says to him, “there’s only us”; they are one person. They decide to run away together, and she says that to him, the same idea as the “little bubble.” She says that they have to take care of each other. Before Catherine dies, he’s being very cynical and again uses game metaphors with baseball.
Chapter 21
In Chapter 21 of the novel, there is an indication that Catherine represents the code hero: suffering, nobility. Before this conversation, she tells him they’re going to have a baby. She’s pretty sure what his response will be. “You always feel trapped biologically”—a very good example of how Hemingway uses the Iceberg Principle. “I could cut off my tongue,” I offered. Here Frederic is playing with Catherine. What happens at the end of the book? It begins to rain (Chapter 22). He gets the news about her pregnancy (which represents responsibility); no more games, he returns to war. That’s when things get serious. Think about the relationship: what does Catherine want from Henry? What does Henry want from Catherine? There’s sexuality, but she’s like a mother for him, like a permanent nurse. In Chapter 19, there’s anticipation for the rain. It’s raining hard. They are always saying, “I love you.” She doesn’t say, “You can keep me safe.”
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Katherine Anne Porter was a member of the Modernist Generation; she lived a pretty long time. A well-known Modernist and very interesting writer. Her real name was not Katherine; her given name was Callie Russell. She changed her name because her mother died, and she lived with her grandmother, whose name she took. She had a family link with Daniel Boone. She had many unsuccessful marriages. Her first was at 16, lasting three years; her husband was abusive and broke her ankle. She worked as an actress, singer, and secretary before becoming a serious writer. She lived between New York and Mexico City.
In 1930, her first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, was published. Between 1933 and 1936, she lived in Europe (Germany and France). In 1939, she wrote two novellas, long short stories: Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In 1944, The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. In 1962, Ship of Fools. In 1965, Collected Stories, winning the Pulitzer Prize. In 1977, The Never-Ending Wrong, about the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Her style differed from Hemingway’s. Fluent and often moving back and forth in time, she was quite a perfectionist in her expression. She had strict control of her themes: justice, isolation, betrayal, and spiritual denial. Religious symbolism appears in her stories because she had religious training, converting to Catholicism at 16.
Flowering Judas (1930)
The story takes place in Mexico in the 1920s. Two main characters are Laura (an American girl and the protagonist) and Braggioni. She teaches English to Mexican children. Braggioni tries to seduce her, but she rejects him; he is married.
Analysis of Flowering Judas
It is somewhat autobiographical. Betrayal is the main theme, as the title suggests. Death is also important, as are the ideals of life (key to the betrayal Laura feels). At the beginning, she is always doubting, not knowing what to do. Her mind is very complicated. She has a pretty good life, but she doesn’t feel happy with it. She cannot trust anyone and doesn’t want to get involved with anyone (page 647). There is a repetition of the color yellow, especially at the beginning in the description of Braggioni. Many images associate him with a cat (think about his eyes). On page 650, Laura is not brave enough. On this page, Braggioni gives her flowers, and she eats them. Because of this, she dreams of Eugene, a nightmare in which she kills him. In this part, the pessimism begins.
Laura is a revolutionary. The narrator describes Braggioni with very negative adjectives. She does not have enough time to grow; it’s a short story, and her process of growth does not end. The dream is the climax of the story. How should we interpret the dream? Is it betrayal? Who betrays whom? Laura to Eugene? Why? Because she respects his wish to die. It’s not a betrayal, but a strict Catholic might think it is. She’s not necessarily betraying Eugene. Where does the dream come from? From her subconscious. She’s talking with herself, not with Eugene. The cat imagery for Braggioni is intentional. He is described as a fat cat. He’s a cat, and he’s singing, trying to seduce Laura like Sylvester trying to catch Tweety. She’s the canary, and he’s the cat. Where do we usually find canaries? In cages.
Where is she? In Mexico City, but she thinks she should run away and not be there—one of the main life motifs of the story. Her inability to move or make a decision: she knows what she wants but does nothing. She’s in a kind of cage, put there by herself. When she speaks with Eugene in her dream, she is betraying herself. She’s not capable of running away. The main interest is in the character of Laura; she’s not a child and doesn’t grow, but she’s in a cage that she has built for herself. She wants to escape but doesn’t know how. Examples of betrayal in the story: the title itself; Braggioni with his wife (at the end, manipulating her to forgive him); he betrays the prisoners; he betrays the revolution. In Laura’s case, she betrays the revolution, the Catholic church, and herself (page 651).
The dream is a parody of the Eucharist; Jesus Christ is the one who says, “this is my body” and “this is my blood.” It is close to stream of consciousness at the end, in the dream sequence. We gain access to many of Laura’s memories. The narrator asks a question, telling the reader that it seems to be Eugene, but after all, it’s herself. Who’s accusing her of being a murderer? Eugene in the dream, but it’s herself. She feels guilty of murdering herself. She wants to escape but is incapable of it: “I will show you a new country.” Eating and drinking in the Community is like being immortal; here we have a parody of it, meaning death. When she eats from the tree, she’s accepting death. There’s a parallelism between Eugene and Laura: he escapes through death, but she cannot.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
William Faulkner was a very prolific author. He loved the South, living all his life in his small town in Mississippi, on a plantation. He was one of the exceptions of the Lost Generation; he rejected being an expatriate. Hollywood anecdote: He worked there for a short time, writing some screenplays, including the film adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. He had little formal education, only high school, which was good but not extensive. After finishing high school, he also wanted to participate in World War I. He went to Canada to join the R.A.F. (Royal Air Force), training as a pilot. He had a minor accident and lied to others, glorifying the accident.
His work is based on his family history and the history of the South, particularly the Civil War. His natural ambitions were poetry. In 1924, he published a collection of poems, The Marble Faun, which were generally considered poor. Strongly influenced by Romantics, especially Keats, he stopped writing poetry and started with fiction, becoming very prolific. He wrote:
- Soldier’s Pay (1926)
- Mosquitoes (1927)
- Flags in the Dust (1928)
When he rewrote the last, it became Sartoris (1929), about his small town in Mississippi, and he became a well-known writer. Also in 1929, he wrote The Sound and the Fury. In 1930, As I Lay Dying: as a Modernist, Faulkner innovated a lot in fiction, particularly with narrative voice. Sanctuary (1931), one of his most accessible novels, was considered a “pot-boiler”—a novel written primarily to make money. It was also one of his less important novels.
Light in August (1932) mixes two different stories: the story of a young, pregnant, and abandoned girl who wants to find her child, asking people on the road to help her. The other part is an orphan with an identity problem, who has some Black ancestry. Racism is a theme, as Black people are depicted behaving in a certain way. At the end, both stories intertwine, and both characters meet. And then, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), his most difficult novel. Similar to Flowering Judas, it features a history within a history within a history… It’s not a simple narrative frame; it’s very complicated. It’s about Southern history, racism, misogyny… Faulkner is concerned with discussing Southern history, and also how they rise, becoming materialistic—a recurring theme in his body of work.
Yoknapatawpha County: before the Europeans, there were Indigenous peoples, and he writes about their history. The prominent families: Sartoris, Sutpen, Compson, and McCaslin. He uses these families to show the rise of the South after the Civil War. We also have the Beauchamp (Beecham) family, a family of Black people working on a plantation, as enslaved people. We also have the Snopes and Bundren families, representing the “poor white trash.” With the Snopes family especially, he investigates the rise of the South. Very complicated family trees, spanning various generations. This county is based on Lafayette County, and its capital town is Oxford, Mississippi.
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The narrative voice is quite complicated and difficult to understand because it’s an example of interior monologue, a big innovation at the time, using stream of consciousness. He was the bravest in applying this innovation; he was among the first. The narrator changes; in the second chapter, it’s another one. In total, there are four chapters, each with a different narrator: Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and in the last, an omniscient narrator (more objective). The importance of thoughts. In the first chapter, the most obscure, Benjy is intellectually disabled and difficult to understand. In the second chapter, Quentin is an extremely intelligent person, whose mind is less complicated to follow. In the third, Jason’s thoughts are the easiest; he’s a simple boy, quite easy to follow. The fourth chapter shifts to an omniscient narrator, offering a more comprehensible perspective.
Three brothers remember the history of their family. Each one has common memories, but the history has different perspectives depending on the character. It’s very interesting for its experimentation with the narrative voice, using four different narrators. Faulkner is accused of many things: being a racist (using words like “negro”) and being a male chauvinist. In the fourth chapter, we have two key characters: Dilsey, the Black matriarch, and Candace (Caddy). Caddy is the center of the whole history, a character based on a little girl Faulkner saw covered in mud and dirt in a park. She is the central character because all the male characters are obsessed with her, each in a certain way. Two main motifs or ideas are constant: each brother’s obsession with Caddy, and each character’s relationship with time. Faulkner was a Modernist, very interested in time (related to Cubism, which divides time, not just space).
The chapters are structured as follows:
- Benjy, April 7, 1928.
- Quentin, June 2, 1910.
- Jason, April 6, 1928.
- Omniscient, April 8, 1928.
The narrative jumps in the past, making it difficult to establish chronological order. April 8 is Sunday, and it is Easter Sunday. This is very important because in the last chapter, Dilsey wants to go to church, and she has to take Benjy with her to the Black church. Jason has to run and follow his niece, Quentin, Caddy’s daughter. He wants to defend family honor, so he runs after her. The source of the title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, specifically the speech after Lady Macbeth’s death (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 19-24): “Life’s but a walking shadow… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In fact, in the first chapter, the narrator is intellectually disabled, and the whole novel sounds in fury. But does it signify nothing? Is it a kind of Modernist experiment? Benjy loves Caddy very much; most of the time, he does not talk. It’s his 34th birthday party, but he has the mind of a three-year-old. He only cries because he loves Caddy, and she’s gone, she’s disappeared.
Chapter 1
This explains the beginning of the novel. Chapter 1 has a quite simple style at the beginning, but Faulkner tries to reflect Benjy’s intellectual disability by using Latinate vocabulary. “By the flower tree”; he doesn’t know the name of the flower. Luster is a Black character; he tells Benjy not to cry. Benjy is crying because the use of the word “caddy” reminds him of her, the only person in the family who has given him love. The style here is very similar to Hemingway’s: very observational. Benjy is obsessed with Caddy, the only one who showed love towards him. The only moment he does not cry is when he’s picking flowers. The other motif is time: Benjy has no intelligence; he does not know what time is, and he has no concept of past, present, or future. All moments happen in this moment; because of this, we have free association. It’s difficult to follow, with many leaps in time. The importance of the dates in the novel, and Luster’s responsibility for taking care of Benjy. The Black family is associated with the white family; someone has to take care of the intellectually disabled, and Luster does. There’s a kind of show, and Luster wants money for a ticket to watch it.
The use of “shadows” helps to convey a conception of time, to know more or less when events take place. The change in the typing of letters indicates Benjy’s mind jumping back, remembering a time when he and Caddy were in the same fence and crawling. This memory is from Christmas, not April 1928. There are many references to Damuddy, a corruption of “grandmother.” There are particular moments when his mind keeps going back. Uncle Maury, an abbreviation for Maurice. Faulkner likes to make names very confusing. When Benjy was born, he was named after his grandfather, Maury, then changed to Benjy. At first, he was Maury. Why was his name changed? When they realized he was intellectually disabled, his mother didn’t want that name for him, thinking it might be denigrating. We also have two Quentins: the brother and Miss Quentin. This causes confusion with names, making the narrative difficult to follow. Miss Quentin only appears in Chapter 3. Caddy names Quentin to the doctor because she’s also obsessed with her brother. Quentin is so jealous that when he finds out she has sex with other boys, he gets angry. He commits suicide because she marries and is pregnant, and he cannot be the father. He wants to think he’s in love with Caddy, trying to convince her to commit suicide with him.
The novel reconstructs the family and analyzes their behaviors. Caroline Bascomb is tremendously sentimental. Quentin (the daughter) is abandoned by her mother. Jason has to take care of her; he is an evil character. When Caddy is going to get married, all the money goes to her and not to him, for going to the university. The problems of the parents are passed down to the children, a generational problem.
Chapter 2
Benjy is obsessed with Caddy; she represents love to him, and all his life is present. In Quentin’s case, he’s obsessed with her because he thinks he’s physically in love with her and thinks she loves him too. Physically and emotionally in love, he is also obsessed with time; he wants to escape from it, which is one of the reasons he commits suicide by drowning. Every time he sees a watch, he looks to the other side. This is very similar to Joyce. He keeps repeating “Father said,” and time is described as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.” His memory constantly remembers his sister, the marriage, trying to convince her to commit suicide together… Quentin is continually humiliating himself, remembering all these things, showing a lack of effectiveness. Differences between him and his father: his father has a better sense of humor about life; Quentin takes everything too seriously. Why does Quentin believe he’s in love with his sister? He believes his sister’s virginity represents the family’s honor. So he thinks it’s his duty as the big brother to preserve and protect it. He also tries to convince his father that if he could commit that terrible act, they would be left alone, both of them. Virginity is overrated, representing the family honor, a tremendous obsession.
At the end, Quentin suddenly asks Gerald if he has a sister. Gerald says he does not, and Quentin hits him. Gerald fights back and gives Quentin a black eye. Quentin finds a trolley and rides back to Harvard. In his room, Quentin cleans a bloodstain off his vest and thinks about his mother. He remembers the time he told his father he had committed incest with Caddy, and that his father did not believe him. His father told Quentin that his feelings of despair about Caddy’s behavior would quickly pass. The class bell rings outside. Quentin puts his watch in Shreve’s desk, brushes his teeth, takes up his hat, and leaves the room. Faulkner emphasizes the importance of time and memory in Quentin’s world through the frequent appearance of clocks and watches. Quentin is effectively trapped in time, obsessed with his past and memories. Additionally, Quentin repeatedly mentions walking into and out of shadows, which are constant reminders of time as gauged by the position of the sun throughout the course of a day.
Unlike Benjy, who is oblivious to time, Quentin is so obsessed and haunted by it that he sees suicide as his only escape. For instance, when Quentin encounters the Italian girl in the bakery, he refers to her as a “little dirty child,” which evokes a memory of Caddy. Faulkner implies that there is an unconscious sexual frustration between Quentin and Caddy, and that each of them might use his or her lovers to make the other jealous. Since Quentin is still a virgin, it seems likely that Caddy has made him far more jealous than he ever made her. While the shame of Caddy’s promiscuity is clearly upsetting to Quentin, his despair may also contain elements of jealous rage.