Great Gatsby thesis statements: The great Gatsby character

Ninety years have passed since the publication of one of the most famous novels in American literature: ‘The Great Gatsby’, by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. And resuscitates an eccentric theory about its protagonist

Ninety years after its publication, it revives the most eccentric theory about Fitzgerald’s novel: that its protagonist was in fact an African-American posing as a white man. Neither Robert Redford nor Leonardo DiCaprio. Carlyle van Thompson would like to see Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx starring in the next film version of The Great Gatsby. Now that the book, which laid the model for the great American novel, has just turned ninety, it has returned to the ring the most eccentric academic theory that exists on the matter: that Gatsby is really a black man posing as a white man and that the novel actually tells the story of a racial skirmish.

According to the great Gatsby thesis statement, the main and almost sole champion of that theory is the aforementioned Carlyle van Thompson, an adjunct professor at Medgar Evers College, a small community center in New York, which has been broadcasting it to his students for years, and irritating most of the students along the way, biographers and scholars of Scott Fitzgerald.

Everything started at the end of the nineties. “Studying the novel, I began to ask my student about which ethnic group is the protagonist and the answer was always white, but they did not have any evidence to support their theory. That made me starts a two-year investigation that even led me to consult the original facsimile, “says the professor by e-mail. That is to say, Thompson challenges the theory of race by default, which leads anyone to assume that, if their ethnicity is not mentioned, they are white. Toni Morrison played with that deliberately in her novel Paradiso, which starts with the phrase “they killed the white girl first”, without ever mentioning who is white and who is black.

In that process and in line with the great Gatsby thesis statement, Thompson discovered all the evidence that he ended up collecting in the book The Tragic Black ‘Buck’: Jay Gatsby’s ‘Passing’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. For example, that Gatsby owns forty acres, just like freed slaves, who were given forty acres of land and a mule; or that gives the impression that he cuts his hair every day, something he would do to keep at bay any curl that betrayed his blackness.

The great Gatsby thesis

The professor counted the times (apparently many) that the yellow color is mentioned in the novel, symbolic of the light-skinned African-Americans who were known as high yellow, and he noticed the character’s association with jazz and New Orleans. In addition, on one occasion they refer to their body “brown” and in another to their tan. The suggestion of Negritude on the part of Scott Fitzgerald would also work by association. Every time an African-American character appears, like the “three modern blacks, two boys and a girl” or a “pale, well-dressed black”, Gatsby is there or has just left the scene.

At one point in the novel, Tom Buchanan says that the millionaire is a “dark” individual and Jordan replies that “we are all white here,” but Jordan is a known liar. We must not forget, either, that the protagonist of the novel has changed its name, from “Gatz” to “Gatsby”, as those who left their lives behind did, and tells Nick Carraway, the narrator, that his family is “dead”. According to Thompson, that is also indicative of those who decided to make the passing, the crossing of the racial frontier, which happened to be symbolically dead for their entire environment. “Beyond all that, what proves it is the structure of the novel,” says the professor.

And if Gatsby is black, why did Fitzgerald never say anything about it? According to Thompson thesis statement for the great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was especially anxious about the so-called miscegenation (miscegenation), a hot topic in North America in 1925. A few years earlier, a racist pamphlet entitled The Rise of the Colored Empire had been published as a best-seller warning against the contamination of the white race. The book appears in fact mentioned in The Great Gatsby in the mouth of Tom Buchanan, who is ridiculed by his wife Daisy, the heroine, for defending white supremacy.

Most Fitzgerald scholars are not exactly fans of this attempt to problematize the text. His principal biographer, now deceased, Matthew J. Bruccoli, said it was “madness”; accused Thompson of wanting to attract attention and promote his academic career and declared that “if Fitzgerald had wanted to write about a black character, he would have said it in April 1925”, noting that “this type of games are bad for literature, Bad for Fitzgerald, bad for The Great Gatsby and bad for the students who are exposed “.

The author of the thesis statement for the great Gatsby answers that most academics “have a very narrow vision and have not even read the entire study.” In his opinion, we should not look so much at the class dimension but at the race, since the 1920s were key years for this issue. “The problem is not so much in the book but in the films that have been made, that have fixed their image, in the heroic nature of the character and its impact in the literary world. All this makes it difficult for it to be understood as a passing story “.

Thesis for the great Gatsby by John Horn

Recently, another author, the Canadian John Horn, who writes the interesting blog Rambrary Rambrary, gave credibility to the theory of black Gatsby – as well as the much more widespread and supported that believes that Nick Carraway is gay – and remembered that Fitzgerald could have your reasons for not explaining it. Same as D.H. Lawrence faced justice for obscenity in Elamante from Lady Chatterley and E.M. Forster had to publish (very) posthumously his homosexual romance Maurice, the author could have wanted to avoid being accused of promoting interracial relationships, illegal at that time in the United States.

Jay Gatsby may not be one of them, but the biographies of the tens of thousands of people, from the liberation of slaves until barely thirty years ago, embarked on this path of imposture would surely give for a handful of large (or small) ) American novels. According to the thesis statements for the great Gatsby, in a book published just a few months ago, a chosen exile a history of passing in American life, Allyson Hobbs collects some of these lives and tries to reframe them as stories of loss. Despite the difficulty in the investigation, since if the passing was successful, there was no evidence of who practiced it, unearth stories such as Elsie Roxborough, a poet and lover of social life that was renamed Mona Manet and that, after dating the black writer Langston Hughes, decided to pass as white and wrote to him his intention to “leave the race of color.” When she committed suicide, years later, only her white relatives attended the funeral. Or that o Dr. Albert Johnson, who, unable to practice medicine after graduating in 1924, decided to live as a target. He and his wife became the pillars (targets) of his conservative community until one day his son let go a racist comment. “Well, you are black,” the father replied, starting a trip back to his origin.