SOURCE: Eble, Kenneth E. “The Great Gatsby and the Great American Novel.” In New Essays on ‘The Great Gatsby,’ edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, pp. 79-100. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Eble places Gatsby in the tradition of the quest for an “American” literature.

1

In length, the book barely qualifies as a full-sized novel. In subject, it is about an American bootlegger who nourishes an adolescent dream about a golden girl he can't have. Its plot does little more than tell us who the protagonist is and get him killed off in the end by the down-and-out husband of the blowsy mistress of the rich brute who has married the girl whom the hero wants but can't have. Its manner of telling is disjointed, albeit by the literary design of the author, and accompanied by some seemingly casual moralizing by an omnipresent narrator sounding...