I was always wondering if there was a prototype for this Character that Fitzgerald knew in real life. It is kinda obvious that Nick is actually Fitzerald and as a popular novelist he sure had bunch of rich pals to party with. Could this be actually a real story?
shareRobert Kerr for the backstory and Max Gerlach, a WWI officer and bootlegger. Gerlach wrote a note to Fitzgerald that ended by calling him "old sport".
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Yes, himself in a way. He succeeded in a way that Jay Gatsby couldn't, but he was always an outsider too...which makes for his brilliant social observations in his works.
shareFitzgerald is both Nick and Gatsby, the others people have mentioned he used merely to mask it and make them their own character. Fitzgerald was a dichotomy, in some ways he wanted to be Nick, but the pull of Gatsby and his "it" factor, no matter the cost, coupled with an insatiable goal of attaining a love he was deemed as beneath her stature parallels his life. He could see it as Nick, but had to, or I should say, wanted to be Gatsby.
If you're really interested I could write way more, but that's the truth in a nutshell.
Source: skipped 70% of my lectures at Berkeley to read everything about him, including manuscripts/facsimiles most have never seen at Berkeley/Princeton. I even own one. Hopes that helps. Yes, I'm sort of obsessed.
Thanks for your interesting response. I have a question for you regarding Gatsby's accent. Leo actually impressed me a lot in this role, and he made me really empathize with Gatsby. However, if I remember correctly, he was from North Dakota.
So my question is, why the southern accent? It seemed to be something Baz wanted, because "young Gatsby" also had that accent by the time he rescued the millionaire on Lake Superior. Was it considered more "gentlemanly" to have that accent? Were his parents from the south originally? Maybe Baz just has no *beep* clue about regional dialects in America? I just don't get it.
Gatsby's accent was a put-on. He wanted to seem like old money. One of the instances where DiCaprio's inability to completely nail an accent actually works in his favor.
shareHe was never seen as good enough by Zelda's family, and always felt his middle class background was an embarrassment.
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