Prof John McRae’s lecture

• The chapter begins by describing a cacophonous noise. “I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams.” McRae thinks that this sums up the entire novel and its themes of reality and dreams. In this novel, dreams have been used to describe something positive, something attainable that is different from the real world. However, in this chapter, neither reality nor dreams are used positively.
• McRae compares the portrayal of deaths in Gatsby to Greek tragedies, in which deaths often occur off-stage.
• Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Gatsby’s death have an element of beauty and gentleness, which is contradictory to the tragedy. There are descriptions of the wind, the rippling water and the thin red circle.
• McRae says that it is not a tragedy of the jazz age, but a tragedy of miscommunication, missed dreams and corruption. It is a tragedy of epic consequences that happens on a small scale.