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Echoes of War: Trauma and Ineffability in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934)

Goublomme, Florette

(2021)

Details

Supervisors

De Bruyn, Ben

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enThis paper aims to demonstrate the importance of the First World War in two novels written by the modernist American writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, namely The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934). Although it is barely present in the plots of these two novels, the impact of the First World War is however visible. I therefore argue that war and the trauma it caused can be considered as ineffable. They are thus reflected in the novels through a subplot in order to preserve the importance of trauma and war in narratives that take place in the 1920s – also called the “Roaring Twenties” – while respecting the ineffable nature of war and trauma. After a state of the art, a theoretical section aims to define the important concepts in which the analysis of these two novels is anchored, i.e., trauma, ineffability, subplot, and Rothberg’s “implicated subject” (2019). The next sections are devoted to the analysis of each novel separately thanks to three levels of analysis. Through these levels we can perceive the importance of war and trauma in the novels. The three levels are the type of narration of the novels and their narrative structure, the representation of the society, and the recurring motifs. Both novels are then compared in the discussion that precedes the conclusion in order to observe the evolution of the representation of the First World War in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.