Course Paper Report

In my course paper, I explored racism within The Great Gatsby. My thesis was: Fitzgerald associates Gatsby with African Americans, Jews and immigrants and uses him as an example of discrimination within the upper class to prove that discrimination in the 1920s was not based exclusively on social status but actually on race. In order to prove my thesis, I researched the historical and cultural context of the novel. One source that was particularly helpful in that area of the “Tribal Twenties” and the rise in Nativism that was taking place during the 1920s was Jeffrey Louis Decker’s Gatsby's pristine dream: The diminishment of the self-made man in the tribal Twenties. I also provided examples of racist comments within the novel from both Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway. These comments include: Tom on the dominant race, Nick on the bridge and funeral procession as well as his comments about Meyer Wolfsheim.  I also provided a limited character evaluation of the two as well as Gatsby. An important source in locating these examples was Jackson Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale’s  Approaches toTeaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

            Nick Carraway was very important to my paper. He provided racial remarks throughout the novel; however his social status proved to be critical in proving my point that Fitzgerald compared Gatsby to African Americans, Jews and immigrants in order to make the point that social class was based on race rather than money. Nick is a prime example of a man in the upper class that has little money. He comes from a good family; therefore, his name reserves him a spot in the in the impenetrable upper class.