Department of English
Knowledge through Fiction: Characters as Social Metaphors in
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Sebastian Vaca Vink Magisters Essay Literature Fall Term, 2020
Abstract
While it is common to relate to fictional characters, there is a common view that this is all that fiction can provide us with and that we cannot learn from fiction. There are arguments to support this claim, such as the no-evidence argument and the fiction-distortion argument. They claim that due to the nature of the production of fiction and fictional characters, we cannot learn from them. However, fictional characters can be used as a springboard to teach students about many different topics, such as historical periods, different cultures and attitudes. To do this, one should look at the characters as social metaphors. Characters as social metaphors work as labels to teach us about different social types that we can use to understand our friends and enemies. This effect is called the fiction-to-world relation by Noël Carroll and will be used in this essay to analyze different characters from The Great Gatsby and see what they can teach us about the 1920s in the U.S. The Great Gatsby works as a good base novel for this type of analysis because it was produced in the same era it depicts. Furthermore, this essay will fill a gap in research done relating to The Great Gatsby by using this type of text or character analysis and relating it to how it can be used in Swedish Upper secondary school in an effective way to reach the aims for English 7 set forth by Skolverket. As the text and specifically characters were subjected to the analysis, it became clear that one could see traits and trends that would give students insight into the 1920s. Furthermore, this newly acquired knowledge could be used as a springboard for further research for students to find out more about the attitudes, social class struggles and society in general during the roaring 20s.
Introduction
Learning and the acquisition of new knowledge are two fundamental pillars in school and teaching. With this goal in mind, teachers at the upper secondary school level in Sweden aim is to educate students to the best of their abilities. Besides their own abilities and preferred methods, teachers use guidelines and goals presented by Skolverket (Skolverket, 2020), to make sure that their students are given the opportunity to learn new subjects and develop as thinkers, as well as are given the tools to be able to extract knowledge from different sources presented to them during their academic lives but also in their future adult lives.
PISA-surveys concluded, one of the three most important things is “ensuring that the system is able to deliver the best possible instruction for every child” (Lundahl 2014, 33). Due to the fact that students have different kinds of interest and levels of motivation of language learning and acquisition, teachers must find different strategies and tasks to help and allow our students to become more involved and actually help themselves to find enjoyment in language learning.
According to Skolverket in their stated goals for the English subject in upper secondary school, the teaching “should aim at helping students to develop knowledge of language and the surrounding world so that they have the ability, desire and confidence to use English in different situations and for different purposes” (Skolverket, 2020). This means that besides just language acquisition, one of our aims as teachers should also be to teach them about the surrounding world. The aim is to give students the ability and confidence, the tools to use English, but also the desire to use English for different purposes and this is done through general language acquisitions tasks and exposure to many different types of English-speaking media, such as movies, radio, music, literature and more. However, the above stated aim for English is based in a general manner on the goals of the subject as a whole. As a teacher, one has to look at the more specific goals on the different English courses that are available for students in upper secondary school, English 5, 6 and 7. Depending on which of these courses one is teaching, there are different goals to reach and thus one’s teaching method and strategy have to change. However, one of the common aspects of teaching English in upper secondary school is that it is usually not focused as much on vocabulary and grammatical teaching as in lower secondary school or primary school is. It focuses more on different types of resources as a basis for more advanced acquisition.
to find all of these different points of views and this creates the possibility for them to find and acquire new knowledge that they in turn can share with their peers in class discussions. The most common way of doing this could be to look at different historical texts and then choose a focus and try to see what information they can find. However, I believe that this can easily bore students especially the ones that lack motivation from the start and furthermore, those who lack interest in history. I believe that fiction can serve as a better way to peak these interests. With the right selection of texts, students can find it more interesting to read a fictional story with fun and interesting themes instead of looking at a dry, factual historical text that might not interest them at all. However, it is important to note that there are some arguments against using fiction for teaching. One could argue that we cannot learn from fiction. Mainly due to the fact that fiction is made up, so it does not have to represent something real. Furthermore, a text is always biased depending on the author’s own point of views. For example, an anti-communist author will portray a anti-communist in the worst possible way (Carroll 2016, 8). Another argument that could be made is that because characters in fictional text serve as functions to further a story, one cannot take their actions as a direct representation of real life. However, Noël Carroll presents us with an interesting theory as to why we can learn from fiction. He calls it the “fiction-to-world relation” (Carroll 2016, 3). The “fiction-to-world relation” brings to light the fact that throughout history, fictional characters have worked as concepts, helping us to recognize different social types, and through this bettering our own understanding of our own environment and furthermore helping us understand our friends and our enemies (Carroll, 2016, 4). He calls these types of characters “social metaphors” and discusses how they are used as “labels of social types” (Carroll 2016, 4). The example Carroll uses is Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. One might refer to someone as a “Scrooge” referring to how that person is mean and selfish. With this, Carroll suggests that we can learn, by reading about Scrooge, to recognize people with the same characteristics (Carroll 2016, 5). The counter arguments mentioned previously are called, by Carroll, the “No-Evidence” and the “Fiction-Distortion” arguments (Carroll 2016, 7).
point is that the characters we are trying to learn from are not actual people. They are simply made up (Carroll 2016, 8). So, to summarize the No-evidence argument, “not only is the evidential base of the motivational behavioral complex of traits manifested in the fiction woefully meagre statistically; insofar as the character is made up, it is questionable whether the author has any adequate evidence for his/her characterization of the alleged social type in question” (Carroll 2016, 8). The second counter argument is the “Fiction-Distortion” argument. The “Fiction-distortion argument questions whether fictional characters can give us knowledge of the social types in the real world insofar as fiction characters are typically designed to play various narrational roles and given this function, they are not reliable portraits of actual human motivation and behavior” (Carroll 2016, 8). Examples of this can be characters behaving or acting in a certain way for the purpose of the story and not because an actual person would act that way. Carroll responds to both of these counter arguments. The No-evidence argument assumes that it is empirical knowledge that can be gained from fictions. However, Carroll maintains that “learning need not merely be a matter of knowledge, empirical or otherwise. It may also involve acquiring the ability to recognize or notice something previously beyond one’s ken and gleaning some sense of how that something hangs together as unity” (2016, 10). Furthermore, Carroll states that even though the fiction-distortion argument is valid, that the actions and behaviors of fictional characters are often determined by their function in the narrative instead of their psychology, the argument has never been “that we learn from all fictional characters or from all fictions, but only that we learn from some” (Carroll 2016, 12).
understanding of society that it is trying to convey. To find a suitable novel, where one can find a clear representation of historical reality, that also helps us understand social dynamics through representation, it could be wise to choose a novel that is produced during the time it is portraying. One novel that fits well into this description, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In The Great Gatsby we can see many characters that could be seen as social metaphors. To further explore Noël Carroll’s argument that we can learn about different social types in our world through fictional characters as social metaphors, I suggest that we can use social metaphors in fiction as a starting point in school for acquiring historical and cultural knowledge. In this essay, I will argue that we can teach how to recognize social metaphors in fiction and their function in relation to how writers create character types to capture cultural dynamics. The focus of this analysis is on how character types are used in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.
Background
novel is used in schools are: Exploring cultural and historical contexts, narrative, structure and style as well as strategies and resources (Bryer & VanArsdale 2009, 156). These three categories can cover a large portion of what a teacher might feel is needed in regard to the aims of English 7.
When it comes to literary analysis in school, it is important for us as teachers to give our students the right tools to allow them to become proficient readers. For example, an experienced reader might be able to “attend to the symbols and motifs in The Great Gatsby and, knowing the history of that era” draw assumptions about different characters in the novel (Alston & Baker 2014, 62). It is not uncommon for proficient readers, in this context, teachers, to have “what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call the “expert blind spot,” where proficient readers, who have forgotten what it feels like to read a text for the first time, underestimate the cognitive work needed to make sense of that text (Alston & Baker 2014, 62). Because of this, it is of utmost importance that we, as teachers put ourselves in the shoes of our students and understand what type of instructions and tools that they need to allow themselves to become better readers but also so they can perform the tasks that they might face in the classroom. Bryer and VanArsdale, state that we as teachers want our students to understand historical contexts, examine complex characterizations, to interpret cultural critiques, to analyze narrative structure as well as being able to hear the intonations of its lyrical language (Bryer & VanArsdale 2009, 155). However, this essay will mainly focus on historical contexts as well as cultural critiques but also on the use of figurative language in the sense of Fitzgerald’s use of social metaphors.
Previous work on Gatsby
Great Gatsby after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film of the same name. Furthermore, he discusses how the novel “resonates more in the Obama era than it ever did in the Jazz Age” and the reason for it (Vogel 2015, 29). As the novel saw more and more use in American schools, new research regarding how it could be used in schools began to take shape. More general ones such as Reading for teaching: What We Notice When We Look at Literature by Chandra Alston and Lisa Barker and Choosing What we Teach: Judging Value in Literature by John Pfordresher. To more specific ones focusing on The Great Gatsby such as Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale to Gatsby: False Prophet of the American Dream by Roger Pearson discussing the fact that the American dream as a concept is filled with optimism and sense of fulfillment, and that Fitzgerald who is considered one of the authors that focuses on the American dream has a unique expression of the American dream that lacks these concepts (Pearson 1970, 638). Furthermore, a text that will become useful for this essay’s discussion part is What Matters: Meeting Content Goals through Teaching Cognitive Reading Strategies with Canonical Texts by Mary Styslinger, Julianne Ware, Charles Bell and Jesse Barrett. Regardless of this text focusing on English content goals, it can still be connected to the content goals in Swedish Upper secondary schools.
Theories and Method
that we avoid the “expert blind spot” and give our students the necessary tools, both when dealing with reading comprehension as well as historical knowledge. As a teacher in both English and History, I find it very easy to do this type of close reading, but this insight also allows me to understand the fact that students are not capable of the same type of analysis without my help. To provide students with the proper historical context the teacher must supply them with various sources that they can use to engage the text in a better way. This can be done through different types of media, such as websites, historical texts, photographs, films or books that can provide historical context but also help them understand the social dynamics at play during the roaring twenties.
To guide us in finding social metaphors, we look at Noël Carroll’s definition: “a cluster of traits, drives, motivations, and behaviors that we can use to illuminate real world colleagues and strangers” (Carroll 2016, 6). One example that Carroll uses is Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol. To find social metaphors, we have to look for behaviors in characters, the traits that they display in the novel and the motivation behind their actions. This is of utmost importance, because that will lead us to a connection with the historical and cultural context of the novel. As mentioned previously, Carroll discusses the world-to-fiction as well as the fiction-to-world relation. In this essay and close reading, the focus is on the fiction-to-fiction-to-world relation. This is because we are looking at what insights the fiction can give us about the world and not the other way around. However, it is important to see how fiction is almost always approached by a reader with both the world-to-fiction and the fiction-to-world relation.
Close reading
by character as to not make the analysis confusing. Two quotes per character have been chosen and will be analyzed to show traits that can be seen as having historical implications and according to Fitzgerald was shown in people during the roaring 20s. At the end of the close reading, a discussion part will summarize and analyze the information that has been gathered through close reading.
Jay Gatsby
him, believed that it would allow Daisy to love him and ending up with them being together. In his mind, the only reason that he and Daisy have not been able to be together before this moment is because he lacked wealth. However, the aspect of a difference in social class is still in the way of them being able to be together. Furthermore, the fact that Gatsby and Daisy, as will be discussed later, both possesses selfish traits creates a wedge in their relationship, maybe without them noticing it. Gatsby is very selfish because he disregards other people’s feelings. He sees Daisy as a thing that he needs to acquire to become complete, completely disregarding what she feels or believes. Gatsby’s story is told from Nick Carraway’s point of view. He is the narrator of the story and can be considered unreliable. His class position is important because it is different from both Gatsby’s and Daisy’s. As the narrator, he aspires to be an impartial observer of how the two protagonists’ dreams are shaped by their class belonging. However, Nick Carraway is also a character in the story, which makes his narration far from impartial.
Nick Carraway
wealthy life. The first female character that we will look at is Daisy Buchanan. She is Nick’s cousin, and she comes from a good family with a good reputation. She used to be in love with Gatsby but is now married to Tom Buchanan, who comes from an even more influential family.
Daisy Buchanan
might be seen as an extension of Fitzgerald himself. Much as the previous quote, this one also discusses the effect that her voice has on certain people: “[She had] the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. . . . [T]here was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour” (Fitzgerald, 12). Again, Daisy’s voice is in focus. An excitement in her voice that men have a hard time to forget. Much like she is for Gatsby, her voice acts as a promise that good things are going to happen. But as we can see with Gatsby and with Daisy herself, she is actually quite the insecure and careless person. She needs someone that can provide for her, the things that she feels that she needs in her life. In the end she chooses materialism and social class standing before the love that she has for Gatsby. Although it is quite hard to fault her for this since she is put off by Gatsby’s almost fanatic approach and demands on her at the end of the novel. It can be said that Daisy is quite a careless person, with no regard to other people’s feeling. She is secure in her social class, and it is hard for anyone to really bring harm to that. But she seems to take enjoyment in acting as a sort of bait for men, to make them believe that they can “get” her, which in reality they will never be able to because of the society’s rules that basically prevents anyone from really and truly making a class journey. On the other hand, one could say that Daisy is just looking out for herself and that she knows what she wants in life. Maybe she sees life as a jungle and you have to live by the law, eat or be eaten. We now move on to Daisy’s better, or perhaps worse half, Tom Buchanan. Tom is portrayed as a brutish man and even though he sometimes seems to believe it, he is not an academic person. He is brutish in many aspects of his life, and he is constantly longing for new thrills to make his existence matter to himself.
Tom Buchanan
although he can never achieve this. Meanwhile Tom searches for the dramatic turbulence that football used to give him. He manages to get a taste of this by having dramatic turbulence in his private life. Mainly by having an affair with Myrtle but also by the fact that his wife and Jay Gatsby starts an affair of their own. We learn from the novel that Tom has had affairs and been unfaithful to Daisy since the start of their marriage. Tom is obviously against the affair that Daisy has with Gatsby, but it does not seem that he is as much against it as one might think he should be. As we can see in this quote, he longs for dramatic turbulence that in some ways can give meaning back to his life, so this affair comes almost like a saving grace. Tom, like many other characters that have been discussed in this section, only sees his own interests in life, and disregards the sort of effects it can have on other people’s lives. However, the main problem he has with the fact that he might lose Daisy, is the person he might potentially lose her to. There is no way that he can accept Daisy leaving him, the great Tom Buchanan, for a newly rich and potentially criminal Gatsby, simply for the fact that it would be beneath him. The last character this analysis will look at is quite different than the others. While the rest of the characters are playing a main part in the novel, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of Wilson the mechanic, cannot be considered a main character. This is not to say that she is not playing a major role, she just cannot be considered a main character in the same sense as Gatsby, Daisy, Nick and Tom can. Furthermore, Myrtle is also the only character that one can say belongs to the lower or working class.
Myrtle Wilson
Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. (Fitzgerald, 39)
We know that Myrtle belongs to the working class, in part because she is married to Wilson but also by the way Nick describes her in the book. However, this quote shows us that she owns expensive cloths, purchased by Tom, signaling her upward mobility. By her changing out of her old cloths to her new and more expensive ones, not only does her appearance change, but also her personality. She goes from being the wife of a poor garage owner to a wealthy man’s mistress. She obviously loves “being” higher social class, and sees this as something positive, even if it is just an illusion since she is not actually moving up in social class, merely putting on a façade. Her change into fancy and expensive clothes makes her feel equal to Daisy and much like Gatsby, she is fooled by wealth, believing that money is the one thing that creates the difference between them, Tom and Daisy. She even adopts an “impressive hauteur”, a sort of arrogance after changing clothes, further strengthening her feeling of change. The intense vitality that Nick expresses can be seen as a link between her and Tom. As mentioned previously, Tom is seeking something to give his life some meaning, and perhaps it is this vitality that Myrtle provides, that he feels gives him at least some sense of meaning and importance. Considering that Tom could probably pick any woman of his choosing, how come then that it is specifically Myrtle? On the one hand, it can very well be the vitality that she provides but also the fact that she belongs to such a different part of society than he and his wife does. This considerably lowers the chance of this affair to having any major impact on his “real” life. It might also be a part of the times, considering that the female role in society is a lot lower and less meaningful than today. However, it would still be the “wrong” thing to do, to flaunt one’s affair even if it is common knowledge.
At one point, she speaks with exasperation about a servant “I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.” (Fitzgerald, 41). After Myrtles “transformation” from working class to” upper class” she shows her disdain for other people in her own social class. By complaining about servants, she displays one of her biggest wishes and it clearly signals that she has a desire to be Tom Buchanan’s social equal, which she clearly isn’t. Her role is dependent on him and is not one that she herself has “earned”. Much like we mentioned previously, she falsely considers herself to be equal, socially, to Daisy.
Gatsby and Myrtle have one thing in common, the idea that they both want to rise in the social order and are not happy with the class they were born into. However, it is significant to note that though they share this idea, the one thing that fundamentally sets them apart from each other is the fact that Gatsby is a man, and Myrtle, as a woman can do little to change her lot in life without the help from a man.
Discussion
into a good family, and married into an even better one, but in the end, she is a woman. She is dependent on her husband for most things and without him, she is not the same. However, she is seemingly fine with this role that society allows her to have, and maybe it is because of societal pressure that she in the end, does not risk everything and go with Gatsby, but instead stays with Tom. It is important to note what social metaphors can be seen in the close reading and try to categorize what characters belong to each and what traits they possess. The first social metaphor that we can see is not necessarily bound to one specific character. Instead, it is something that we can find in both of the characters that belong to the upper class, Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Both Tom and Daisy show similar traits. They are both experiencing their lives as dull and they are seeking thrills. However, this is displayed in different ways. Daisy uses her voice and her personality to instill hope in other people, more specifically men. As mentioned previously, she is baiting men into believing they can be with her and that everything will be good and perfect. In some ways she is almost a representation of what society seemed to be during the 20s. Tom, however, does the same by having an affair with Myrtle, where he gives her, even though it can be seen as unintentional, a sense of hope and promise. She feels as she is moving up in social class standing by being Tom’s mistress even though this is not the case. Tom sees her as a way for him to gain that thrill that is missing from his life, disregarding the fact that he is unfaithful to his own wife but also that Myrtle is unfaithful to her husband.
not, and the reasons for his success in life is simple, he wanted to be worthy of Daisy and that Daisy would see him as worthy of her. Myrtle on the other hand is simply dissatisfied with her life. She married the wrong man according to herself, and she uses Tom as a way to leave her dull life in the ash heaps behind, to live a completely different one in the city. When she comes to the city, and changes clothes to the more expensive ones that Tom has bought her, she completely changes as a person. She now sees herself as more than she actually is, she feels that she now possesses the same thing that Daisy has, and that Tom sees her differently. This is however not true. It is possible to see similarities between these social metaphors that one could say, creates a third social metaphor. This social metaphor, however, is broader and could be said to cover all the characters that have been looked at in the analysis. All the characters are reaching for something that is seemingly unattainable for them, however, they live under the illusion that they can achieve it. For Myrtle and Nick, it’s the upwards class mobility, for Gatsby its gaining Daisy’s affection, and for Tom it can be to relive the glory days and for Daisy it’s gaining purpose with their lives.
Pedagogical reflection
the important topics and themes that are presented in the novel (Styslinger et al 2014, 56). According to Barret, “Students were expected to evaluate the relationships among character, plot, and theme; analyze the effect of the author’s craft on the meaning of the literary text; and evaluate devices of figurative language”, and to accomplish these learning goals, Barret engaged students “in the process of questioning, visualizing, and connecting” (Styslinger et al 2014, 56). Besides these strategies that were introduced by the teacher, the student was also was given the task of listing five other strategies that they had not used when reading the novel but that they had used in the past, dealing with other literature (Styslinger et al 2014, 56). This exercise was done as to show the students what type of strategies that they can use when approaching a difficult text. By first listing the difficulties that they could find, they could collaborate in smaller groups on how to overcome the difficulties. Besides making them aware of different strategies, they were also engaged in being teachers for each other.
the benefit of studying a time period that is not too far away from our time. Furthermore, in English 7, one of the aims is to discuss and teach about ethical and existential questions (Lundahl 2014, 111). One could easily see why the social metaphors in The Great Gatsby can be used to discuss these questions and the overarching cultural goal of the English language as a subject is for the students to “discuss and reflect over living conditions, societal questions and cultural phenomena” (Lundahl 2014, 124). When planning a lesson then, a teacher has to first make sure that his/her students have the appropriate level of reading comprehension required for the type of text that is to be used. This can be done by using the type of exercise or structure in a lesson that Barrett has shown.
can be used by the students to increase comprehension. Furthermore, historical texts, pictures and all different kinds of media can be used to give the students a general look into how life was back then. Later the students could be divided into smaller groups, to deal with one character each. Discuss and use the traits of that character that they can find in the novel and try to find historical or cultural reasons for why their specific character acts the way he/she does or maybe why they are portrayed by the author in the way they are.
different kinds and for different purposes, such as agreements, in-depth articles and scientific texts” (Skolverket, 2020).
Conclusion
In this essay, we have explored Noël Carroll’s argument that we can learn about different social types in our world through fictional character as social metaphors. We have taken this a step further by showing how we can use social metaphors in fiction to teach students how to acquire historical and cultural knowledge in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. Through a close reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby we found different social metaphors presented through the characters. These metaphors displayed a picture of the roaring 20’s, where social class injustice was prevalent, people from different social classes grew bored of their lives, longing for excitement and change. The longing for upward social class mobility was noticeable in the characters belonging to the lower and middle class. Furthermore, a disregard for consequences could be seen in the characters belonging to the upper class, however one could also see traces of this in all characters.
Furthermore, in this essay we have also discussed how social metaphors that we can find in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby can be a good
springboard for classroom activates to develop historical and cultural knowledge in our students, as well as reaching the English 7 core content goals in Swedish Upper Secondary Schools. This has been done by doing a close reading into different characters in the novel and discussing how their traits, motivations and attitude make them social metaphors that we in turn can use to better our understanding of our own world. This close reading has then been discussed in mainly a historical context and why historical context is important to have to be able to do a close reading in a better way. A pedagogical discussion focusing on reading comprehension as well as the English 7 core content have been discussed and shown what type of classroom activities a teacher should engage their students in to stimulate learning and comprehension when dealing with fiction.
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