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F. Scott Fitzgerald likely gleaned the title for his magnum opus The Great Gatsby from an enigmatic passage in Joseph Conrad 's Lord Jim, in which the eponymous character is said to be "of great gabasidy" - a polyglot's pronunciation of great capacity. But the parallels between Conrad and Fitzgerald 's novels go well beyond the title, most notably in the way that Fitzgerald fashions Gatsby in the image of Jim. Moreover, both Conrad and Fitzgerald meditate on Jim's and Gatsby's "capacity," which they imbue with a romantic optimism that forestalls the traumas of the past. Fitzgerald utilizes Conrad and his protagonist as a model for how to place a conventionally romantic character within a text that is otherwise preoccupied with modernist forms and themes.
Keywords: F. Scott Fitzgerald / Joseph Conrad / transatlantic modernism / Lord Jim / The Great Gatsby
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
FScott Fitzgerald labored over the title of his third novel, fretting that The Great Gatsby (1925) failed to capture the complex tone and themes of his project. Along with "The Great Gatsby" and "Gatsby," he flirted with naming the novel "Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires," "Trimalchio," "Trimalchio in West Egg," "On the Road to West Egg," "Gold-Hatted Gatsby," and "The High-Bouncing Lover" (Bruccoli 206-7). Although he was invested in the idea of alluding to Trimalchio's story in the title, Fitzgerald was persuaded away from the erudite allusion by his wife Zelda and his editor Maxwell Perkins.1 Even in March 1925, just a month before publication, Fitzgerald was still trying to change the title of the novel, first to "Gold-Hatted Gatsby" or "Trimalchio" and then to "Under the Red, White, and Blue" (Bruccoli 216). By this time, however, Perkins told him that it was too late to make further alterations. Upon publication, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins, saying, "The title is only fair, rather bad than good " (qtd. in Bruccoli 217). In contrast, Perkins writes that he "always thought that 'The Great Gatsby' was a suggestive and effective title" (qtd. in Bruccoli 191). While neither Fitzgerald nor Perkins explicitly lays claim to its origin, their correspondence suggests that the...