User:JFordyce/sandbox

I said earlier that there was much literary art in Fitzgerald’s apparent self- disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of angst and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1925) or Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, con- tested border. In an interesting  article in The Mailer Review, comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes, {{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self- understanding” that set the book apart from those of his s contemporaries and writers ever since It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her.