Afro-american voices in the great Gatsby a bakhtinian reading

Abstract

Underscoring the difficulty of implementing this complex theoretical framework in a literary analysis that could yield new readings of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (TGG), this research work resorted to Bakhtin's philosophical and epistemological conception of language and Literature in order to elucidate the way in which Fitzgerald included African-American issues in a short novel that has historically been analyzed as the chronicles of the Jazz Age. From a materialist conception of language use as living discourse, a voice, and of the novel as a diversity of individual voices and social languages artistically organized, a Bakhtinian reading allowed for an "active-dialogic understanding" (Bakhtin, 1986: 158) of the stylized discourses of race that Fitzgerald included in TGG, bringing in voices that speak of the African-American experience in the Twenties. The dialogic analysis of the stylistic units crafted around different chronotopic motifs showed that Fitzgerald anchored his fiction in the heteroglot empirical world of the Twenties Although at the margins, and not focusing on them, this Modernist author transposed into the novelistic world the African-American experience of segregation and resistance as another destabilizing social factor. Blacks are not invisible in this short novel; they are presented as subjects whose worldviews, not always voiced, enter in dialogic relationships with other worldviews and, from the margins, add up to the realization of Fitzgerald's account of the twenties in this literary work