Analysis Of Crack Up In The Great Gatsby

When Esquire magazine first published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s series of essays “The Crack-up”, “Pasting It Together” and “Handle With Care,” collectively know today as “The Crack-Up,” in the year 1936, the author was slammed with criticism by many prominent literary figures of the time. In all three essays, which share a similar tone, Fitzgerald gradually describes a “crack-up”— what he explains to be a physical breakdown characterized by lack of willingness and vitality to keep on fighting for success and a spiritual breakdown characterized by the loss of all motive and will to be generous and compassionate—he claims he prematurely suffered and suddenly realized. Fitzgerald presumes this slump as being analogous to a salt losing its flavor:

Indeed, “The Crack-up” is unlike any essays we read, because contrary to most other writers in their works, like Scott Russell Sanders in “Under the Influence,” where he reveals his father’s secret of alcoholism or Maxine Hong Kingston in “No Name Women,” where she discloses a family secret about something unjust that happened to her aunt, Fitzgerald is willing to convict himself instead. He explicitly declares his own absolute, catastrophic breakage, compares himself to a cracked and useless plate, and implies that he has no hopes of recovering from the breakage at all: “I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked…Hence this sequel—a cracked plate’s further history” (524) and “…at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of [his] soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day” (525). The essay also serves little than to reveal his breakdown; it seems to entirely be an account of cynic lament rather than his attempt to re-inspire and rejuvenate himself. But why would a writer of Fitzgerald’s merit and renown risk his image and career by advertising his own debility? And even more importantly, if his enervation was as critical as he

With high hopes for himself, Fitzgerald also seems to be unable to accept failures; for instance, even after more than a decade, he still has regrets for not being able to play football in college or to participate in the war and still fantasizes about them: “…my two juvenile regrets—at not being big or good enough to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war—resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep in restless nights” (520). Combined with this inability to move on after failures is his unwavering sense of pessimism. This is first evident at the start of the first essay where he implies how even a decade ago he didn’t have much hope for himself and a collapse was unavoidable: “I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’—and more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and high intention of the future” (520). Here, even though Fitzgerald talks about the “high intention” he claims he had for the future, he also seems to have a strong conviction that a slump was looming. Fitzgerald pessimism also