What Does The Car Symbolize In The Great Gatsby

When I was a boy," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn."1 Fitzgerald would have to wait until 1931 to sit beside the wheel of his own Stutz, but by then he was no longer young, but middle-aged; the car was not new, but second-hand; and it was not red but blue.

"Begin to feel lack of automobile,"2 reads Fitzgerald's Ledger for July 1912, when Scott was only fifteen. Throughout the life of the Ledger, in numerous entries, Fitzgerald records his automotivehistory: "cartroubles," "soldcar," "boughtcar," "carfreezing," "car broken," "car busted," etc. The cars in Fitzgerald's life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy

In the very expensive category there is Gatsby's Rolls Royce, driven by a chauffeur in a robin's-egg blue uniform. In his comic satire on the American Dream, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," Fitzgerald combines the ñames of two of the most expensive luxury cars of his time—the Rolls Royce and the Pierce—to convey the penchant of America's economic élite for conspicuous consumption: "St. Midas' School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motor-car," Fitzgerald wrote.

Fitzgerald, ever the social historian, was keenly attuned to the social distinctions generated by the possession of the 'right' automobile. In The Beautiful and the Damned Anthony Patch observes that "all the newest and most beautiful design in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue," but when it comes to buy one of his own, he purchases a cheap new roadster, which he later refers to with contempt as "a farmer's car."15 Fitzgerald's protagonists of all ages are keenly aware of the social statements that their cars

In The Great Gatsby, for example, the only car to be seen in George Wilson's garage is "the dust-covered wreck of a Ford."18 Because the novel is set in 1922, the car most likely is a Model T, for that is the only model Ford manufactured during the previous fourteen years. The "farmer's flivver" that Anthony Patch sees in The Beautiful and the Damned19 is unquestionably a Model T. "Fliwer" in today's usage refers to any small, inexpensive car, but originally, dictionaries of slang tell us, it referred only to the Model T.20 In his stories written during the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald scoffs at the fliwer and those who drive it. In "The