Abstract
T. Elliott, writer and critic, referred to The Great Gatsby, as the novel was first published in 1925, as "the first step that American fiction [had] taken since Henry James". Since this date, critics agree to emphasize it as a the most accomplished and mature book ever written by Fitzgerald. The novel was not only praised for its revolutionary topic, based on its ability to render the spirit of the Jazz Age, but more for its destabilizing pattern. In fact, it was immediately sacred as a turning-point in the author's career as well as a major contribution to the elaboration of modern novel. This revolution mainly consisted in a complete different comprehensiveness of the writing of a novel not only as a matter of imagination and style but as matter of pattern and a visceral need for realism. Strikingly, it seems that Fitzgerald intuitively anticipated the critic's judgement through this meaningful remark: "I'm writing something extremely beautiful and simple intricately patterned". Such a phrase wonderfully suggests and resumes the main feeling, that still resists several readings of the novel just three quarters of a century after it has been written : the mysterious impression of having touched and captured for a while the short-lived vision of existence, in its pure and burning reality. Fitzgerald succeeded in concentrating in 200 pages the drama of existence through the spirit of a circumscribed period.
So, beyond social considerations, which gave rise to varied and numerous critical works, it may be relevant to examine the technical and dramatic devices, that conditioned the nature of the novel, as a living and multi-dimensional piece.
