DA NARRATIVA AO CINEMA: O RETORNO TRIUNFAL DE JAY GATSBY

Abstract

In this symposium, whose central theme is the study of character as a fundamental category of literary discourse, we propose to revisit Gatsby, the main character of the novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925 by the American writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. Gatsby has enchanted generations of readers through the decades and became an iconic character not only in the United States literature. He is an emblematic character in the panorama of literary studies because of the debates that he raised and still raises about individual and collective values. He is a character who challenged the American Dream myth and who rose to international fame by printing your name in the gallery of the great characters.

The popularity of Gatsby broke the literary boundaries migrating to other media spaces including film, television, theater, comics, computer games, ballet and opera, among other examples of these productive intertextual and interdisciplinary relations that emerged from the reading of Fitzgerald’s novel.

This article based on the theories of post-classical narratology – especially the one developed by Henriette Heidbrink studying the characters in different media – has as its object of study the reconfiguration of Gatsby from literature to the big screen. It argues that character’s permanence and its excellent reception from the public is due in part to his tremendous capacity of reconfiguration in different media. This aspect is the factor that explains the success of a character who literally survived eight decades after his author’s death.