"The Great Gatsby and Carnival in a Bakhtinian Perspective"

This essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Rabelais and His World, and The Dialogic Imagination to re-read F. Scott Fitzerald’s The Great Gatsby. After pointing out affinities between The Great Gatsby and Petronius’ Satyricon in terms of certain themes, aspects of narrative viewpoint and overall ethical evaluation, the essay identifies elements of the carnival chronotope in Fitzgerald’s novel and stresses how they allow him to represent the corruption underlying the capitalistic American society of the 1920s. The essay also relates the conceptualization of Myrtle Wilson to “rococo carnivalesque” and analyzes Jay Gatsby’s experiences in terms of the central carnivalistic act of “crowning and decrowning.”