“' . . and the long secret extravaganza was played out': 'The Great Gatsby' and Carnival in a Bakhtinian Perspective”

After pointing out various fundamental affinities between "The Great Gatsby" and Petronius' "Satyricon," 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."