Bartleby, Gatsby and the American Nightmare Sahng Young Moon (Yonsei University) Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) share a vision related to one of the most important themes of American literature, that is the American dream. More precisely, Melville and Fitzgerald share their vision of the American nightmare in terms of their disenchantment with, and their critique of, America's complacent self image. In this paper, I explore thematic links between Melville and Fitzgerald by highlighting and juxtaposing the sociohistorical contexts of their texts. Bartleby and Gatsby share a number of more than superficial features. The death of these characters represents their authors' critique of America, one about the mid-nineteenth-century and the other about the 1920s America respectively. Both Melville and Fitzgerald portrayed darker aspects of their society especially when their contemporaries were to a large extent imbued with optimistic beliefs in the progress of their nation undergoing territorial expansion and rapid industrialization (in Melville's case) or an unprecedented postwar economic boom (in Fitzgerald's case). In both texts, the portrayal of New York as a closed space in terms of class, race, and ethnicity, is significant not simply as the local setting of these works but also as a metonym for American society. In particular, both Melville and Fitzgerald seriously deal with issues such as poverty or the ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor in America. In other words, they address the core American ideals such as liberty, equality, and democracy.
