Tragom romantičarskog i sentimentalističkog duha - psihologija gubitka u delu F. Skota Ficdžeralda

Abstract

American modernist F. Scott Fitgerald was a writer who analyzed his own life for insight into his society as a whole. Fitzgerald wrote about a variety of different mourning patterns from his childhood and these circumstances contributed to his literary insights into cultural mourning norms. The paper aims at presenting biographical references we link to the specific feeling of loss evident in his experience of the world around him, only to put these references into the context of psychoanalytical theory. Thus, This Side of Paradise links Amory's difficulty in progressing into maturity with his upbringing in a society where people blindly believe in Victorian progress and resist the act of mourning. Ultimately, Amory matures by learning how to grieve, identifying with his father's romantic masculine and his mother's sentimental feminine modes of mourning - crosscurrents of loss within the dominant culture. In The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald's alter ego Monroe Stahr attempts to cope with loss in the world around him, while mourning for an aristocratic past formerly sealed off to him. Stahr envisions the motion picture industry as a unifying force in society. In effect, in a reflection of his creator's literary efforts, he promotes creativity and empathy as important elements in the healing process.