„JUST ONE MORE WALTZ WITH YOU“ – MUSICAL REFERENCES IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S NOVEL “THE GREAT GATSBY”

Abstract

The musical layer embedded in some of the works of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald has attracted the curiosity of scholars and has been a central object of research since the second half of the 20th century. This fact, as well as the author's interest in music, which he maintained throughout his entire life, and the influence of it on the popular culture of the 1920s, lay at the basis of the idea of providing a closer look at some of the musical references made in Fitzgerald’s most famous piece of writing, “The Great Gatsby” (1925). The present paper chooses to focus on three of the eight songs identified in the novel in order to demonstrate that their mutual interweaving enriches the narrative by either setting a different perspective to previously registered themes, motifs and symbols and their meaning, or further confirming what is already known about the characters and the motivation behind their actions.