BORROWED TIME: THE PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (UNITED STATES

The influence upon F. Scott Fitzgerald of philosophical thought and the influence of his philosophy upon his fiction form the basis of this study. Throughout the four novels and four volumes of stories published during his lifetime two philosophical motifs appear. On the one hand, Fitzgerald's Schopenhauerian pessimism appears as a need to escape through art the prison-house of the will. In Nietzschean terms, he expresses through his protagonists modern man's need to live creatively, to reach the status of philosopher-artist. On the other hand, Fitzgerald's protagonists experience a need to exist in the pragmatic tradition of rugged American individualism within an American aristocracy based not on birth and an innate or acquired sensibility but on wealth acquired in the machine culture. In his best work, Fitzgerald blends a philosophical treatment of American culture of the early twentieth century with a sense of the ideal. This dissertation analyzes the philosophical motifs, documenting the existence and influence of the philosophies which Fitzgerald used to create aesthetically his American hero.;Chapter One traces the young author's literary and intellectual development as he formulated concepts of European and American philosophies. Chapters Two through Five examine the novels and collected stories. In Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, and Richard Diver (and, in a lesser way, the protagonists of the shorter fiction), Fitzgerald develops his failed American hero from the initiate Blaine who accepts pragmatic experience; the pessimist Patch who is the failed Schopenhauerian artist-genius; the idealist Gatsby and the artist-genius Carraway; to his final hero, Richard Diver, whose philosophy based upon old American traditions succumbs before the rapacious materialism of modern pragmatism. Fitzgerald's incipient, eclectic philosophy of the first novel matures by the last to his American philosophy set against the backdrop of Spengler's failed western culture. Throughout these works Fitzgerald demonstrates that the polarities of the American Dream--the platonic conception of the New World as a reflection of the ideal form and the materialistic acquisitiveness of a pragmatic society--cannot be synthesized by his here who, failing to formulate a new philosophical mode of being, ends in Schopenhauerian entropie.