Robert Archambeau at The Hudson Review:
Gatsby’s pink suit is, of course, a sign of his vulgarity, every bit as much as his lavish, show-off parties. And it is the vulgarian character of these parties that ties Fitzgerald’s hero to the character Trimalchio from Gaius Petronious Arbiter’s first-century literary burlesque, the Satyricon. Fitzgerald’s publisher had the good sense to reject Trimalchio in West Egg, the initial title of the novel. Fitzgerald’s commercial sense had certainly failed him when he proposed that title, though the allusion itself was sound. Both Jay Gatsby and Petronius’ Trimalchio are social upstarts—“Mr. Nobodies from Nowhere,” to steal Tom Buchanan’s phrase. Both use lavish parties in misguided attempts to pull themselves closer to the glamorous lives they desire.
Trimalchio, though, was an upstart in a way that Gatsby could never be. I don’t mean that Trimalchio, as a Roman freedman, rose from lower social depths than did Gatsby, who knew poverty and obscurity but not enslavement. I mean that a strong case can be made that Trimalchio was the first modern literary character—a new sort of literary figure, different from the flatter figures of classical narratives who came before, characters who were, generally speaking, more social types than they were individuals.
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