Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Great Gat*****y by highlighting Fitzgerald's experimental counter-realism, a quality that his editor Maxwell Perkins referred to as "vagueness." She argues that his counter-realism comes from his animation of inanimate objects, giving human dimensions of motion and emotion to things as varied as lawns, ashes, juicers, telephones, and automobiles. She concludes with a short meditation on race in The Great Gat*****y and encourages a closer reading of the novel's instances of racial differentiation.
