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Absolution
With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made a conscious departure from the writing process of his previous novels. He started planning it in June 1922, after completing his play The Vegetable and began composing The Great Gatsby in 1923. He ended up discarding most of it as a false start, some of which resurfaced in the story "Absolution." Unlike his previous works, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape Gatsby thoroughly, believing that it held the potential to launch him toward literary acclaim. He told his editor Maxwell Perkins that the novel was a "consciously artistic achievement" and a "purely creative work — not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world." He added later, during editing, that he felt "an enormous power in me now, more than I've ever had." The Great Gatsby takes place in 1922, during the Roaring Twenties, a time of prosperity in the United States after World War I. It is widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic, capturing the essence of an era.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1924
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About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
2,334 books25.6k followersFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 13, 2020
for this short story to be the origins story of Jay Gatsby makes absolute sense to me... the persona Rudolph takes on, the priest asking him of if he’s ever been to parties and fairs, the “when people get together in the best places things go glimmering” quote...
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February 18, 2023…well… I guess I’m gonna be doing some research as to what (if anything) this means. 😅
October 16, 2025
Opaque.
I don’t find that this would have worked well at all as the prologue to The Great Gatsby, not only because it strips away Gatsby’s mysterious past but also because Rudolph just doesn’t seem like Gatsby in the slightest. There are very few threads binding them together thematically and Rudolph’s personality doesn’t seem to mesh with Jay’s. I’m glad that Fitzgerald decided against the idea.
It’s difficult to understand what exactly is happening here. I guess the most obvious answer is that Rudolph expected to be struck dead for his sins but God struck down Father Schwartz instead as a symbolic innocent sacrifice. Or, perhaps Father Schwartz was guilty of hypocrisy or negligence and therefore took the blow. The ending suggests that life moved on and the events of the story hardly mattered at all, as the beginning and end are very similar. Trying to find critical analysis of this story is genuinely difficult, so I might never know a consensual answer.
I don’t find that this would have worked well at all as the prologue to The Great Gatsby, not only because it strips away Gatsby’s mysterious past but also because Rudolph just doesn’t seem like Gatsby in the slightest. There are very few threads binding them together thematically and Rudolph’s personality doesn’t seem to mesh with Jay’s. I’m glad that Fitzgerald decided against the idea.
It’s difficult to understand what exactly is happening here. I guess the most obvious answer is that Rudolph expected to be struck dead for his sins but God struck down Father Schwartz instead as a symbolic innocent sacrifice. Or, perhaps Father Schwartz was guilty of hypocrisy or negligence and therefore took the blow. The ending suggests that life moved on and the events of the story hardly mattered at all, as the beginning and end are very similar. Trying to find critical analysis of this story is genuinely difficult, so I might never know a consensual answer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 28, 2022
“There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come […] several times he had walked past Romberg’s Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air.”
Through the prism of a Catholic confession with Rudolph Miller (in his fantasies Blatchford Sarmenington and whom Fitzgerald intended to be the younger Gatsby, or rather, Gatz) and the dying Father Schwartz (perhaps an echo of Fitzgerald’s own priest), the reader watches repression, fantasy, temptation and distance play out.
Tanner suggest that one could take the dying words of the Father as “the delirious regret for all the sexuality and glamour, the heat and light, that, as a celibate priest, he has repressed and kept his distance from.” Tanner muses that Fitzgerald’s work is imbued with “a confused and inarticulate longing”, a sort of Neo-Platonism (which conceives of the world as an emanation from an ultimate indivisible being with whom the soul is capable of being reunited in trance or ecstasy – e.g. Daisy, whom Gatsby’s whole existence revolves around). Furthermore, “there is a crucial difference between Dexter Green’s desire to possess the glittering things and Father Schwartz’s advice to stand back from the glittering light, and it lies precisely in the latter’s apprehension that getting too close might be dangerous, ruinous to the vision of earthly (and heavenly?) delights.” Gatsby is a voyeur, a shadow silhouette, and in this respect he is similar to Nick, which may suggest some of their kinship.
The interminable, labyrinth like wheat is a similar motif to the dreadful ashes of the Valley of Ashes, inescapable and torturous. The pastoral manifests itself incongruously in the urban setting of The Great Gatsby – Gatsby’s predecessor desired thatched cottages as his neighbours (although this rural idyll was never realised).
Sensuality and the forbidden is diffused through the short story and the Father’s wavering in faith is eroded by the vital, “girls with yellow hair” whose “shrill laughter” haunts him. Both the Father and Gatsby don’t desire abrasive, raw physicality, the “heat and the sweat and the light”, but rather abstract dreams that go “glimmering”.
Through the prism of a Catholic confession with Rudolph Miller (in his fantasies Blatchford Sarmenington and whom Fitzgerald intended to be the younger Gatsby, or rather, Gatz) and the dying Father Schwartz (perhaps an echo of Fitzgerald’s own priest), the reader watches repression, fantasy, temptation and distance play out.
Tanner suggest that one could take the dying words of the Father as “the delirious regret for all the sexuality and glamour, the heat and light, that, as a celibate priest, he has repressed and kept his distance from.” Tanner muses that Fitzgerald’s work is imbued with “a confused and inarticulate longing”, a sort of Neo-Platonism (which conceives of the world as an emanation from an ultimate indivisible being with whom the soul is capable of being reunited in trance or ecstasy – e.g. Daisy, whom Gatsby’s whole existence revolves around). Furthermore, “there is a crucial difference between Dexter Green’s desire to possess the glittering things and Father Schwartz’s advice to stand back from the glittering light, and it lies precisely in the latter’s apprehension that getting too close might be dangerous, ruinous to the vision of earthly (and heavenly?) delights.” Gatsby is a voyeur, a shadow silhouette, and in this respect he is similar to Nick, which may suggest some of their kinship.
The interminable, labyrinth like wheat is a similar motif to the dreadful ashes of the Valley of Ashes, inescapable and torturous. The pastoral manifests itself incongruously in the urban setting of The Great Gatsby – Gatsby’s predecessor desired thatched cottages as his neighbours (although this rural idyll was never realised).
Sensuality and the forbidden is diffused through the short story and the Father’s wavering in faith is eroded by the vital, “girls with yellow hair” whose “shrill laughter” haunts him. Both the Father and Gatsby don’t desire abrasive, raw physicality, the “heat and the sweat and the light”, but rather abstract dreams that go “glimmering”.
June 18, 2025
Als Story verwerteter Fehlstart in eine Vorgeschichte, mit Gatsbys Jugend.
Absolution schildert eine Episode aus der Kindheit/Jugend des späteren glorreichen Bootleggers, der unter der Fuchtel eines streng religiösen Versager-Vaters aufwächst und eine Sünde begangen hat, die er nicht beichten will.
Um was es sich handelt, ist mir nicht klar geworden, vielleicht ist mein Englisch zu schlecht, aber für mich ergibt dieses Kapitel als Kurzgeschichte keinen Sinn, so schön es auch geschrieben ist. Mit dem Helden-alter-ego hat das Kind einen schizophrenen Zug.
Absolution schildert eine Episode aus der Kindheit/Jugend des späteren glorreichen Bootleggers, der unter der Fuchtel eines streng religiösen Versager-Vaters aufwächst und eine Sünde begangen hat, die er nicht beichten will.
Um was es sich handelt, ist mir nicht klar geworden, vielleicht ist mein Englisch zu schlecht, aber für mich ergibt dieses Kapitel als Kurzgeschichte keinen Sinn, so schön es auch geschrieben ist. Mit dem Helden-alter-ego hat das Kind einen schizophrenen Zug.
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February 2, 2021I don't have much to say about this one. It was cool to know that this might have been the prologue to The Great Gatsby. It's one of the sadder stories and I felt bad for the boy. I hated the dad. It's one of the stories where it felt incomplete and I wanted more. It was as if this was a chapter in a longer novel about the character's lives.
August 13, 2018
Has a strong Dubliners feel to it. Also, a window into Jay Gatsby.
December 18, 2022
A young boy goes to church for a confession …
October 8, 2025
gran gran tópico la culpa cristiana y me da un poco de culpa q me guste jeje
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December 28, 2025Interesting to know that Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to a fan that this story was intended to show Gatsby's early life, but was cut to preserve his "sense of mystery"
October 24, 2023
LOVE IT
September 15, 2023
A puzzling short story. I read it twice. If you get it, let me know.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews