Gatsby in Bed: Reflections on Listening (as Opposed to Reading) Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel Night after Night in the Age of Alexa

This personal essay, first presented at the Sixteenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society on 27 June 2023 in Växjö, Sweden, reflects upon the experience of listening to the Audible audiobook version of The Great Gatsby narrated by actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Audiobooks began in 1931 with the Pratt-Smoot Act, which authorized the U.S. Library of Congress to record readings of books for the vision impaired. Ninety years later, the medium has grown into a popular alternative to reading that generates some $1.8 billion per year and that 53 percent of the U.S. population has tried at least once. The differences between reading and listening begin with the dreamlike immersion into language the latter affords, wherein we relinquish the narrative momentum of the eye scanning printed lines to the immanence of the spoken word. As this article argues, readers can discover new thematic connections by hearing Fitzgerald’s sonorous prose.