Examples Of Human Condition In The Great Gatsby

In the short story called, “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer, the protagonist is dealing with the complicated relationship between her divorced parents. Ashleigh, the main character, is questioned by her dad if she can borrow her mom's money for his own problems. Ashes, short for Ashleigh, like the compliments that she keeps receiving from her dad. Ashes complex relationship with her parents makes her choose between her mom or her dad. One lesson this story suggests is that no matter how much you love someone, you have to let them handle things on their own.

The Human Condition is a big part of our understanding of literature, it can mean death, acceptance, judgment, and several other diverse things. It is about the positive or negative aspects of humans that everyone all universally deals with at least one time in one’s life. In the novel “The Great Gatsby”, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the short stories Raymond Carver’s “Everything Stuck to Him”, and Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”, all have the most prominent human condition: love. Love is portrayed as society’s primary concern in literature, and is represented as a main concern in today’s society .

Imagine living in a world where dreams that come to mind are highly reachable and come without a struggle, a place where fantasies come into play. Americans far and beyond believe the American Dream is something as simple as owning a home or starting a family, but for Jay Gatsby, that was simply not enough. As a man with implausible dreams, Gatsby thought differently when compared to others. His American Dream was not a job or a home, but rather a married woman who is known as Daisy Buchanan. As Gatsby placed the sole focus of his life on Daisy, he became obsessed. Through a passage in The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald employs personification and diction to convey the idea that Gatsby was lost in the unique distortion of his own reality with Daisy.

Jody’s pride, materialism, and urge to dominant had turned him into a cold, bitter old man that was on his dying bed with kidney problems [Page 85]. This was the only time Janie had to tell him about the independence she had longed for during their marriage [Page 85]. She knows that Jody was a good husband in the aspects that he provided for her and had power. These were the things that Nanny Crawford had wanted for her. However, Janie the things she wanted which were love and independence in love. She also gained wisdom from her and Joe’s long time together. Janie did not have to leave Jody to get out of this marriage, because he died immediately after she told him all the problems she felt had been in their marriage.

In order to understand Janie’s journey to discover love and herself, one must first define love from her perspective and analyze its origins. Janie’s adult concept of love is influenced by many things, including her grandmother and her childhood concept of love. Janie thinks there is a standard for love because her grandmother had standards for who she loved. Nanny’s concept of love, which shapes Janie’s, is heavily influenced by her slave background. Nanny was impregnated by her master, then witnessed her daughter, Janie’s mother, get raped by a school teacher (16-20). Because of the trauma both she and her daughter faced, Nanny ardently begs Janie to marry a man who will keep her safe from harm. Not only does Nanny want a protector for Janie, but she also wants a provider for her. If Janie is to have a husband who is well-off, she will not want the way her mother and grandmother did. Thus, Janie figured that she could marry a person for the security they

Growing up as a child, Janie did not have a mother or father figure in her life. "'Tain't Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby, it's protection” (Hurston 28). Her grandmother, Nanny, wanted her to live a better life than her mother. Janie believed that Logan was not the person she wanted to be with, but wanted to please her grandmother’s wishes. Janie had learned that even though she did not love him now, later on in life true love would find her. Once Janie and Logan were married, months had gone by and she was afraid that she would never fall in love with him. She had decided to give her grandmother a visit to confess how her love for him is still not there. Despite the fact that Janie was just trying to find a way out, her grandmother sent her off to give love time to unfold.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (188).

‘’We are different from you, we were born different, it’s in our blood.’’ (Luhrmann 2013). The Great Gatsby’ a hit novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald, was later adapted to a film, directed by Baz Luhrmann in 2013. The film is narrated by Nick Carraway, tells his story but also Jay Gatsby’s and how they both become intertwined with love, scandal and sadness. This essay will discuss the statement ‘’In The Great Gatsby, the only element not restricted to one class is unhappiness. All members of all classes are equally unhappy. Discuss whether you agree or disagree with this statement.’’ I personally disagree with statement because in the film happiness is also not restricted to one class, and it is also evident that the unhappiness varies from person to person no two people are equally unhappy. Unhappiness in the classes is displayed through: Myrtle Wilson (lower class), Nick Carraway (middle class) and Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan (upper class). Myrtle, Nick, Jay and Daisy all are unhappy for a variety of reasons and some are evidently unhappier than another.

In The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver showed us that the the relationships we form out of necessity are different then the relationships we form out of choice. She shows us this through Taylors relationship she has with her mother, a necessary one, and her relationship she has with Lou Ann, a relationship she has by choice. Taylor’s relationship she has with her mother is a very strong relationship but it was formed out of necessity, she was born into the relationship. For example, “Two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.” (Kingsolver 13) This shows that

The Great Gatsby is a book with no limits, but also no happiness. If you take a close look into the book you can see for yourself that nobody in the book was actually happy. I believe that if you have good morals and ethics then you can achieve happiness. We see very little true happiness within the characters throughout the course of the book. Fitzgerald’s standpoint on morals and ethics in this book is that there are no boundaries. That a man can cheat on his wife, and likewise, but that person will never truly be happy. We never really see happiness at all in this book. There may be parts in the story where someone might be having fun at a certain point, but when

Many people today are dependent on one another, and could not live alone in this world, due to how they would take it as a negative aspect of their lives. The new generation of humans is raised in a way that makes them believe that being lonely is the worst quality to have, and all prefer having a social life. However the people of the 20th century did not view independence the same way people do today. People of this time believed in something called Individualism, and took pride in independence rather than sociality. Individualism was widely believed during this time period and various authors wrote many novels, that displayed how independence can be advantageous and social values could cause many predicaments in a person's life.

The disillusionment of the American Dream is a frequent but important written theme in the American literature. Fitzgerald’s famous book The Great Gatsby is one of the most important representative works that reflects this theme. F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America's Jazz Age during the 1920s. His classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's American Dream. The Great Gatsby can be seen as a far-reaching book that has revealed many serious and hidden social problems at that time. As one of the most popular and financially successful

Why is affluence so significant? It was not always this way. For hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, personal properties were insignificant or even disadvantageous unless it was food. For the sake of development and standards of life, this had to change. As wealth gained in value, people also lived better, longer lives, but at a certain point, it began to manipulate the society around it. Some may argue that this occurred around the 1920’s in America. The changes of this time were monumental. People were moving to cities in large numbers, the party lifestyle was adopted by men and women alike due to dramatic social change, and the economy was booming, they were not called “the roaring 20’s” for nothing. The large economy enabled people to gain more wealth than ever. A multitude of people, primarily in older generations, did not encourage this lifestyle, finding it fake, licentious, flashy, and unchristian. This disapproval of change is apparent in The Great Gatsby due to Nick’s distaste for the frivolous and gaudy lifestyles of the East and West Eggers and Gatsby in particular. This distaste, also conveyed heavily by the author, is most significantly formed around the iniquitous value of money and adultery. Ergo, In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that Modern America has become irrationally focused upon immorality and wealth rather than the true American values of hard work and faith, which is demonstrated through the motif of the colour

“There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind appearance.” Said Albert Einstein about the relationship between appearance and reality. Einstein is telling the readers that people are discovering new things that were hidden behind illusions of what had appeared. Humans have to use hat feeling to see threw those appearances to discover the elements that form the reality they live in. Scott Fitzgerald uses the creation of illusive appearance but also writes a discoverable reality for the most of the characters in his novels. In his novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates a strong relationship between the illusion of appearance

The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us a variety of themes-justice, power and greed, The American dream and so on. The Great Gatsby is regarded as a brilliant piece of social commentary. The Great Gatsby concerns the wasteful lives of four wealthy characters as observed by their acquaintance, narrator Nick Carraway. Like Fitzgerald himself, Nick is from Minnesota, attended an Ivy League university, served in the U.S. Army during World War I, moved to New York after the war. The narrator, Nick, is a very clever and well spoken storyteller. Nick confides with the reader in the first pages of the novel. He says that he needs to tell the story of a man called Gatsby. It is as if Nick has to overcome disappointment and frustration with a man who has left him with painful memories. This thesis is valid for three main reasons. First, it is evident that dreams and memories are central to the overall plot and meaning. Secondly, the American Dream is a “green light” of desire that Gatsby never stops yearning for and something he will not forget over time, even as he is dying. This is so, even though no one cares about Gatsby or his dreams after he died, except maybe Nick. Finally, the fact that Fitzgerald uses flashback; that Nick is telling us about a main character after he has already died and before the story begins, is ultimate proof.The Great Gatsby is structured by Nick’s memory. Fitzgerald’s clever use of flashback throughout and within the