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Examples Of Illusion In The Great Gatsby

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The Illusion and the Illusioned: Exploring Perception in American Literature The power of conviction proves a prevalent theme that authors often deconstruct throughout the American literary canon. Perception fundamentally differs from reality, yet authors adopt it to portray characters catalyzed to action by their own illusions. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s blind trust in Daisy shapes his trajectory in life, which portends his eventual demise. Similarly, Pecola’s yearning for and conviction in the fulfillment of white beauty standards in The Bluest Eye eventually pushes her to insanity. Though Fitzgerald and Morrison connote illusion negatively through these two texts, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening portrays Edna Pontellier’s …show more content…

Fitzgerald depicts the tension between appearance and social reality in two ways: James Gatz first creates an illusionary persona, Jay Gatsby, that he adopts after envisioning his relationship with Daisy Buchanan as a totalizing vision. From the onset of the novel, Jay Gatsby cultivates an elusive image, leading to far-fetched speculations that he’s “a cousin or nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm” (Fitzgerald, 17), or that he’s “killed a man once” (23). These rumors imply that Gatsby encourages this aura of mystery, as Nick Carroway notes that even at his parties, “sometimes [guests] came...without having met Gatsby at all” (21). When meeting Nick, Gatsby claims to be “the son of some wealthy people in the Old West...brought up in America and educated in Oxford” (34). The way he “hurried [his phrases], or swallowed it, or choked on it” (34) belies his own fragile, fabricated background, as he later reveals that Gatsby had amassed his fortune solely on illegally “[selling] grain alcohol over the counter,” and only attends Oxford for “all but five months” (70). By divulging Gatsby’s true background towards the end of the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that not only does Gatsby live an illusion, he also cultivates it specifically to obtain Daisy’s love. For instance, he spins out “a universe of ineffable gaudiness…[that] were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of …show more content…

In the novel, Morrison condemns the idea of living by one’s perception of one’s value rather than through the truth, which leads to negative implications. Pauline Breedlove creates an elaborate fantasy world, in which the household of her white employers becomes hers. Morrison indicates that Pauline “[looks] at their houses, [smells] their linens, [touches] their silk draperies, and [loves] all of it” (Morrison, 127), to suggest that Pauline has formed an attachment to what she believes is hers. The way she refers to “[her] floor...[her] floor...[her] floor” (107), after her daughter Pecola accidentally spills a tart at the Fishers’ house, implies that Pauline views that household as a parallel reality, with the white girl as her daughter, and the clean kitchen as her kitchen. Morrison depicts another illusion in which Pauline strives to become a paragon of virtue—by being “an active church woman, [not] drinking, smoking or carousing” (128). She believes she “[fulfills] a mother’s role conscientiously when she points out [the father’s] faults to keep [the children] from having them” (129). But in reality, Pauline fails to embody that role, often “neglecting her house, her children, her man” (127) and “fighting [her husband] with a darkly brutal formalism” (43). Morrison’s depiction of Pauline’s delusive mindset consequently leads to harmful effects, like the emotional abandonment of her family. Her

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