Brenda Nayiga
Mrs. Michelin
ENG 4UO-I
26 April 2016
Exploring the destruction of true love in a capitalist society:
A Marxist Approach to “The Great Gatsby”
Love can be defined as honesty, trust and respect; it occurs when two people touch each other 's soul. Every series, every story and every movie speaks about how two people fall in love and live happily ever after. All stories come to that same conclusion but what happens when two people don’t belong to the same social class. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a story about Jay Gatsby, a man who is part of the working class that becomes wealthy through illegal acts and throws extremely corrupted parties every Saturday night. In this novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the lack of true love between Tom, Gatsby and Daisy. The protagonist, Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan, a woman that is married to Tom Buchanan, a very wealthy man and he believes that the amount of money he possess will change Daisy’s heart. When Daisy discovers that Tom is cheating, he uses his status and power to deceive her in order to fulfill his desires. Tom, Gatsby and Daisy represent the upper class which with closer analysis demonstrates the Marxist theory by Karl Marx. Marx explains it as the practice of socialism which includes materialism, class struggle and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of class stratification. By critically analyzing these characters from a Marxist perspective, the matter of the
that he has achieved has been part of the plan conceived by him to try
Society won’t let Gatsby and Daisy be together when they fall in love because Daisy comes from a family of old wealth, while Gatsby is the son of peasants. “For over a year,” as a young man, “he
In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald builds theme of personal ambition by using the setting and the characterization to show the significance of the main persona, Gatsby’s personal ambition. Fitzgerald uses the setting of East Egg and West Egg and characterization of Daisy and Dan Cody on the connection they have with Jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby’s ambition is to achieve the American Dream. In Gatsby’s eyes, to achieve the American Dream consist of becoming the richest man and sharing his wealth with the woman he loves right by his side. Jay, based of his characterization, never sees himself as the poor man and
When looking at “ The Great Gatsby,” with a Marxist point of view, one will find that the carelessness of the novel is prominent through the actions of Daisy and Tom alone. The way they run away after Myrtle’s death and the way they treat others
In the roaring 20’s, America was referred to as the ‘Jazz Age’, a positive and optimistic time where possibilities seemed endless. The concept in EBB’s sonnet of ideal love transforming individuals is similarly interpreted through the characterisation of Gatz into Gatsby. The obsessive love to ‘own’ Daisy highlights the idea that this power of love can only exist in the Jazz Age. Gatsby’s idealised love is derived from the traps of wealth and money which is clearly evident in the dialogue “her voice is full of money”. Gatsby’s is willing to reinvent himself for Daisy and he consumes everything he does in life to make himself worthy of Daisy so they can marry as if it were five years ago. Nick the novel’s narrator, tells Gatsby that “you can’t repeat the past” to which Gatsby replies “why of course you can! I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before”. This evidently shows that the power of ideal love which is genuine and unconditional is very strong on individual’s and transforms them into a whole new world with new values. Gatsby’s determination to make everything right evidently depicts how the concept of ideal love had transformed him to attain his ideal love, Daisy. Hence, Fitzgerald conveys his perspective of ideal love during the Jazz Age, and similar to EBB, ideal love is seen to transform individual’s and demanding for love to
There is a fine line between love and lust. If love is only a will to possess, it is not love. To love someone is to hold them dear to one's heart. In The Great Gatsby, the characters, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan are said to be in love, but in reality, this seems to be a misconception. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays the themes of love, lust and obsession, through the character of Jay Gatsby, who confuses lust and obsession with love. By the end of the novel however, Jay Gatsby is denied his "love" and suffers an untimely death. The author interconnects the relationships of the various prominent characters to support these ideas.
Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ is set in America of the 1920’s, a predominantly materialistic society revolving around wealth and status above all else. Fitzgerald depicts this obsession with money and luxury through complicated relationships full of trouble, infidelity and sorrow. The relationships Fitzgerald portrays all symbolize the materialism and hedonism of the age; each relationship is doomed to a certain extent based on the social class of each character.
The Great Gatsby does not depict marriage and love in the traditional sense. Characters in this novel are married to the money and love the power it gives them. Love is caring for each other, supporting one another through tough times, always being by your partner’s side no matter what happens in life; good and bad. In this story the American dream of being wealthy gets in the way of true love. In most of these relationships love is missing, marriage had become a game; it was ok to go behind one another’s back to achieve their dark goal, abusiveness acceptable. For example on page 12 it says “Tom Buchanan broke her nose (Myrtle) with his open hand.” Take Jay Gatsby for example a man in love with a rich, young and beautiful woman named Daisy. He knew the only way for her to even notice him would be if he was rich. He lived in the illusion that money equaled happiness and that followed him till the day he died. Nothing made him happy he always wanted more and more. Sure his love for money made him wealthy but whether he had nothing or all the money in the world he could still not buy true love.
Conflict is a recurring struggle throughout The Great Gatsby and Ken Allen’s “Roaring Twenties”. In Fitzgerald’s nonfiction novel, class was one of the main conflicts and reasoning’s behind many of the actions from the characters. A major social issue was class socialization. Class socialization refers to the rich socializing with the rich and the poor socializing with the poor. Classes of people were divided by wealth. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy would not be with Gatsby due to his lack of money. Since Gatsby descended from a poor family, Daisy would not accept him as a lover although she was indeed in love with him. Gatsby’s lack of wealth led to many other conflicts sustaining from his drive to earn money to prove his worth of her affection. Another conflict in The Great Gatsby was the stock market crash. The stock market crash was a major event during the Roaring Twenties. When the market crashed, prices on goods soared due to the low quantity of products resulting with millions of people becoming poor. In Allen’s poem “Roaring Twenties”, socialism
F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the finest American authors of the twentieth century wrote The Great Gatsby during the Jazz Age to critique the distortion of the American dream, and his work has lasted long past his lifetime. Fitzgerald discusses the nature of love and wealth and stresses the importance of defining a person beyond their external position. In his novel, letter to his daughter, and the screenplay adapted from the novel, it is clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes exposition, narration, and imagery to illustrate how people in the 1920s did not understand the meaning of true love and worried about superficial characteristics, thus resulting in the corruption of the American dream from the pursuit of true love and equality to the pursuit of wealth and discrimination; however, he moralizes that human beings are capable of emotional growth and of escaping the illusion of wealth.
This is when Gatsby realizes that his love for Daisy was all based on his money. He is figuring out that true love is impossible. Fitzgerald is proving his point through all of the failed relationships in the book. Another example of love being impossible is Tom’s relationship with Daisy. Even though tom and daisy say they love each other they actually hate each other. Daisy loves tom for his money and not for him
Although it is the repercussions of their deceptive fantasies that Gatsby and Lester fall victim to, it was their continued search for love that leads them to these. Love is the principal value in The Great Gatsby and is illustrated best by the contrast of Gatsby’s idealized romantic love for Daisy with Daisy’s “love” for wealth and status, a love which is common to the majority of their irresponsible society. F Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” through this contrast as well as Gatsby’s fall from grace that results in him becoming lost in “the colossal vitality of his illusions” (pg. 92). Daisy characterizes the power of a love of money in the Great Gatsby and is used by Fitzgerald in condemning Gatsby’s hedonistic society as well as his own. However it is the absence of love –rather than the presence- that is most prominent in American
Gatsby does not belong to his own class and he is not accepted by the upper class, therefore he becomes an exception. Because of disappointment of being looked down upon and impossibility of accept by the upper class, he has nothing left except his love, which is also his “love dream”. Gatsby’s love for Daisy has been the sole drive and motive of his living. Gatsby’s great love is also the root of his great tragedy, because he is desperately in love with a woman who is not worthy of his deep love. Fitzgerald offers Gatsby with the spirit of sincerity, generosity, nobility, perseverance, and loyalty. All his good natures can be seen
The Great Gatsby does not offer a definition of love, or a contrast between love and romance. Rather it suggests that what people believe to be love is normally only a dream. America in the 1920s was a country where moral values were slowly crumbling and Americans soon only had one dream and objective to achieve, success. Distorted love is one theme in the novel The Great Gatsby, present among all of the characters relationships; Daisy and Tom, Tom and Myrtle, Daisy and Gatsby, and Wilson and Myrtle, though Myrtle does not return the love. This distortion illustrates that it is not love that leads several characters to death, but lust and the materialistic possessions that really drive the characters to their lonely
In social injustice, there are the oppressors and there are the oppressed. Such is the case in the world of The Great Gatsby, where gender norms shape the dynamic of all romantic relationships. Men/Husbands are expected to be violent and commanding, and their wives are to stay quiet and happy. Male characters see opportunity in this construct -- they use it to their advantage or as a way to establish power and a reputation. Gatsby, born poor, falls in love with Daisy’s money before he falls in love with her- he wants both his fantasy about Daisy and his fantasy about money and glamor to come to fruition. When Daisy marries Tom, her glamour and wealth pass on to him instead of Gatsby, who has to find wealth independently. Daisy’s reputation