F. Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby

Since American literature’s emergence, the American dream has become a conceptual ideal for many people throughout history. Although the dream has its own distinct aspects throughout different time periods, it predominantly focuses on the foundations of wealth, success and a desire for something greater. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction novel, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, the protagonist, is primarily known for the numerous lavish parties he throws each weekend at his ostentatious mansion in West Egg in an attempt to reunite with Daisy Buchanan, a woman he falls in love with prior to entering the war before the Roaring Twenties. However, he is seized with an impotent realization on the fact that his wealth cannot afford him the same privileges as others that are born into the upper echelon. Gatsby is completely blinded from his opulent possessions until he becomes oblivious of the fact that money cannot buy love or happiness. Throughout the story, the predilection for materialistic features causes many characters to lose sight of their aspirations, demonstrating how a dream can become easily corrupt by one’s focus on acquiring wealth and power.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald tells the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers. Fitzgerald uses the Roaring Twenties as the setting of this novel. The twenties were a time of promiscuity, new money, and a significant amount of illegal alcohol. Fitzgerald was a master of his craft and there was often more to the story than just the basic plot. He could intertwine political messages and a gripping story flawlessly. In the case of The Great Gatsby, he not only chronicles a love story, but also uses the opportunity to express his opinion on topics such as moral decay, crass materialism, individual ethics, and the American dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the midst of the roaring twenties, which was an age full of wealth, parties, and romance. Young people living in the 1920s were centered around wanting to find love so Fitzgerald, along with many other authors during this time period, focused his writing in The Great Gatsby on relationships and affection. Jay Gatsby, one of the main characters in the novel, is a very mysterious man, but there is one thing that readers know about him for sure: he is utterly in love with Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby shows his love for Daisy in many differents ways, including him waiting for her, becoming rich for her, buying a mansion across a bay from her house, throwing parties in hope that she will come, and taking the blame for the Myrtle accident. Gatsby truly is a hopeless romantic who will do anything to impress the woman he is so in love with.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is an author known for his best-selling book, The Great Gatsby. The story is about a man, Jay Gatsby, who was in love with Daisy Buchanan. Daisy was married to Tom, but Tom was cheating on her with Myrtle Wilson. There were two islands the story took place in: East Egg and West Egg. East Egg was the “old money,” or money passed down from ancestors, while West Egg represented the “new money,” or self- made money. Fitzgerald used multiple types of symbolism in his book, and his symbolism helped the reader understand the plot. The novel is read throughout schools to teach symbolism. The book can be described as “[…] satisfying as entertainment, thought provoking as a study, and increasingly rewarding the more closely it is examined.” (Koster). A frequently used type of symbolism in The Great Gatsby was color. The colors symbolized in the book were white, green, yellow, blue, gold, and gray.

Nick Carraway is who narrates this story He is a very opened minded, nice, quite guy from Minnesota. Nick travels to New York and rents a house in the West Egg side of Long Island. West Egg is where all the people who have just made their fortune live. Although Nick lived in the West Egg side he had many connections with the people on the East Egg side. Nick had a wealthy and attractive neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby lives in a mansion and has extravagant parties every Saturday. Gatsby’s real name is James Gatz and he was born at a farm in North Dakota. He went to St. Olaf’s University but dropped out two weeks later do to the humiliation of being a janitor. One day he was fishing at Lake Superior and he saw a yacht owned by Dan Cody. He

“This is a valley of ashes- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and raising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (Fitzgerald 26). In the novel, “The Great Gatsby,” the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, mainly depicted lives of the rich and their luxuries but also showed the lives of the poor people in the valley of ashes in a small portion of the book. The valley of ashes played an essential part in shaping the lives of the characters in the book as it shows the difference between social classes and the struggle of the poor.

Identity is cultivated through several diverse mediums within F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby ‘The word identity is defined as the set of personal and behavioral characteristics which define an individual as a member of a certain group. Based on race, ethnicity, religion, language and culture people distinguish themselves from other groups and form their understanding and pride in who they are’ . For the novels’ central characters, Gatsby and the others , status is autocratic, and an ambition. In their minds, adopting an aspirational identity would afford them the confidence, integrity and purpose they perceive as lacking. Each focal character approaches and reacts to identity differently; however there are also numerous parallels. Jay Gatsby begin his life identifying as oppressed destitutes – then strive separately to embody an identity which they do not fit. Gatsby, being an ambassador for the American Dream, has aspirations upon which he intends to capitalise, and superficially, he does. In the book the central characters may try to escape their prescribed identities in life, and to varying degrees they do, but fail to emulate the social group into which they want to acclimate. The meaning and justification of Identity transforms throughout the texts, and this is what I hope to investigate.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and is one of Fitzgerald 's best published books. It was written during the summer and fall near St. Raphael. When he first published it, the sales of The Great Gatsby were horrible. It received a critical praise, but the book did not bring him any profit. The Great Gatsby was published in the Jazz Age and became well received. It was an improvement in Fitzgerald 's technique and structure in writing. The Great Gatsby was a portrait of The Roaring Twenties and was one of the greatest novels published at the time. The Great Gatsby has two lovers, Jay Gatsby and Daisy, who cannot be together because Daisy already has a husband. Jay Gatsby is determined

According to Merriam Webster, the American dream is defined as “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity; also :  the prosperity or life that is the realization of this ideal” (Merriam Webster, 2017) Throughout the semester, we have been introduced to a variety of different perspectives on the American Dream by several authors, ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take on it in The Great Gatsby to Allen Ginsberg’s attempts to derail it in Howl.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the protagonist Jay Gatsby exemplifies both positive and negative aspects of the American Dream through his love for Daisy, his mysterious accumulation of wealth, and longing for acceptance within society.

For many celebrated authors, the meaning of their work comes from a collection of opinions and outlooks on life that the writer has accumulated throughout his or her life. In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, this statement could not be truer. In fact, much of Fitzgerald’s most famous work feature plots that closely parallel events from his life (Lathbury 10). For example, his novel This Side of Paradise includes a young man who is rejected by the love of his life on the grounds of his social status. Zelda similarly rejected Fitzgerald for his social status at first. In comparison, it is not surprising that Fitzgerald’s story The Great Gatsby takes place in the Jazz Age, which he lived through while writing the novel. Writing a story that takes place during his time was Fitzgerald’s way of telling his story as well as to make commentary on the world around him. This commentary was the product of Fitzgerald’s lifelong aspiration for greatness as well as the baggage he carried from World War I like other members of the lost generation had. Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby depicts his duplicitous mentality of celebrating, but criticizing the Jazz Age, an outlook resulting from his life and experiences in World War I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author during the jazz age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels and many short stories but he is mostly known for his iconic novel “The Great Gatsby.” This American Classic, written in 1925 takes place in New York during The Roaring 20’s. The novel revolves around this interesting character named Jay Gatsby. He is from North Dakota, and around 30 years old. Born poor, motivated him to do anything to acquire his longtime dream to become wealthy. Apart from that, he was also motivated to reacquire Daisy’s love. Gatsby acquires his wealth by performing illegal activities to impress, and win Daisy back. The Great Gatsby is an example of the prototypical American Dream, but also demonstrates many characteristics of American society that leads the country to the great depression

Ever since Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and introduced Europeans to the Americas, people have flocked to the United States in order to fulfill the “American Dream.” Each person has their own interpretation of the American Dream, but to most, it simply means rising from humble beginnings to great success through hard work and determination. Benjamin Franklin, a great American leader, pursued the American Dream through the creation of his “13 Moral Virtues.” Like Benjamin Franklin, Jay Gatsby, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, created his own list of virtues as a child that he believed would make him successful if done correctly. This list contains items that overlap many of the ideas Benjamin Franklin considered necessary to accomplish the American Dream. However, did Gatsby follow this list strictly enough to have accomplished the American Dream? Gatsby fell short and missed the mark of Benjamin Franklin’s idea of successfully accomplishing the “American Dream” because he did not follow the basic virtues of frugality, moderation, tranquility and chastity.

"You don 't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say," F. Scott Fitzgerald ("F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote-" Brainy Quote). Not only did he write well written novels and short stories, he wrote them in such a way to inspire and entertain his generation and future generations. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a leading author in America 's Jazz age- the twenties.

Urban schools often do not have the funds to pay qualified teachers as much as they deserve, so schools must hire teachers with less experience and fewer skills. There are major teacher shortages in most low-income, urban schools. A shortage is caused when the demand for teachers is greater than the supply of teachers willing and able to teach in an urban school. “Therefore, a teacher shortage in urban districts makes it hard to hire qualified teachers—so…teachers who are hired are often less qualified than teachers in suburban districts” (Jacobs). These shortages are especially noticeable in the subjects of math and science. Urban schools had 34.7 percent difficulty filling teacher vacancies in math and 27.2 percent difficulty in science while suburban schools had only 25.1 percent difficulty in math and 17.4 percent difficulty in science (Jacobs). In addition, “urban schools were substantially more likely [than suburban schools] to fill these vacancies by hiring a substitute (42.4 percent versus 30.0 percent) or hiring a less than fully qualified teacher (19.2 percent versus 14.4 percent)” (Jacobs). This means that students in urban districts are being taught by highly unqualified teachers while suburban students benefit from teachers who have vast experiences and