F. Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby Essay

1. We see all the action of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of one character whose

The 1920s is the decade in American history known as the “roaring twenties.” Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a reflection of life in the 1920s. Booming parties, prominence, fresh fashion trends, and the excess of alcohol are all aspects of life in the “roaring twenties.”

     It has been said that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about the pursuit of the American dream. It has also been said that the novel is about love, ambition, and obsession. Perhaps both are true. Combined, these themes may be understood in their most basic forms among the relationships within the novel. After all, each character’s reason for belonging to a relationship speaks very strongly of what really makes him tick; each character’s manifestation of his own desires is found within his lover. Throughout the novel, what universally unites each character beyond anything else is the love of a dream or position and involvement in relationships for the success of

After a time of prosperity, the roaring 1920’s became a decade of social decay and declining moral values. The forces this erosion of ethics can be explained by a variety of theories. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a convincing portrait of waning social virtue in his novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald portrays the nefarious effects of materialism created by the wealth-driven culture of the time. This was an era where societal values made wealth and material possessions a defining element of one’s character. The implications of the wealthy mindset and its effects on humanity are at the source of the conflict in The Great Gatsby, offering a glimpse into the despair of the 20’s. During a time

The 1920’s embodied a people who strove for wealth with complete disregard to the moral disgraces committed in the process of becoming rich. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby portrays the general feeling of the 1920’s through complex characters such as Jay Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, and Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald uses symbols such as the billboard, the green light, and the valley of ashes to convey themes and propel the plot forward.

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many of the characters live in an illusory world and only some can see past this. In the novel, West Egg and its residents represent the newly rich, while East Egg represents the old aristocracy. Gatsby seeking the past, Daisy is obsessed with material things, Myrtle wanting Tom to escape her poverty, George believing that T.J. Eckleburg is God, and Tom believing he is untouchable because of his power and wealth are all examples of the illusion v. reality struggle in the novel and Nick, the only character aware of reality, witnesses the fall of all the characters around him to their delusions.

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about half of the main characters present themselves as something they are not. Throughout the novel, the theme of passing is apparent in Nick, Jay Gatsby, Daisy, and Myrtle Wilson, although they are all passing, each does it for a very different reason. Many scholars have touched on the idea that these characters are not who they appear to be and that their passing is associated with social class issues of the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s characters are built around the idea of passing and social class restrictions.

Nick Caraway, from F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, once found himself “. . . standing beside [Mr. McKee’s] bed and [Mr. McKee] was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands” (Fitzgerald 38). Nick’s thoughts and actions in this odd circumstance spark numerous questions on his sexuality. While Fitzgerald uses covert implications to support the idea Nick is a homosexual, he also preserves plausible deniability that perhaps the scene was just a drunken hallucination. Yet it has been speculated that, due to the time period, Nick was forced to hide his desires through interactions with the “feminine man” (Fitzgerald 30), Mr. McKee or the masculine woman, Ms. Jordan Baker. Similarly, other literary figures have been caught between societal expectations of proper behavior and their own definitions of true happiness. Other characters that have faced this choice are French diplomat Rene Gallimard and opera singer Song Liling from David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Based loosely on true events, the play chronicles Gallimard’s doomed love story with Song, who is actually a male spy for Communist China. For twenty years, Gallimard claims he did not know of Song’s gender, yet Hwang’s covert implications support the idea both Gallimard and Song were homosexuals who had to hide their preferences in order to survive in their respective societies. Gallimard’s latent homosexuality manifests itself in the symbol of his prison cell while

When Cody died, he left the boy, now Jay Gatsby, a legacy of $25,000. Unfortunately

Jay Gatsby was a self-made millionaire, a mysterious figure among West Egg, and a man whose innocence and blindness for love led to his demise. In the beginning, Gatsby seemed to earn the title of ‘Great.’ Unfortunately, by the end of the story Gatsby no longer seems like a great man, but a naïve, paranoid man. The reason Gatsby seemed great at first was because of his portrayal of wealth and the American Dream. Eventually, the audience is introduced to Gatsby’s long lost love Daisy Fay, who is now a married woman whose new name is Daisy Buchanan. At this point, Gatsby starts to lose his greatness because he is now relentlessly pursuing a married woman. Gatsby is naïve and foolish in believing that Daisy is going to leave her husband, Tom, for him. Gatsby also loses greatness when it becomes obvious that nobody really knows where he got his wealth, when he makes up elaborate stories to his new friend Nick, the narrator, and when Nick and Gatsby meet up with a man Gatsby associates with named Mr. Wolfsheim, whom Nick thinks is the reason for Gatsby’s wealth. The story is called The Great Gatsby, but Gatsby eventually proves himself to be a man who is less than great.

The roaring twenties was a time for happiness and celebration, but the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shows a different side of this dynamic decade. Fitzgerald uses a poignant, yet hopeful tone to show the shadier side of the nineteen twenties most refuse to look at, while tying in the brighter side. In The Great Gatsby, the reader is sucked into a story of corruption, and empowerment by the rich hidden by extravagant parties and bright colors. Jay Gatsby, who only dreamt of wealth and love had an ideal dream life, that ideal life could be defined as his “American Dream”. His dreams were later crushed by very powerful people, careless people, people who used and abused others to get their way, no matter the consequences.

An Austrian physician by the name of Sigmund Freud, a well renowned psychologist, aside from his studies, was once rumored do have done enough cocaine to kill a baby horse. Other than his cocaine addiction he also developed the theory of Psychoanalysis, which in short means that he studied the longstanding difficulties in the ways that people think and feel about themselves, the world, and their relationships with others. Sigmund Freud’s ideals of psychoanalysis was translated to in a way where we are able to analyze media in all it’s shapes and forms. Psychoanalytic media analysis argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the characters within a movie, and the literary work is a manifestation of the Id, Super-Ego, and Ego. The text that I will analyze using the psychoanalytic media theory will be the film The Great Gatsby, originally a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I will be using Freud’s primary psychoanalytic theory of the ID, Ego, and Super-Ego to analyze the movie The Great Gatsby, and also analyze the potential cultural and societal impacts of an authors use of psychoanalytic theory.

Thesis: The pursuit of the American Dream is a dominant theme throughout The Great Gatsby, which is carried out in various ways by F. Scott Fitzgerald, how the author represents this theme through his characters and their actions is one small aspect of it.

I read a beautifully crafted novel called “The Great Gatsby”, written by the acclaimed author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is written in perspective of Nick Carraway, an ordinary man who dreams of being a writer. Nick arrives in New York in 1922 in search of the pedestaled American dream. Nick moves to Long Island and has the privilege of being Jay Gatsby’s neighbour, a mysterious man who is socially renowned for his extravagant parties and endless luxuries. The story is centrally based around Gatsby and his devoted love for Daisy Buchanan, and his fight to reclaim her from her womanizing husband –Tom Buchanan. Through series of events and adventures, Nick is pulled into the captivating world of the rich as he depicts the themes of impossible love, dreams and tragedy.

Any American is taught a dream that is purged of all truth. The American Dream is shown to the world as a belief that anyone can do anything; when in reality, life is filled with impossible boundaries. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us a glimpse into the life of the upper class during the roaring twenties through the eyes of a moralistic young man named Nick Carraway. It is through the narrator's dealings with the upper class that the reader is shown how modern values have transformed the American Dream's pure ideals into a scheme for materialistic power, and how the world of the upper class lacks any sense of morals or consequence. In order to support Fitzgerald's message