F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Essay

Because Gatsby is standing alone, searching for the elusive Daisy, he is shown to not be content. He finds no joy in having all these people here if he cannot find his Daisy. He views Daisy as the person that will bring him to an even higher social class, because even though he is rich, he still remembers the social value Daisy encompasses because of her abundance of lovers. Ultimately he wants to swell his ego, to tame the wild beast, because Daisy wasn’t settled down before with any one man. Even though she is now married, he still views her with the same awe of when he first laid eyes on her at camp, even remarking that “‘Her voice is full of money’”(127) in reference to his percieved value of her when they first met. Quintessentially, Gatsby has narcissism flowing through his veins because he is attempting to recreate a past to soothe his remorse from when he initially left Daisy to fight in the war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the popular novelists of twentieth century America. He is the representative novelist of the age because his novels deal with the American life in 20th century.

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses his life experience in his works. He explains, ‘that was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy 's school; a poor boy in a rich man 's club… However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has coloured my entire life and works.’ The short story of Winter Dreams was written around the same time that Fitzgerald was developing ideas for The Great Gatsby. Whilst this wasn’t published until 1925, Winter Dreams débuted in 1922 and the similarities between the novel and short story were intentional. Winter Dreams became a short draft, which Fitzgerald based The Great Gatsby on. Both resemble Fitzgerald’s real life; although both were written before most of the comparable events occurred. Preceding this, The Jelly Bean, a short story from Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (published in 1922) invited the reader to follow Jim Powell through his dreams of social advancement and love, which parallel Fitzgerald’s later stories and life experiences. In addition, Fitzgerald’s The Rich Boy, a short story published in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men suggests that the author’s life experiences shaped his work up to and even after The Great Gatsby, which is considered to be Fitzgerald’s greatest work.

In America the repercussions of World War 1 resulted in, the roaring twenties, a time period characterized as an era of economic prosperity. The stock market sky-rocketed, advances in technology were distinct and demands were shifting, but what value prominently elevated above everything else? Wealth. The widespread wealth was desired and people valued social class with such high regard that to attain these two fixations became the standard “American Dream” of the 1920’s. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s depiction exposes an era of poor social and moral values, and it was a miserable desire for wealth that progressed this. Fitzgerald utilizes the setting, a combination of the time period and geography, to reveal the message that it became

     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

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.”

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald was accurate in his portrayal of the aristocratic flamboyancy and indifference of the 1920s. In his novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald explores many aspects of indifference and flamboyancy. A large influence on this society was the pursuit of the American Dream. Gangsters played a heavily influential role in the new money aristocracy of the 1920s. The indifference was mainly due to the advent of Prohibition in 1920. One major societal revolution in this period was that of the “new women,” who expressed new actions and beliefs. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald accurately portrayed his characters Nick Carraway, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and the novel’s eponym, Jay Gatsby,

Hopes and dreams are needed to give man's efforts a meaning, or a purpose. Pushing towards some ideal is how man can feel a sense of his own identity. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is a man with tremendous and "infinite hope" (Fitzgerald, 6). To be able to accomplish a life long dream, one must have strong determination that can in no way be weakened by any obstacles one might face. It is the hope of achieving your dream that keeps you from wandering away from it and guides you to the right path. In order to achieve his dream, Gatsby was motivated, optimistic and brave. Whether or not he eventually was able to accomplish this dream, having these qualities in a person certainly indicate

At a first glance, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye’s dark, depressing story seems to be worlds apart from the more colorful tone of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As a teen, Holden Caulfield is thrown headfirst into the adult world, forced to deal with his teenage angst, loneliness, and pain without guidance or companionship, while attempting to preserve the innocence found in children in vain. Being older and wealthier, Jay Gatsby lives a luxurious life, devoting his time and resources to his mission of reuniting with Daisy, an old lover. Despite the age and lifestyle differences, both characters have a troubled history and are constantly plagued by their haunting memories, with Holden being unable to overcome his brother’s death and Gatsby constantly tormented by his inability to create a relationship with Daisy. Hoping to find comfort and unwilling to seek external support, both Holden and Gatsby resort to self-delusion, creating facades that blur the line between fact and fiction, in a final attempt to find the mental peace that they so craved. This desperation and their inability to differentiate between fact and fiction begins to manifest itself in their social lives, isolating them from society as they slowly drift away from the real world and closer to their fantasy world.

How would you feel being in a part of a love story that you know can’t end well for one of your friends. You love your friends and you don’t want to see anyone get hurt, but you also don’t stop them from making foolish choices. This is the conflict the narrator of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carroway will soon find himself in the middle of. Nick Carroway opens Chapter 1 with a quote from his father. His father says, “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone… just remember that all people in this world haven’t been given had the advantages that you’ve had.” The narrator uses this quote to foreshadow the conflicts that will occur between him and other characters throughout the book.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby fuels the title character’s tragedy with the misconstruction of identity, by monopolizing the dialectic thereof. Gatsby’s several self-reinventions and fabrications of his personal background allow him to define himself unilaterally, forcing others into the roles of spectators. Despite his ability to control his image, he lacks the ability to maintain the economic position he creates for himself, as his own decisions in that matter derive directly from that which favors the elite, and not his younger, James Gatz, self. Moreover, because Gatsby controls empty signifiers to establish Jay Gatsby, he only entrenches himself further into the trap of the petit-bourgeoisie. Ultimately, in attempting to ascend the economic strata of American capitalism through reinvention of identity and creation of spectacle, Gatsby reinforces the systems that protect the interests of the bourgeois Buchanans and Nick.

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

Nick observes that Gatsby “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (104), showing Gatsby's amazing quality to transform his hopes into reality by inventing his ideal self named, "Jay Gatsby. " By re-creating himself, Gatsby's powerful dream of happiness with Daisy became his motivation of lavish excesses, narcissistic behavior and even criminal activities. When Gatsby realizes that Daisy’s "voice is full of money." (127) he relates Daisy to treasure, and claims that treasure is difficult to obtain. Gatsby has a misconception that by achieving his dream through crime and accumulating wealth, he will impress Daisy, and obtain happiness.

Jay Gatsby, such a name has a nice ring to it. Does the name contain an element of comedy, though? Not necessarily. Brian Way argues that The Great Gatsby is a work of social comedy and that Mr. Gatsby, the main character, is one of profound comedy. Fitzgerald presents Gatsby as a desperate character, as opposed to this comedic character Way believes him to be. This desperation indeed leads to a sort of comedy about him, but he is not inherently comic.