Hope Is The Thing With Feathers And The Great Gatsby

In the Great Gatsby there is always a recurring theme of hope vs. despair and over the course of the book the character's ambition drives there hope that the worst won't happen. The hope changes them to either be better or worse off than before and in some cases it causes despair. We see this in many of the main characters of the story, they have a hope for the future to be better.

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (Fitzgerald 79). In Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” the protagonists live lives of secrecy, one in which is full of despair and desperation. This desperation is caused by an emptiness that resonates from within and in order to further eliminate it from their mind and hearts they aspire to fill the void they experience. The idea “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” from Henry Thoreau’s “Walden” becomes present as the characters find themselves unsuccessful in fulfilling their life goals to find happiness through the attainment of wealth, status, love, etc. Several characters in the novel mistakenly believe utmost fortune cause the desperation to cease, while

"I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go." Some people think that you should just go through life not taking chances, or taking risks. This is another example of Langston and his feeling to be free. "I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. I cannot live on tomorrow's bread." When he says he doesn’t need his freedom when he’s dead, this is saying that you should make the best of the freedom you have now, while you are still alive."What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?" (Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951) When you have a dream and you don’t go after it then what happens to it? “Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” (Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951) Persevere, keep trying to accomplish your goals in life. His metaphor to life and a broken winged bird is saying that when you don’t grasp onto your dreams, and make them come true, then you can’t achieve your full capability."The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it." (The Big Sea,1940) If you do want to effectuate your goals then don’t hold off on them, do them so you can finish them and maybe

Never give up on your dreams. This seems obvious right? Well it really shouldn’t be, because following this advice will kill you. Ninety percent of the time you should follow your dreams, but it’s the ten percent that’s lethal. The Great Gatsby is a perfect example of how a dream can propel and how a dream can destroy. Jay’s hope for a life with Daisy both helps build and destroy him. But there is a way to have creation without destruction. To have creation, you must follow a dream. To dodge destruction, you must be aware of a damaging dream. The reason that Gatsby is so interesting is that he is both a good example and a bad example. Most people want to be rich and powerful, so how does Gatsby do it? He acts with hope.

I believe that the three texts that I have studied contained moments of optimism and pessimism which in turn have shaped my opinion of the general vision and viewpoint. This alludes to the feelings and emotions portrayed through the omniscient camera in "The King's Speech", the morally inclined narrator Nick Caraway in "The Great Gatsby" and the protagonist in the novel "Foster". I was very intrigued to find out more about these societies and the vision the author/director hoped to convey.

According to Marian Erickson, “Most of life is choices, and the rest is pure dumb luck.” Real people’s lives depend on this quote everyday, which leads to the outcome of each problem individuals face. In the passages, characterization of the main personas helps one understand the theme. Conflict and symbolism also help lead to the overall idea that life is not always guaranteed to be full of success. The book The Other Wes Moore, the poem “If,” and the informational text “The Art of Resilience” all share a common theme of how choices and luck contribute to the success of life.

Without using depth of thought, The Great Gatsby is essentially a love story of the impossible forbidden desire between a woman and a man. The primary theme of the novel, however, shows off a much larger, less romantic scope of the novel. Though most of its primary plot takes place over simply a few short months through 1922’s summer, and is set in a small area in relative proximity to Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a a view on the 1920’s in America, and uses a lot of varied symbolism with it, in particular the loss and dismemberment of the American dream in an era literally named after the amount of wealth and industry it produced in material excess. Fitzgerald is able to showcase the 1920s as an era of dying social and moral values, evidenced in its overwhelming pessimism, desire, and unfulfilling pursuit of pleasure. The carelessness of the parties and celebrations that led to wild jazz music, exemplified in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night, eventually was created, in the corruption of the American dream, as the rampant desire for wealth and pleasure surpassed more worthwhile ideals.

It does not matter how many times life knocks someone down, it matters whether or not they recover. As Winston Churchill once announced, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Life may cause numerous troubles, although, overcoming inadequate decisions can correct your fate. The Other Wes Moore, written by Wes Moore, is an exquisite example of how one poor decision does not need to determine one’s fate, and an individual has the power to metamorphose their fate. In addition, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a superior illustration of how confronting one’s mistakes and choosing to rectify them. The Other Wes Moore and The Scarlet Letter both portray the theme rising above challenges with the use of literary devices.

“And one fine morning...” With this phrase, appearing on the last page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby, narrator Nick Carraway effectively sums up the motivating force that drives the novel’s titular character, Jay Gatsby. It is the achievement of the American Dream that hangs – unreached – at the end of Carraway’s sentence. In this way, the story leaves us with a similar lasting taste of longing, the bittersweet realization that powerful as the Dream may be, it is just that: a dream. And yet, while the Dream, like the sentence – is never fully realized, this unrealization is itself a source of motivation for continuance. There is still the promise of that “one fine morning” making it impossible to

“In our lives, change is unavoidable, loss is unavoidable. In the adaptability and ease with which we experience change, lies our happiness and freedom.” Through this quotation, Buddha states that you cannot avoid change and loss in life, but the way you adapt to the change and how you react to the change will affect your happiness and freedom. This is indeed the case in F. Scott Fitzgerald novel “The Great Gatsby” in which the character of Jay Gatsby dedicates most of his adulthood to becoming rich so he could marry Daisy Buchanan. However, by the time Gatsby obtained his wealth, Daisy had been married to Tom Buchanan. Despite that, Gatsby does not accept the loss of Daisy and still tries to marry her. If he had accepted the loss of

So often, it seems, life can seem like a "patient etherized on the table" (Eliot, 3). Be it the apparent futility of existence as a whole, or the insecurity of those single moments of doubt; life is often fleeting. I believe life is best described as a fickle beast, always elusive; always turning down some new and unexpected road. This fleeting life is what both Jay Gatsby of  The Great Gatsby and Alfred J. Prufrock of "Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" experience. These two men experiences move down remarkably similar paths as they quest for love and life. Yet each has sealed their shared fate in a different manner. As they head toward the seeming abyss of death, both

      Gatsby overcame many obstacles in order to accomplish is dream. Born to shiftless and unsuccessful farmers (104), determined

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”- Langston Hughes. This American classic follows Jay Gatsby, a man consumed by a wave of obsessive determination, later crashing upon the immortal rocks of old money and societal expectation. Gatsby survives only in the drunken memories of scandalous strangers as formless gossip. After two decades of climbing the ladder of life and out of rural poverty, Gatsby remained disrespected by those born on that rung, unaware of a life of any other sort. In the end, after all his expended effort, he does not win Daisy. He does not feel the subtle warmth of the emerald glow on his fingertips. He does not achieve the object of his life’s desire. I believe F. Scott Fitzgerald presents the idea that perhaps the American Dream is unattainable. Perhaps it is never meant to be captured, but to live forever in the

Dreams are tides that wistfully swing back and forth to their own rhythm and reigning one in is a challenge of a lifetime. I have my own aspirations to attend MIT and become an Astrophysicist, but in reality will those tides shift in my favor as they had done for Gatsby? Better yet, the quest to resist a lonely life is something all of us endure. One of the worst things a human can suffer through is not being remembered by anyone. Experiencing a sense of gaiety with someone is a sense of relief and those feelings can build upon one another. Finding someone that you can talk politics and philosophy with fervor might be a rare find to try to hold onto. Who else has read Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World”? Such as life goes on, people drift apart and that very person who knows your inner demons; the very person who ended up helping you become who you are leaves without another trace. Life goes on, but those memories are forever bittersweet. Does one not attempt to recreate those memories in a dash of zeal? In spite of the valiant efforts, we soon register that we’ve changed ourselves and that recreating the very memories imprinted within our nostalgia will only server to further sever us from the present. Nevertheless, I can relate to Gatsby’s sense of urgency. Reaching to the stars and coming back down with no one is a fate possibly worse than death, Gatsby after his attainment of fame within the populous he latched onto a dream that could only further propel him. Of someone who knows of him underneath the guise and who could gait along with him in his walk across the stars. If only Gatsby had known of what I’ve discovered then maybe his plummet to earth would’ve become less

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, hope is a major theme throughout the novel. Hope is the act of wanting or wishing for something to happen. Gatsby, for example, is hoping that Daisy will leave her husband to be with him, this eventually leads to his death. Despite the recurring nature of the theme of hope, it is not portrayed in a completely favorable light. In fact, there is a complex attitude towards the nature of hope as shown through the narrator Nick. He believes hope is a human instinct, but it is something undoubtedly pointless in the long run.