Okonkwo and Jay Gatsby Essay examples

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the ideals of wealth and dreams are exhibited through the lives and experiences of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. Specifically, Gatsby tends to waste his wealth rather than investing for the future. He uses the “green light” to serve as a constant reminder of his dreams and life goals he wishes to pursue. Nick Carraway’s friendship with Gatsby enables him to partake in the wealth and luxuries of Gatsby's lifestyle. The American Dream is brought to fruition through Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle and extravagant parties. Furthermore, the motifs of wealth and dreams are perpetually shaping and influencing the characters’ decisions, experiences and outcomes over the course of the story.

Similarly, in the 1920s flourishing American economy of flashy cars and ostentatious mansions and extravagant parties and overpriced attire, there are those who believe money is the key to glee. Gatsby, born into a family of “unsuccessful farm people” trades in his “torn green jersey” for a “shirt of sheer linen” and dedicates his life to amassing the fortune he believes will help him accomplish his dream (Fitzgerald 5.92 & 6.98). Deceit becomes his best friend as corruption murders his once innocent dream and meretricious promises replace his morals. He, to rise to the top and near his dream, cheats the poor, the people that are so much like his own family.

In book, “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts how the American was corrupted through wealth. Fitzgerald provides many examples. The most common example shown was Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s idea that to achieve his American Dream must be to acquire wealth. In order to show this, Fitzgerald uses various literary elements. Two of those being imagery and foreshadowing, these played a critical role in describing the theme, and specific moods to show what was to come and as well as describe the story as a whole. These play a vital role in representing Gatsby’s life and journey to acquiring Daisy, his version of the American Dream.

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.

Although "The Great Gatsby" is filled with multiple themes such as love, money, order, reality, illusion and immorality, no one would probably deny that the predominate one focuses on the American Dream and the downfall of those who attempt to reach its illusionary goals. The attempt to capture the American Dream is the central of this novel. This can be explained by how Gatsby came to get his fortune. By studying the process of how Gatsby tried to achieve his own so-called American Dream, we could have a better understanding of what American dream is all about, in those down-to-earth Americans' point of view. The characterization of Gatsby is a representative figure among Americans as he devoted his whole life to achieve his dream.

The culture of the wealthy Americans represented in The Great Gatsby was defined mainly by consumerism and excessive material wealth. Wherever given the opportunity, Jay Gatsby went over the top, as shown in his flamboyant style of dress and his huge mansion where he throws lavish parties. This is actually not all that different from Fitzgerald’s life. After his first work was published to great fanfare, Fitzgerald was the talk of the town. As was the case with Gatzby, many of those around him did not – and never would – actually know Fitzgerald. They wished merely to be close to someone famous. Fitzgerald shunned all the attention, eventually moving to France. It was there that he looked at the supposed American Dream from a different perspective. To Fitzgerald, it was clear that the sudden wealth that many Americans began to acquire caused leisure and idleness to replace traditional ethics like hard work as qualities that were admired. (Decker, 28) Certainly the Buchanans and Gatsby cared little about hard work once they had achieved their material goals.

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.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby provides the reader with a unique outlook on the life of the newly rich. Gatsby is an enigma and a subject of great curiosity, furthermore, he is content with a lot in life until he strives too hard. His obsession with wealth, his lonely life and his delusion allow the reader to sympathize with him.

In the period of the 1920’s, there was a certain status of wealth that was difficult to achieve. There were two societal classes consisting of those with wealth from prior generations, and those who worked to earn it themselves. Tom, Daisy, and Nick, who represented the old money society did not have to work hard, unlike Gatsby which he represented the new money and they had to work to earn money. People like Gatsby, who gained their wealth on their own often fought for the approval from the upper class who inherited their wealth. Rather than having new money and old money, people who tried achieving the American Dream and ended up in failure usually they end up like George and Myrtle Wilson In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the notion that social norms in the upper class depict the idea that being apart of it was impossible unless they were born in it was expressed through Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby because of the corrupt way in which he gained his wealth, making his American Dream unattainable.

Gatsby’s aspirations reflect the time period. The “Roaring Twenties”, as it is called, was a period of prosperity, and the Americans were obsessed with acquiring wealth, and thought that “those who have wealth should be splendid, happy people”

The wealthy upper class has continually been associated with corruption. There is no more explicit instance than in the Jazz Age, when wealth and prosperity became the destination of the American Dream. The decadence of both the old money and new money accentuates the flaws of the American Dream. Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby utilizes the embodiment of Jay Gatsby to illustrate the pursuit of wealth and the corruption associated with it. Jay Gatsby’s aspirations to become wealthy in order to impress Daisy, and the ultimate failure to achieve his dream portrays Fitzgerald’s theme that pursuit of monetary success, while encouraged in society, eclipses morality and ultimately leads to destruction.

After The Great War concluded in 1918, America entered a state of prosperity and luxury throughout the 1920’s. This significant accumulation of wealth marked the start of the Roaring 20’s, a time the American economy grew to be the most powerful worldwide but in which people began exploiting their earnings on excess materialism. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, The Great Gatsby, accurately re-creates this time period yet criticizes the changes of societal attitudes and its values that occurred, making Fitzgerald the first “American writer to write seriously about money and the effects of money on character” (Bruccoli). The two main characters, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, both made the decision to reside in New York in hopes of obtaining their own fortune in order to achieve the wealthy, comfortable lifestyle they always desired. However, their growth and change of perspective as the novel progresses in response to the constant presence of immeasurable wealth reveals how the novel criticizes this time era as an “American social order delimited by patriarchal capitalism in which there is little possibility for authentic love or desire” (Froehlich). The two novel inspired poems “Changing Hours” and “Carried Away” express differing perspectives and reactions towards the idea of progressing into a carefree and extravagant lifestyle. While “Changing Hours” and “Carried Away” both illustrate the deceptive and futile nature of a luxurious lifestyle within The Great Gatsby, only

Okonkwo the son of the useless and unimportant father Unoka strives to become rich and successful in the Ibo, unlike his father who was simple, poor and always was in debt from all of the people around. Okonkwo tries to

On first glance, The Great Gatsby is about a romance between Gatsby and Daisy. The true theme behind this wonderful novel is not merely romance, but is also a very skeptical view of the extinction of the American dream in the prosperous 19s. This loss of the American dream is shown by Fitzgerald's display of this decade as a morally deficient one. He shows its incredible decadence in Gatsby's lavish and ostentatious parties. This materialistic attitude toward life came from the disillusionment of the younger generation of the old Victorian values. Also, with Prohibition in effect, illegal bootlegging practices made for yet another way for Americans to fall down the path of

“The Great Gatsby” is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922. The novel takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed prosperity during the “roaring” as the economy soared. At the same time, prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely