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Imagery In The Great Gatsby

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The Roaring 20’s was the age for physical and spiritual euphoria. There was low interest, stock market growth, and relative luxury for common people. This idealism led to the belief of the American Dream. F.Scott Fitzgerald was one of America’s biggest dreamers. He referred the 1920’s as The Jazz Age, in which Fitzgerald based his book, The Great Gatsby. The story follows the dreams of Jay Gatsby, and the extents he went in order to change his class to regain his lost love of Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald reveals that instead of to achieve the American Dream by working hard and making something of one’s self, it ends up being more about materialism and the selfish pursuit of pleasure.
Jay Gatsby symbolizes the pessimistics of the American Dream as his ambitions to become wealthy enough to reclaim Daisy’s love threw him over the edge. Gatsby was born into a poor family in North Dakota. Sick of his limitations, Gatsby sought for wealth and started his new beginnings. With the first introduction of Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story and Gatsby’s acquaintance, sees him reaching “out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way” and “could have sworn he was trembling” (20,21). Fitzgerald’s use of imagery in the text allow readers to create a mental image that foreshadows Gatsby’s inevitable future of failure. The “trembling” of his arms is a representation of his struggle to achieve his dream that is out of his reach; hence, making him a dreamer, in which people who

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