The Great Gatsby Analysis

The plot of The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is driven by Jay Gatsby's

“The orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” is the unattainable goal of those living in Tom and Daisy’s world—a world where lives are wasted chasing the unreachable (Fitzgerald 180). In his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, author F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that making any progress whatsoever toward this aspiration often requires people to establish facades that enable them to progress socially, but that a crippled facade will backfire and cause detriment to its creator. In the passage where Nick realizes who Gatsby is on page 48, Nick observes two different versions of Gatsby—one that is reassuring and truthful and another who “pick[s] his words with care” (Fitzgerald 48). Nick is at first attracted to Gatsby’s constructed

After reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was able to gather a small playlist of songs that can relate to the book. The lyrics in these songs relate to scenes, symbols, and different characters in the book.

Although the timeline is kept vague in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald makes it clear that his work of art is based in the early 1920’s between World War I and the Prohibition. This was a transitional period in the United States. America changed after the war and as a result, so did life. The idea of the perfect life fluctuated as troops began flooding back to the United States, migrating to cities, picking up jobs, and buying houses for their new or planned families. The economy was booming, jazz became the new popular music, woman (more commonly referred to as “flappers”) and men were expressing their freedom by having parties and hanging out in clubs or bars, Henry Ford just introduced the Model-T which made automobiles

Lavish parties, rich man, huge house, drinking everywhere, rich and poor. This is the lavish life of Jay Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is a story of a man who has almost everything, Money, Huge house, but he is missing one thing, his true love, Daisy. He bought a huge mansion in west egg just to be across the bay from Daisy who lives in east egg. The central theme in the Great Gatsby is that you cannot have everything no matter how rich you are.. In the Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald shows many different sides of the complicated character Jay Gatsby, some good and some bad. While Gatsby shows many different sides of him, the sides that are most prevalent are his traits of having a complicated history based on relationships or

“‘Jay… You can’t repeat the past.’ Gatsby wheeled around… ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why of course you can.’”(Luhrmann). The Great Gatsby greatly deals with people trying to relive past relationships and parts of their lives. This why a common theme for the Great Gatsby is that you can’t repeat the past. This is shown when Gatsby dies trying to repeat the past and return to a relationship and feelings that had been gone for 5 years, “He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. ”(Fitzgerald 110). The movie better displays the theme that you can’t relive the past because of its style, the symbolism, and the point of view taken in the movie.

In “The Great Gatsby” a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald discusses the American Dream and the Pursuit of Happiness. He expresses throughout the novel how the idea of the American Dream is romanized and ultimately impossible to achieve, which is shown through the careless and selfish social values and through the ‘easy’ money (made by Gatsby) causing this idea of the American Dream to become warped and and corrupted. The large contrast between the two social classes of the upper class- ‘old money’ and ‘new money’ is also expressed throughout the novel, where Jay Gatsby portrays the self-achieved newly rich, while Daisy and Tom Buchanan represent the aristocracy of the ‘old money’. Fitzgerald portrays this large contrast

What makes the culture of the 1920's different from the decades beforehand? It was the decade in which there was a major explosion in the availability of new consumer goods that were previously rarely available. This includes washing machines, refrigerators, radios, vacuum cleaners, and lets not forget, most importantly, automobiles!

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explores the society of the 1920s and the fundamental clash between the East and West as a new money businessman lives a lavish lifestyle to win his past love. Although people with old money such as the Buchanans survive, Jay Gatsby dies. Gatsby, despite his dubious legality, literally and figuratively creates a self-made identity that collapses on the cusp of achieving his dream. In the scene beginning on page 110 where Nick imagines Gatsby falling in love with Daisy, Fitzgerald portrays the death of the American dream through charged stylistic devices.

In the classic, The Great Gatsby, the actual author F. Scott Fitzgerald quickly begins with a sentence that raises many questions and inferences. Before Nick ends his talk about Gatsby, he finishes with “No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men” (2). So, from what Nick says in the beginning, I infer that Gatsby will be fine at the end, and content with himself. However, it seems as if man restricted Gatsby from pursuing his dreams. Using the word ‘preyed’ is an interesting word choice. Usually when I see the word ‘preyed’ I think of animals; so, possibly the people that preyed him were like animals and could not be controlled, they might be wild and vicious toward Gatsby. Dust is typically dirty so the people that do restrict Gatsby will probably tear him down in a foul and dirty way that is inhumane. I think

In the article “All Men Are [not] Created Equal: F, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” Claire Stocks begins with questioning why Nick perceives Gatsby to be “‘great’”(1). Stocks theorizes that Gatsby is a “doppelganger”(1) that Nick desires to be. The similarity between their poor upbringing pushes them both to work hard because they never received inheritances from their parents, unlike Tom and Daisy. Nick sees Gatsby as a mentor because of his wealth despite coming from a poor family. Stock sees Nick’s fascination with Gatsby is a result of that he believes Gatsby has achieved the American dream. Stock reasons with the explanation that the San Francisco lie is Gatsby’s way of letting Nick know that “Gatsby” is just an illusion and that

One way in which America still provides access to the American dream is by being willing to work hard to achieve your goals. In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “To young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world (Fitzgerald 106).” In other words Gatsby, a character from Fitzgerald’s novel, sees having money, nice things, and wealth as living the American Dream. I disagree because the American Dream is more of being able to be yourself without others having judge you and achieving goals to become successful.

1. Fitzgerald achieves a melancholy mood in the beginning of the chapter by using sorrowful and negative word choices to describe events. In the first paragraph we learn about Nick's challenging night and how "I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams" (Fitzgerald, pg. 154). Introducing a new chapter with such saddening descriptions is done to make the readers continue reading with a more negative outlook. Even in the next few paragraphs Gatsby's actions are pitiful and naïve, and it makes the reader sad to see him so blind when they know more of what is going on than he does.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway claimed that “the well-rounded man is the most limited of all species” and that “life is much more successfully looked at from a single window after all” (Fitzgerald). Upon initially reading this statement, it seems to make no sense. Parents and teachers have long stressed the importance of dabbling in many different subjects while warning against specializing in one area. However, after thinking about it the thought does not seem so preposterous and farfetched. After all when the best singers and athletes in the world come out to perform, no one cares how they did in chemistry, or if they understood how to implicitly differentiate. The fact of the matter is that specialization is more likely to lead to success than being a jack-of-all trades, but unfortunately that is not what children are taught these days. Therefore Carraway was correct when he stated that the well-rounded man is the most limited, as proven by history and my own personal experiences.

Mirroring the American we know today, The Great Gatsby still earns its place as a canon of American literature. In it’s simplest form The Great Gatsby represents America. The majority of characters in the Great Gatsby can be described as obsessed with the other’s perceptions, unsophisticated, naïve, and sometimes idiotically optimistic. All of these characterizations are traits that fit both the Great Gatsby and modern day America. Although it can be hard now to see our society within their world, in many ways Americans are still dealing with the same themes. There are still divides between new money and old and tensions between social classes. People are still striving to be better than one another and trying to project the best versions of themselves. We still gossip and obsess over people and celebrities we don’t even know. We know what it feels like to deeply yearn for something so close yet still out of reach, and to subconsciously know that this goal will most likely never be reached. More importantly even if we do reach it will we be completely satisfied once we get there? The Great Gatsby deserves to be a part of the canon of American literature because although the roaring twenties were almost one hundred years ago, the same innate human qualities and fixations continue to persist in America today.