The Great Gatsby Analysis Essay

For so many years, he has been invading my thoughts and quiet moments in the garden, at breakfast, while resting… even during the thick of a fantastic plot of an astounding book. For so many years, I’ve been trying to make Gatsby disappear from my mind. But in fact, I can’t just can’t keep him out of my thoughts… I just had to write this entry in my diary for I needed an outlet to express my thoughts.

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.

I’ve only known Gatsby for a few months, and so I’ll start with my first impression. It was summer, and many people came to enjoy his premises. He held huge parties at his mansion every Saturday.1 They were the most opulent and ostentatious parties, typical of the West Egg. All sorts of people came, from the city or just across the lake, looking to mingle and join the wealthy. They basked in Gatsby’s display of wealth, enjoying the alcohol, the music, and the atmosphere. They enjoyed so much of his parties, yet they never got to meet

Through the use of powerful diction and irregular syntax, Fitzgerald creates feeling of unfulfilled potential. Fitzgerald uses clear, piercing phrases such as “Daisy tumbled short” and “colossal vitality of his illusion” to show how unreachable Gatsby’s dream had become for both parties involved. Fitzgerald’s strong word choice illustrates the magnitude of the change happening in Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship, and how Gatsby and Nick are both feeling anticlimactic with the aforementioned change. Gatsby has been hoping and dreaming of having Daisy’s love again for nearly five years, and Nick has planned this meeting for the two to act as a catalyst for the rekindling of a flame Gatsby and Daisy once had. In other words, Gatsby and Nick both have their hopes up and some investment in the reunion. Daisy on the other hand “tumble[s]” in and is excited and joyous. She had not dreamed of this, planned on this, or hoped for this like the

Fitzgerald uses Gatsby's parties and the way in which Nick views them to reveal that whilst Gatsby is surrounded by shallow and vulgar people, he is above this. Fitzgerald also uses these parties to expose Gatsby's isolation which leads us to feel sympathy toward Gatsby. Despite the amount of people at the party, Nick observes Gatsby's seclusion and loneliness, "my eyes fell to Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps". This evokes a great deal of sympathy from us as although Nick describes Gatsby in a warm and friendly way, "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life", we now can see that Gatsby is a lonely figure. This sympathy is accentuated when Nick is the only person to turn up to Gatsby's funeral, as we know that Gatsby is a decent and honourable character and thus our sympathies are emphasised by Gatsby's isolation. When Nick first meets Gatsby, he reveals Gatsby to be a fascinating character that we would like to know more about. The warm and assuring smile that Nick describes is in antithesis to the

Gatsby’s head is a complete mess. Nick says of him “Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies [...] these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality” (100). Gatsby is always dreaming of changing to the point of letting years go by stuck on the same illusions.

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

"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air…"

Throughout the novel, Gatsby exhibits his persistent ambition to achieve greatness. Firstly, when describing Gatby’s past, Nick states that Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” illustrating his high expectations for himself (98). Meeting with Nick for the first time, Gatby’s father mentions that “he knew he

(105) The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God… he must be about His Father 's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he 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. As Nick recounts Gatsby’s backstory, he offers both factual information and this more abstract description. He notes how artificially Gatsby has created his personality and identity, but also seems to respect the commitment he shows to that artifice. To better articulate the fraudulence of Gatsby’s identity, Nick employs several sets of symbols. First he describes him as a “Platonic conception of himself,” implying that Gatsby projected an ideal (“Platonic”) way his life could

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.

Nick’s reflection upon his experiences in New York is summed up with the last line of the book. In the line, he suggests the constraint that the significance of the past puts on a person’s future and mind. All throughout the story, it can be seen that the delusions of Gatsby signified his constraints. An example of this is when Nick states on page 109, “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.”

However, these materialistic pleasures do not add to Gatsby’s greatness as much as his dream does. The ‘colossal vitality’ of his dream sets Gatsby apart from everybody else. The fact that he has total belief in his dream truly shows his greatness. His idealism is utterly admirable, ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before – She’ll see.’ Gatsby, unlike all of the other characters in the novel is not materialistic. He has no concern for all of his belongings, because his wealth is all for love of Daisy, who clearly states that ‘rich girls don’t love poor boys.’ Gatsby cannot be blamed for the failure of his dream, his dream was only destined to crash because it was invested in a shallow person – Daisy. Gatsby’s dream is often described by Nick. He tells us that Gatsby had ‘thrown himself into it with a creative passion.’ His dream is immense to ‘romp like the mind of God’. These vivid descriptions from Nick provoke the feeling from the reader that Gatsby is great.

“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

The passage is structured into three sections, each differing in the use of narration, description, and dialogue. The first paragraph is Nick’s narration that prepares the reader to discover the “strange story” of Gatsby’s youth. The following five paragraphs are an intriguing mixture of narration and description. Gatsby’s descriptive revelation of his past is retold through by Nick’s narration. The filter of Nick’s own opinions inevitably affects the nuance of Gatsby’s experiences. Nick’s biased disapproval of the rich is conveyed through subtle words such as “bought luxury,” which implies his scorn for the rich who enjoy excessive luxury at the expense of others’ efforts.The last paragraph consists of Gatsby’s monologue only, in which the expression of his thoughts are independent of Nick’s opinion. Through this Fitzgerald provides the reader with Gatsby’s honest thoughts, in which his illusions are further made obvious. For example, his misguided belief that Daisy thought he “knew a lot because [he] knew different things from her” is overconfident and idealistic, giving the reader an insight into his character.