The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a time that was characterized by an unbelievable lack of substance. After the tragedy and horrors of WWI, people were focused on anything that they could that would distract from the emptiness that had swallowed them. Tangible greed tied with extreme materialism left many, by the end of this time period, disenchanted. The usage of the literary theories of both Biographical and Historical lenses provide a unique interpretation of the Great Gatsby centered around context. Enabling one to see how the few real things and feelings of the world have been reflected in the Great Gatsby.

At its most simplistic form, nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past. It is a subtle phenomenon that is associated with a person or place. Fitzgerald plays this concept into his novel The Great Gatsby, which is narrated by a character named Nick Carraway. Nick tells of his neighbor Gatsby, who goes to extreme lengths to reclaim a lost love. Throughout the novel, Gatsby serves as a conduit for humanity’s nostalgic depictions of the past. He accumulates massive amounts of wealth and even changes his identity in efforts to relive something that has already passed. Fitzgerald draws from this, and conceptualizes how nostalgia distorts a person’s overall perception of being.

To be Nick Carraway is to be an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is a narrator, who, has little to no credibility and simply cannot be trusted. These narrators are often in first-person and “seem to have limited knowledge, to be mistaken in his or her understanding of people and events, or even to be deliberately misleading the reader.” (Margree par. 1). The well-known novel The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, introduces readers to a story where everything may not be necessarily true. The beauty of this novel is that the readers actually get to decide what they want or do not want to believe. This is all due to Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. Nick is prejudice and has various faults like dishonesty and being oblivious to himself. A character/narrator like this during the 1920s in New York City seems to fit in just fine, after all it was an age of “vitality, sapping out genuine emotion in favor of the artificial,” (Wolok 1). However, Nick’s faults have a major effect on the background stories and events taking place in The Great Gatsby. He picks and chooses his narrations forcing readers to not get only half the story. Along with this, Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby is an unreliable narrator because he constantly contradicts himself, is biased towards Gatsby, and attempts to use other characters as primary sources.

Society has an obsession with money. In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, wealth is portrayed in two different classes called the new money and the old money. New money refers to those who have recently made their own fortune within their own generation. Old money refers to those who have inherited money from their wealthy families in the past generations. The new money people are more extravagant with their money in order to flaunt their wealth, while the old money people are more conservative with their money because they have been around for longer and people already understand their wealth. The difference between new and old money is not

Jay Gatsby is one of the most crucial characters in the book of The Great Gatsby and throughout the book he isn’t happy at all because he lacks the ability to deeply look at other options other than just his love and dream, Daisy. He invariably fails to look at other ways to be happy because in his eyes, his only option that he observes is the option to get Daisy Buchanan back as soon as possible, but he has one problem; Tom Buchanan who isn’t willing to let go of Daisy. Gatsby 's only way to happiness is having Daisy back so that he could recreate the past. Gatsby had the opportunity to attend Oxford and get a heavy education with a great promising future ahead, instead his wish to get back home and reunite with Daisy again. He never saw

During the 1920’s, most Americans cared about their wealth and social standing. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald displays the characters striving for happiness, love, and wealth, in which none of the characters can have all of the options in the life they have. He does this to explain his own struggle with his American dream by never having a lot of money, never being a very successful writer, and losing his golden girl. Fitzgerald portrays his pessimistic view on the struggle of fulfilling the American dream by portraying different types of people trying to achieve their own dreams with the obstacles of social status, and the influence of reputation getting in the way of their individual dreams.

The Great Gatsby is an American novel written in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. One of the themes of the book is the American Dream. The American Dream is an idea in which Americans believe through hard work they can achieve success and prosperity in the free world. In F. Scott Fitzgerald 's novel, The Great Gatsby, the American Dream leads to popularity, extreme jealousy and false happiness. Jay Gatsby’s recent fortune and wealthiness helped him earn a high social position and become one of the most recognizable men in West Egg. Gatsby is jealous of Tom Buchanan’s prosperous life and beautiful wife, Daisy, which motivated him to become wealthy in order for him to win back Daisy, the love of his life. Throughout the novel, Daisy’s attitude remains superficially happy to mask her pain at her husband 's constant infidelity. Gatsby contemporary success and riches led him to become extremely wealthy and one of the most popular men in West Egg.

West Egg is the representation of the belief of what the American Dream is. The inhabitants of West Egg are more true to what they want to do in life, than just having money and not enjoying it or trying to just have a perfect reputation. One of the main characters in the book, Gatsby, is the epitome of someone reaching towards achieving the American Dream, but he

Greatness is defined as “wonderful; first-rate; very good; being such in an extreme or notable degree; remarkable; exceptionally outstanding; important; highly significant or consequential” (dictionary.com). So, using that criteria as judgment, is Gatsby actually great? Historical figures that are considered “great” add perspective to the controversy of that question, making a model or guidelines for someone to be thought of as “great”. Jay Gatsby shares the title “great”, as these leaders do, yet may not fit the mold. Why? That is a sticky subject. Formerly known as James Gatz, Gatsby is “great” in that he pursues a dream until his death, something many people can’t do; however his “greatness” truly lies in the fact that he is defeated by his desire for a girl that did not belong to him anymore. He chases a dream that isn’t in reaching distance. This great failure is Gatsby’s legacy that makes him The Great Gatsby, but what makes Gatsby, or any man for that matter, “great”?

The importance of two places in a literary work not only reveal the meaning of the work, but the hidden pieces of demonstrating one’s true destination and significance in the work. In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald applies a meaning to the two separate places known as East Egg and West Egg. The two conflicting places reveal the differentiating actions taken toward the social and economic statuses, which leads to the sorrowful events of dehumanization. The West Egg, a part of the new societal values has been noted to consist of snobbish wealthy citizens who have attained wealth through illegal terms; the East Egg side includes those that have gained wealth from generation to generation, the ones with old money and aristocracy,

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone...just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (Fitzgerald 1). The first line of The Great Gatsby illustrates a heartfelt sentiment of treating others respectfully and not judging a book by its cover. However, as the chapter continues, the narrator Nick Carraway, suggests this propensity of tolerance is better used as leverage to entice more people to trust you and tell you their secrets. Nick is privy to the secret lives and untold truths of many rich and powerful people of New York because he could be trusted, whether he wanted to be or not. This is a constant theme throughout The Great Gatsby -- the internal struggle of F. Scott Fitzgerald, portrayed through his characters, of being a kind, honest person content to live his own life versus a grotesquely rich and selfish person who only cared about himself and living the illusive American Dream. The characters created by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby strongly reflect influences of people and events in his life, and demonstrate facets of his personality that dictated how he viewed the world, friendship and love.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, an influential writer in the 1920’s writes the American classic novel The Great Gatsby, following the rekindling of a past love between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan through the perspective of Nick Carraway. Nick observes as the couple reconnects despite Daisy’s cheating husband, Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby’s obsessive manner. He then witnesses as Gatsby takes the blame for Daisy’s mistake of killing Myrtle Wilson and later Gatsby’s death. Myrtle Wilson a minor character in the novel who is also the mistress of Tom Buchanan, along with the person Daisy kills. Notably, Nick Carraway “feels a palpable repugnance for the Myrtle Wilsons of the world” (Voegeli). Set in 1922, Myrtle embodies the failure of the American Dream during the roaring twenties; furthermore, Myrtle and her husband George Wilson “preside over the valley of ashheaps” (Telgen), and George has a meager job working for Tom Buchanan. Because Fitzgerald develops the character Myrtle Wilson as a catalyst to Jay Gatsby’s death, a foil to Daisy Buchanan, and an archetype for temptation, he constructs a minor character with a significant presence.

“Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time spaces inhabiting humans” (Foster 173). Throughout The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the two Eggs to demonstrate the large impact location has on the lives of his characters. Because of the complicated social structure of America during the 1920s, it is both figuratively and literally impossible for Gatsby to truly become a part of Daisy’s life. In the grand world of the upper echelon of New York City, geography is everything. For these elite members of society, the East Egg of Long Island is the place to be, a place where money seems to grow on trees and life is ever easy for its inhabitants. These old

“The Great Gatsby” is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This novel takes place in the early 1900’s and consists of five main characters – Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and Jordan Baker. The plot is that Gatsby tries to get Daisy from Tom; Daisy denies Gatsby because he was a bootlegger. This story signifies Gatsby trying to achieve The American Dream. Jay Gatsby is one of the most celebrated characters in twentieth-century literature. Carlyle Van Thompson proposed an argument in the year of 2000 that Gatsby was a black man. Thompson explains his analysis and provides numerous facts from the “The Great Gatsby.” He shows how it is nearly impossible for an individual to say that Jay Gatsby was not a black man although he passes for a white man. Fitzgerald uses countless symbols throughout his novel, which can lead one to certainly agree with Thompson’s theory. Was Jay Gatsby a black man?

America’s Roaring Twenties were a time of pivotal social change. After World War I, wartime factories were adapted to mass-produce commodities for the middle class, including some, like the radio, that many had never encountered before. For men who had previously lived simple lives on farms in the country, the contrast of experiencing the horrors of “The Great War” and returning to live and work in factory cities of technological wonder shook their assumptions about social and cultural norms – it was a new and exciting time; things were uncertain, but they were alive. For women, many of whom had worked in the factories during the war, the 1920's were a struggle against the oppression of the old culture, dominated by males, that left few roles for women other than submitting to their husbands while staying at home. They had had a taste of freedoms they were not about to give up, but few knew how to fight or what victory would even look like. Winning the right to vote and pushing into social circles by seizing behaviors that were previously exclusively male (or at least previously more outrageous for women) signaled a big change in social norms, but culture was slow to make sense of what a desirable role for women would and should be. This period of lively upheaval and confusion, not without its cynics, is illustrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Regardless of their relationship to the different men in the novel, the women of The Great Gatsby all struggle