The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

When F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, he was not only working as a writer, he was an artist painting a piece through his words. While making the lives of fictional characters come to life for the reader, one of the main tools he used to do this was by using the symbolism of colors. Nick Carraway, the main character, befriends many of the wealthiest and corrupt people of Long Island, while exposing them for what they truly are in the journeys he endures with them. His extravagant use of colors to illustrate scenes and characters helps us determine the symbolism behind them, and how they’re used to expose the true personalities of the characters.

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.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald tells the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers. Fitzgerald uses the Roaring Twenties as the setting of this novel. The twenties were a time of promiscuity, new money, and a significant amount of illegal alcohol. Fitzgerald was a master of his craft and there was often more to the story than just the basic plot. He could intertwine political messages and a gripping story flawlessly. In the case of The Great Gatsby, he not only chronicles a love story, but also uses the opportunity to express his opinion on topics such as moral decay, crass materialism, individual ethics, and the American dream.

The Jazz Age was known as a time to reinvent and remodel social norms. As the stock market boomed, the 1920s were a celebratory time of progression and economic growth. People were given more money and more liberty to live their lives as they pleased. However, these freedoms came with a cost. As seen in the novel, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age was a time of moral decay due to these reckless and extravagant lifestyles. Fitzgerald uses contrasting characteristics, object symbolism, and allusions to popular music of the time to highlight the moral depravity present in America’s Upper Class in the 1920s.

Money, commonly associated with happiness and success, is deceiving because it doesn 't necessarily breed enjoyment at all. Lorraine Hansberry 's A Raisin in the Sun and F. Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby examine the difference between wealth and appreciation of life. Lorraine Hansberry explains this with Walter, a negro father in a poor family who seeks more money than is realistic to bring happiness into the family. Fitzgerald uses the character Jay Gatsby to show that wealth doesn 't imply success or happiness. Both characters occupy strikingly different roles in their stories, yet decently portray money 's impact on life. In The Great Gatsby and Raisin in the Sun, wealth is made to seem as the key to happiness, but, in essence,

As the old saying goes, “A man’s home is his castle,” meaning that a man can take refuge within his house, safe from the outside world. This is not so in The Great Gatsby. In the novel, instead of sheltering their inhabitants, houses reflect the inhabitants’ personalities. Jay Gatsby and his house are both ostentatious, hospitable, and stuck in the past. Similarly, Daisy Buchanan is cheery, with inner depression, as is her house. Finally, both George Wilson and his house are dreary and uninteresting. Houses in The Great Gatsby serve to embody the characteristics of their occupants.

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s unique ability to change his identity at will to achieve supremacy threatens the existences of other individuals he encounters and ultimately results in his own unhappiness because of his obsession with his goal.

Everyone has various goals in life that they want to achieve. However, is it worth the struggle, to the point where people forsake their identity? Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pip from Great Expectations written by Charles Dickens, are two character who have turned their back on their past life, in order to fulfill their selfish desires. These two characters are alike as they are ashamed of their past and create a new identity to fulfill their goals, but are unlike as Pip feels guilt later on for leaving his family but Gatsby does not because he tries to buy his way out of it, and lastly they both work extremely hard towards getting the girl of their dreams.

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality”. (Iris Murdoch). How had Jay Gatsby left such an imprint on Nick’s life? Jay Gatsby’s greed and imagination had left his efforts blinded, from the undying need to win Daisy back. However, most people have surrounded themselves with respect on their ethics and morals. Gatsby along with the other citizens of the West and East Egg had constructed their lives around their philosophy and opinion of a good life. The 1920’s had been an era in which been corrupted by the American Dream. The American Dream had been the willing to want, that anyone could make material success, everlasting love, and political power, by hard work and dedication. The Roaring Twenties had created this irrelevant idea that the people could put up facades and mask what they truly were. In the novel The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells a story of the depths and problems that surround wealth and the society of the West/East Egg. Gatsby was great because the idealism of wealth and the American Dream was great, however his intentions were tragically too idealistic, which ultimately caused his death. Jay Gatsby blinded by many materialistic needs, had been under the impression that life is stricken in a rewind of an illusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the Great Gatsby in 1925. It was based to take place in “West Egg,” a made up town in Long Island, New York. Nick Carraway a bond salesman who had just moved to West Egg, across from his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and next door to Jay Gatsby, who later we find in this novel are connected. When Nick moves in and is invited to go across the water to East Egg for dinner. He then sees his cousin, Daisy, who is with her husband, Tom Buchanan, and friend Jordan Baker. Within a short amount of time in this book, we learn that Daisy has issues within the marriage due to her husband’s cheating and his absence of their child’s birth. When Nick mentions the neighbor, Jay Gatsby, Daisy happens to perk up; this can help infer she knows something of him. Once Nick arrives home, he spots Gatsby, who is staring across the water to a green light and stretching his arm up towards it.

admired, as he feared, not to be loved, as he made himself believe; but to be necessary to people” (247). His only hope in loving himself is to be loved by someone else.

Identity is cultivated through several diverse mediums within F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby ‘The word identity is defined as the set of personal and behavioral characteristics which define an individual as a member of a certain group. Based on race, ethnicity, religion, language and culture people distinguish themselves from other groups and form their understanding and pride in who they are’ . For the novels’ central characters, Gatsby and the others , status is autocratic, and an ambition. In their minds, adopting an aspirational identity would afford them the confidence, integrity and purpose they perceive as lacking. Each focal character approaches and reacts to identity differently; however there are also numerous parallels. Jay Gatsby begin his life identifying as oppressed destitutes – then strive separately to embody an identity which they do not fit. Gatsby, being an ambassador for the American Dream, has aspirations upon which he intends to capitalise, and superficially, he does. In the book the central characters may try to escape their prescribed identities in life, and to varying degrees they do, but fail to emulate the social group into which they want to acclimate. The meaning and justification of Identity transforms throughout the texts, and this is what I hope to investigate.

The need to live according to the American dream has been the prime focus of most governments over most of the past decades. Perhaps this has featured in many ways in the country. However, in most aspects, the dream may be noted to be a failure. It is this failure that is associated with the events that point out the fact that Gatsby is not a great person as he is made to look from the introductory sections of the book by Fitzgerald. Just as the better part of the young population have been led to believe that life is a cycle where one goes to school and graduates to get a job and a family is the same way Gatsby idealizes his image through the parties he throws to influence Daisy to fall in love with him. From the presented factors, it is factual to assert that Gatsby’s picture from the onset of the book is an ideal image of what he would want himself to be. Similarly, his conceptualization of Daisy is the ideal picture of what he would want her to be. It therefore follows that consideration of Gatsby as a great person is the ideal thought of him which in truth is not a reality.

In his novel,The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted to explore the American Dream during a corrupt period of the 20’s. In this novel, he wants us to believe that money makes the world go round, or perhaps gets one headed in the right direction. Is it true that an individual can achieve success in life, regardless of family history or social status, if they work hard? Fitzgerald wanted to show the hidden boundaries dividing reality from illusion. He wanted to share his ideas about conflicting contradictions within the American Dream and ultimately about the ideal quest so many had. There has always been great wealth and extreme poverty in America. However, America IS the land of opportunity where status can change from rags to riches legitimately or not as evidenced in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby made millions bootlegging in the time of Prohibition which eventually lead to the collapse of his American Dream

Gatsby, he had a grand vision for his life ever since he was a boy. No amount of fire could challenge the fairy tale he had stored up in his heart. I will be giving a psychoanalysis of one of the literature 's most mysterious and tragic characters, Jay Gatsby. "The novel follows the emotional decline of a young American psychiatrist who 's personal energies are capped, his career corroded equally by his marriage to a beautiful and wealthy patient and his own weakness of character" (S.Fitzgerald, pg2148)