The Great Gatsby and The Wasteland Essay

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.

Themes of hope, success, and wealth overpower The Great Gatsby, leaving the reader with a new way to look at the roaring twenties, showing that not everything was good in this era. F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the characters in this book to live and recreate past memories and relationships. This was evident with Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship, Tom and Daisy’s struggling marriage, and Gatsby expecting so much of Daisy and wanting her to be the person she once was. The theme of this novel is to acknowledge the past, but do not recreate and live in the past because then you will not be living in the present, taking advantage of new opportunities.

“It’s a shallow life that doesn’t give a person a few scars”. This quote said by Garrison Keillor, metaphorically exemplifies the true meaning of hollowness and shallowness. Hollowness and shallowness were a major part of people’s characteristics in the 1920’s ‘easy money’ era because of the great economic boom. During this era, people earned their money by corruption with smuggling alcohol during prohibition. In addition, people earned their money by people unknowingly investing in major stocks. A few people earned their money with hard work; it was mostly made easily for them. Throughout the novel, The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the shallowness and hollowness of the upper class is persistently shown. Hollowness and

The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a story about a wealthy man named Gatsby. Gatsby lives a luxuriant life in West Egg of New York. Gatsby’s wealth has an unknown secret because nobody seems to know where his wealth emerged from. Despite of having so much fortune, Gatsby’s true American dream has not been achieved. In the great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald develops Gatsby as a failed American dream to show the impossibility of the American dream in the 1920’s.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American Author during the late 1910s who was well known for writing; Zelda: A Biography, West of Sunset and The Great Gatsby. He is well known for his diverse use of figurative language, which is used to immerse the reader into the story. In Chapter 3 page 40 of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes both visual imagery and similes to immerse the reader into the story for further understanding.

In the book “The Great Gatsby” there is many things that people say made Gatsby a great or a not so much of a great person. Gatsby was a great man because he became someone with almost everything anybody could and would want but grew up from with nothing, He made all this money from working jobs that were not so great and people envied him for it even though they did not know what he did, and he was just a very mysterious and many people found that very intriguing about him. person For people that didn’t know who he was when he was younger, they all expect him to be old money and get the money from his parents, but as we learn he made his money by working, good or bad jobs he still made money and he was successful and he was proud of it.

Marius Bewley in, "Scott Fitzgerald's Criticism of America," writes about Fitzgerald's works and how they reflect on America. For example, Bewley says, "The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream.” Bewley also talks about the unreality of reality in The Great Gatsby. He explains how Fitzgerald sets up the scene before the reader even meets Gatsby because he wants the reader to adjust to his idea of reality. The focus of this article is about Fitzgerald's way of writing The Great Gatsby and its reflection on America, but also briefly mentions some other work.

“Is Tom most responsible for Gatsby’s death? Daisy? Myrtle? Gatsby himself? Give reasons why or why not each character is implicated in the murder.”

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch

Many times we hear of society's affect on people; society influencing the way people think and act.  Hardly mentioned is the reverse: peoples' actions and lifestyles affecting society as a whole and how it is characterized.  Thus, society is a reflection of its inhabitants and in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is a wasteland described as the "valley of ashes."  Since the characters of this novel make up this wasteland, aren't they the waste?  Symbolically, this waste represents the lack of ethics of the 1920's society and civilization's decay.  In The Great Gatsby, morals deficiencies such as a lack of God, selfishness, and idleness are reflective of a society as doomed as

Fitzgerald highlights the idea of the ‘American Dream” by having one of his main charters, the great Gatsby himself being obsessed with the concept of achieving the american dream. Many times in the book when we see that Fitzgerald uses the colour green he is trying to convey the wanting that Gatsby has.

Jay Gatsby, the protagonist in The Great Gatsby, is faced with the struggle of achieving his dream against the reality of the world (Sanders 109). He acquired his wealth through bootlegging and relations with corrupt individuals. However, he tries to preserve his innocence by recreating his past with Daisy (“Fitzgerald F Scott”). The reality of the world leaves Gatsby with the feeling of emptiness and desperation because his life was consumed with overwhelming wealth and a passionate devotion to a relationship with Daisy, only to have it disappear (Dubose 75). Similar to the Lost Generation, at the end of the novel Gatsby realizes the world is full of deception and cruelty, even after earning great wealth (“Lost Generation”). A Lost Generation is defined as having “developed the idiosyncratic and personal manners” and feeling emotionally and spiritually alienated from the previous generations (Stegner 184). Jay Gatsby symbolizes the Lost Generation which F. Scott Fitzgerald connects to the changing social attitudes such as wealth, love, and the corruption of innocence in The Great Gatsby.

The novel The Great Gatsby is a story that takes place in the 1920’s. The story

How came people did not respect Fitzgerald’s writing in the twentieth century, but why people are respecting and valuing Fitzgerald work in the twenty-first century? Fitzgerald had a hard time to profiting from his writing, but he was not successful after his first novel. There are three major point of this essay are: the background history of Fitzgerald life, the comparisons between Fitzgerald and the Gatsby from his number one book in America The Great Gatsby, and the Fitzgerald got influences of behind the writing and being a writer. From childhood to adulthood, Fitzgerald faced many good and bad experiences that inspired him to achieve his own American dream in a short amount of time.

The XXth century in the USA is the remarkable period, not only economically, socially, culturally and spiritually. American literature grew up to a new level with the advent of such a flow as the Modernism. Modernism Literature reached its peak in America from the 1920s to the 1940s. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most prominent representatives of this genre and entered Modernism in the United States above all as the first exponent of his ideas. In the works of Fitzgerald the topic “Lost generation” is in disastrous pursuit of wealth that swept the young post-war America.