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Theme Of Boxing In The Great Gatsby

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Among the various amounts of topical relationships that occur within Fitzgerald’s society changing novel, The Great Gatsby, exists the indirect reference of the world of boxing in the 1920’s. Despite the lack of physical evidence for this fact, Fitzgerald stated himself that a famous man from the boxing community, Jack Dempsey, was a major influence to many of the characters of The Great Gatsby (“Heavyweights” par. 13). Boxing in general was also often seen and referenced as a way of figuratively showing the enormous rise in societal changes of the time (Hirsley par. 23). In full summarization, Fitzgerald included numerous topics from the real world to create a deranged fictional environment that could be used to inform many readers about the corruption in social class at the time in which 1920’s boxing and Jack Dempsey were a major part of. Boxing had always been around in which its origin started back in Ancient Greece where Greeks found the sport of violence very entertaining (Hirsley par. 17). Despite its huge popularity at that time, it soon died off with the rest of Greece to where it would not be revived until the 1600’s. Medieval Europe played around with the idea of boxing, but it would later perish due to the rise of the Salem Witch Trials (Hirsley par. 18). Boxing would then come back around once more, but only this time being the most effective. The 1920’s eventually came around, and with the rise of entertainment, boxing was born again. It was previously

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