Theme Of Isolation In The Great Gatsby

Hundreds of people are gathered around dancing, drinking, and having a good time. People are causally talking and laughing. Men and women from all around are having the “time of their life.” However, the lifestyle of the city, money, and connections don’t always create fulfilled, happy lives. For Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and Jay Gatsby, they are never alone but always isolated.

A deadly war causes a mother to look frantically for her children after their separation. An isolated child sits alone while the other children play and laugh. A father holds his son’s hands before he passes on his deathbed. Isolation and separation causes many depression and heartbreak. Isolation is not a choice, but separation is, it causes many to create barriers and to move away. Fitzgerald and Chua both explore these ideas of separation and Isolation in The Great Gatsby and “love song, with two goldfish”. In The Great Gatsby and “Love song, with two goldfish” Isolation and separation negatively affects the characters because of time, obsession, and wealth/status.

Dreams are a compelling force in people’s lives. They are what propel them forward each and every day in an effort to reach something better. The American Dream has been sought after by millions all over the world for hundreds of years. This country was founded on the belief that anyone could achieve their dreams. However, in the 1920s these hopes and aspirations began to splinter until they ultimately shattered. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses symbolism, setting, and theme to depict the unattainability of the American Dream.

True love is seen through a relationship of two people. Love exists when two people give all their trust, loyalty, and support to one another. Now imagine finding out all of the love and loyalty was false? Betraying a loved one can make someone capable of things they didn’t even know they were capable of. Betrayal is the breaking of a trust that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship amongst individuals. In The Great Gatsby, characters pursue in the action of having an affair and the result of betraying their loved ones. In the book, The Great Gatsby, the concept of true love is portrayed in a way that negatively affects the characters.

Post war, the Jazz age, women and automobiles. All of this was during the time period known as the Roaring Twenties and the book The Great Gatsby was taking place in. The book covered how the wealthy threw parties but even though they were rich, their money did nothing for their happiness. Fitzgerald describes how Daisy Buchanan was married to Tom Buchanan, a wealthy man, but she was unhappy with her marriage because of the affairs that took place even though she wore beautiful white dresses and lived in a mansion in Long Island, New York (Fitzgerald).Thomas Wolfe further explains how looks can be deceiving in the short story The Far and the Near where an engineer travels on a train from town to town but a particular place he stops at everyday catches his attention but when he visits it, he is fooled by the beauty of the town. Wolfe argues that looks can be deceiving because isolation can cause hope and regret in people.

There are many themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby in which many people can relate to today. Fitzgerald demonstrates a lot of themes that have to humanity and its many flaws. One of the major themes in Fitzgerald’s book is the theme of selfishness and its negative effects on the characters and the people around them. According to the Oxford Dictionary, selfishness is “lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.” In more simple terms, it is when a person puts his or her own needs in before others. There are many characters in this book that depict this characteristic through the story.

Alienation is the main reason why the Great Gatsby is one of the most popular books in America. This modernist characteristic is described as, a state of being cut off or separated from a group or person. In the Great Gatsby, there are many situations involving alienation between multiple characters. One being, when Nick describes the valley of ashes as a place where rich people dump their trash. This creates different character plot lines and character interactions that make the novel relatable to not only the time period when it was drafted but the time period that is today.

Many people surround themselves with materials and fake friends to fill an empty void. This empty void shows how easy one can become isolated from reality. Some find comfort in isolation, while others build intimate interactions with people and themselves. In The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald suggests many different people and spaces have the appearance of togetherness, yet rarely are capable of true intimate connection. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald shows how characters and spaces contribute to an elaborate, subtle cloak of isolation through social interactions, memories of abandonment, and spatial relationships. This cloak conveys personal feelings of intimacy, which allow one to live with purpose. In the novels end, isolation and loneliness are accepted as an amendment to the social contract—signed at birth and continued in death.

Is there such a perfect life? Is one able to attain goals and dreams through transparent boundaries? The 1920’s, a time of striking social and political changes, was marked by further economic prosperity with social divisions in wealth. In addition, more and more Americans transcended into a “consumer society”; a nation founded on the idea of wealth. In Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby,” the existence of class distinctions are defining factors in preventing Jay Gatsby from living a perfect life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was part of a generation who were born at the turn of the century. He was born in 1896, and right from his childhood he had mixed feelings about American life and identity (Mangum 4). The contradictory beliefs and ideas also influenced his writings, “his fiction was born of this tug-of-war between these opposed impulses: the hedonistic and the ascetic, the desire to soak up experience to the limit and even beyond and the need to be morally disciplined” (Glicksberg 59). Thinking about The Great Gatsby, one can create a parallel with the author’s own ambiguity and the various contradictory ideas and beliefs that appear in the book itself. Also, there is a connection between the protagonist and the author, as Harold Bloom puts it in his essay, “like his creator, Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby is the American hero of romance, a vulnerable quester whose fate has the aesthetic dignity of the romance mode at its strongest” (Bloom 5).

The Great Gatsby is narrated by an ex-soldier, Nick, who travels East. In Fitzgerald’s book moving East is essentially going backwards instead of moving on with your life. Everyone who moves East recedes in character and focuses on the life they used to have. Nick learns more and more about corrupt society the longer he lives there, becoming corrupt himself. By understanding the history of the 1920s, the reader views these ideas through a corrupted lense, creating a strengthened comprehension of the themes of the past in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nick Carraway narrates the story as he recounts his experience living within West Egg. He meets various people who influence his time in New York, such as the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, and the antagonist, Tom Buchanan. The novel quickly grew traction and four films were produced based on it, the most popular being Baz Lurhmann’s interpretation. It received both criticism and praise for his portrayal of the novel and the time period. Although both the novel and film were extremely successful, there were many inconsistencies with the music, scenes, and character traits.

Time. It affects all of what we know and are. Living in the past can affect your present,

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Grace Chua “(love song, with two Goldfish)” both intertwine isolation and separation in their text to explore the impact on characters and the various conflicts that are caused. Isolation and separation are both feelings that a person never wants to feel upon them. These feelings result in many conflicts that arise throughout the story or poem. Fitzgerald and Chua both incorporate isolation and separation in their text to show how many conflicts it creates with their characters. Both Gatsby and the male fish are very similar to each other because they both go through the same feelings of isolation and separation.

I have had the privilege to study two compelling masterpieces this year. The enthralling novel "The Great Gatsby" by F.Scott Fitzgerald and the exceptional visual sensation that is "The King's Speech". The cultural context alludes what aspects are relevant to the society of that world and their daily lives. I was very intrigued when comparing both of these texts