Theme Of Reality In The Great Gatsby

Myrtle yearns to be with Tom and live in his wealth but is prevented from doing so by Tom and Daisy. For instance, when Daisy tries to leave Tom for Gatsby, Tom does not exactly dismiss Myrtle, “…but there is no question that she would eventually be discarded” (Donaldson). Myrtle is so infatuated with Tom, she forgot that he can just as well choose Daisy over her. He has the upper hand, as a rich man with control over women especially when it comes to his relationships. While to Tom, Myrtle’s gender has made her just one of his possessions, to Myrtle, Tom’s rich and high status as a man has made him her only path to a higher class. Due to her infatuation with Tom, she often becomes jealous and possessive when she finds a threat to their relationship. Myrtle is so overcome with desire for Tom that she cannot stand the thought of him with another women. Even when she sees Tom in the car with Jordan Baker, Myrtle’s, “… eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she too to be his wife” (Fitzgerald 125). Myrtle is so convinced that Tom is hers, when in reality, she is really Tom’s. Myrtle has almost forgotten the fact that as an inferior women, she has little control over the situation. The reality is that Tom was in control of the relationship and used Myrtle for his lustrous desires. Tom’s rejection of Myrtle causes her to become overrun with jealousy. In

In the Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby built up his wealth hoping he could win Daisy back. Daisy who was in love with Gatsby, married a man name Tom for "old money". Nick becomes friends with Gatsby and is Daisy's cousin. There is "a lot that is realistic in The Great Gatsby" but there is "also a strain of counter-realism.” (YaleCourses). Throughout the novel we find that all three characters are untrue with themselves and none possess true identities. This lack of authenticity in the characters is what leads to their downfalls.

Daisy's superficiality extends to her personality. She is fragile, unstable and a confused character. While talking to Nick she said: “...I woke up with an abandoned felling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'Alright,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful fool” (Fitzgerald 21). They also married their husbands for different reasons. Myrtle says she married George because she thought he was a gentleman. She also thought he knew about good “breeding.” On the other hand, Daisy married Tom because rich girls had to marry into money and good social status.

In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald the concept of a reality is ever changing throughout the story. The ways that the characters treat and act towards each other is a cause of the inability to interpret the differences between reality and illusion. Through the lies, gossip, and empty speech of characters, F. Scott Fitzgerald highlights the way that people treat each other when they do not understand the difference between reality and illusion.

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.

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald descomteratits the idea that people are unable to accept their true reality so they tend to put them self into the a false reality that they believe is true. This idea can be examined through three different literary devices; character, symbol and motif.

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.

The novel, The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is set in the context where the implosion and withering away of the American Dream is represented by the main character and protagonists, Jay Gatsby’s dream. The use of writing, reading and books as representation allows readers to gain insight into character. This will be proven by addressing the themes of appearance verses reality, education and dissatisfaction of the characters with their circumstances in life. This argument will be developing by using the scene of Tom Buchannan’s discussion of the novel by Goddard, the library scene with The Owl-Eyed man and Fitzgerald’s writing style regarding his use of the character Nick Carraway. In order to prove how the representation of

Everyday people create false realities to live in a world that they want. They lie to themselves and others only to find in the end that they are drowning in the reality of a situation. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, “The Great Gatsby,” the concept of illusion versus reality is a leading cause of the failures and issues that most of the characters face. Their emotions and mentalities ran high in the book leading them into a whirlwind of illusion rather than reality. Their inability to grasp what was not real and what was is ultimately the reason for their downfalls.

   The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel about one man's disenchantment with the American dream. In the story we get a glimpse into the life of Jay Gatsby, a man who aspired to achieve a position among the American rich to win the heart of his true love, Daisy Fay. Gatsby's downfall was in the fact that he was unable to determine that concealed boundary between reality and illusion in his life.

Fitzgerald’s use of fantasy is a rather neglected subject worth closer scrutiny not just for its own sake but for what it can tell us about his literary methods in general and his place in the history of modern American fiction. We can best appreciate this through a survey of the fantastic in his short stories, especially “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. As with Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and a number of other novelists, Fitzgerald is often more experimental in his shorter fiction. The relative lack of critical attention paid to it has surely contributed to a general underestimation of the extent to which he was, by design, an artist of the fabulous.1

Myrtle Wilson is the other partner in Tom Buchannan’s affair. She is of a simpler lifestyle living on the “edge of the wasteland…contiguous to absolutely nothing.”(Gatsby 24). Nick describes her “a thick woman” “in [her] middle thirties” (Gatsby 25), the average woman in that time. Once she and Tom get off the train, she immediately buys a dog, and then makes a point to buy a rather expensive dog as well. When she arrives to her sister’s house, where a party is taking place, Nick says that she “changed her costume” (Gatsby 30). Because a costume is also the attire performers wear, Nick is giving us the impression that all of this is a play, a facade to act wealthy when in fact she is not. Nick also says “with the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur” (Gatsby 30), again another indicator of her “performance” of a wealthy woman. Soon, she and Tom “discuss in impassioned voices” whether she had any “right to mention Daisy’s name” (Gatsby 37). Tom punches her after this, but still left the party with her. Myrtle is now a woman with no self-respect, due to her allowing a man, though he may be rich, to physically assault her, instead of having a man who truly cares for her not being well off.

Futility and despair are common themes that overwhelm many tragedies. “The Great Gatsby” is a novel that follows this precedent. Regardless of the efforts of the protagonist to have happy endings, unexpected events direct them back into misfortune. In the novel, “The Great Gatsby” Francis Scott Fitzgerald creates the tone of hopelessness. This is achieved through the specific use of diction, the dissatisfaction of characters and unfaithful marriages.

People living in the Valley of Ashes are barely keeping their life afloat with their miserable wages, and a lack of meaningful opportunities and as a result, many people want to move out of their dreary social situation with any chance they get: One such person is Myrtle Wilson, the woman involved in an affair with Tom Buchanan. Her desire to completely get out of her current situation is a significant propeller of her relationship with Tom. For example, her private apartment is described as an entity that is “crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it” (Fitzgerald 29), which relays her desire to imitate the truly affluent

“There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind appearance.” Said Albert Einstein about the relationship between appearance and reality. Einstein is telling the readers that people are discovering new things that were hidden behind illusions of what had appeared. Humans have to use hat feeling to see threw those appearances to discover the elements that form the reality they live in. Scott Fitzgerald uses the creation of illusive appearance but also writes a discoverable reality for the most of the characters in his novels. In his novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates a strong relationship between the illusion of appearance