Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - Parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and Jay Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby: Parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and Jay Gatsby

In his critical essay, “The Mystery of Ungodliness”, Bryce J. Christensen writes about the parallel that F. Scott Fitzgerald creates between Jay Gatsby and Jesus of Nazareth from the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Christensen explains that Fitzgerald once wrote a letter to his friend, John Jamieson, explaining that he was going to write the story of Jay Gatsby’s youth, but he did not because he wanted to maintain the element of mystery that goes along with the novel. Christensen parallels this to the absence of any detail about the childhood and adolescence of Jesus in the New Testament. Other parallels that Christensen describes include the description of Gatsby by Nick Carraway:

“(Gatz's) parents were shiftless and unsuccesful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby was of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must b...

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