F. Scott Fitzgerald was exceptionally equivocal towards the American dream. He saw it as intriguing and lustrous yet dangerous and complex. His thoughts and his works express his extensive and adventurous imagination. Fitzgerald lived a life of disappointment and depression. His novels are representations of his life and his struggles. He had many marital issues and eventually divorced which led him into the pit of alcoholism. His books reveal his emotion and therefore rarely entertain a happy ending. Both books I have selected revolve around the struggle of love. The Great Gatsby is about the struggle for love and Tender is The Night is about the struggle to keep love. These themes are directly related to his own life issues. These experiences that F. Scott Fitzgerald has lived through has translated into his work and therefore the reader notices common themes throughout his stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporates continuity between the themes of classifying people, money and love, and idealism in his novels.
In his books, Fitzgerald groups people into two distinct classifications to portray social stratification, which stipulates a barrier between them. Fitzgerald does this in order to express the very prevalent distinction between the different types of people and what they are like. Fitzgerald creates a discrepancy to depict the exclusiveness in society. a. “I lived in West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two... Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water.” (The Great Gatsby 5). This separation distinguishes the Buchanan’s from the others such as Gatsby. This idea of wealth and where you are located divides the two types of people geographically and socially. West...
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...has a more secure wealth. Fitzgerald portrays his theme through Gatsby’s own downfall until he is destroyed. “Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.” (Tender is the Night 3). This quote is very important to the book because it describes Dick Diver’s point of view. Dick marries his own phycology patient primarily because of her youth and wealth. He marries a young girl Nicole and basically becomes her father and lover. Later in the story he meets Rosemary who is a very young girl and Dick seems to become very infatuated with her. Fitzgerald is telling the reader that no matter what; a material thing cannot cause true love.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby in order to display the wretchedness of upper-class society in the United States. The time period, the 1920s, was an age of new opulence and wealth for many Americans. As there is an abundance of wealth today, there are many parallels between the behavior of the wealthy in the novel and the behavior of today’s rich. Fitzgerald displays the moral emptiness and lack of personal ethics and responsibility that is evident today throughout the book. He also examines the interactions between social classes and the supposed noblesse oblige of the upper class. The idea of the American dream and the prevalence of materialism are also scrutinized. All of these social issues spoken about in The Great Gatsby are relevant in modern society. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this novel as an indictment of a corrupt American culture that is still present today.
The character of Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s commentary on the logical fallacies of the American Dream are closely intertwined, which is why Fitzgerald goes to such great lengths to separate the two. By distinguishing Gatsby from the flaws he possesses allows the reader to care for Gatsby, and the impact of his death all the more powerful when it finally occurs. By making Gatsby a victim of the American Dream rather than just the embodiment of it, Fitzgerald is able to convince his audience of the iniquity of the American Dream by making them mourn the life of the poor son-of-a-bitch
Fitzgerald drew on his personal experience to artfully weave a tale of love, lust, and fortune, all centered around the ever elusive green light. That dream that cannot be reached. That hope that can never die. And unless the reader looks closely, he or she will miss the purpose of The Great Gatsby: to highlight the foolishness of this clichéd American dream.
In the iconic novel published from the 1920's, the author displays many themes such as appearance vs reality, disillusion, love and relationship, corruption, and differences in social class. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald believes that belief in romantic destiny has dire consequences as demonstrated throughout the novel.
“Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” (1 Timothy 6:9-10). “The Great Gatsby” by F.Scott Fitzgerald tells a tragic tale of materialistic wealth, and uses the colors green, yellow, and blue to convey wealth, hope and unhappiness, respectively, in this classic tale; hope being Gatsby’s saving grace and his ruination.
...and the upper middle class members mixed in the neighborhood, creating a disturbing mix. West Egg provided a direct confrontation to the establishment that disturbed the rich such as Daisy Buchanan (107). The residents of the city have foreign names like “Joens”, “Muldoon”, and “Eckheart” with uncouth professions such as actors and politicians (63). Epitomizing the qualities of the people and the buildings of West Egg is Jay Gatsby. Gatsby possesses a house designed to imitate royalty. However, Gatsby fills that very house with the risque parties, juxtaposing the old idea of wealth with a new one. The juxtaposition between the two ideas strongly characterizes the West Egg resident.
Overall, Fitzgerald originally creates a shallow and superficial character that I had little respect for. Through the progression of the novel, his use of narration, the theme of the corrupt American dream and his writing style a deeper, more admirable character develops. Gatsby died an admirable man and F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the growth of admiration excellently thought his novel, “The Great Gatsby.”
Throughout the novel The Great Gatsby there are many things that represent various ideas, moods, and symbols. Many of these symbols and representations are things that are simple such as a color or a road-sign. An example is the color yellow, throughout the story this represents death and/or corruption. This symbol is portrayed through several events in the novel. Another example of symbolism in the novel is the Green Light, which represents Gatsby’s dream, as well as the American Dream. This is also shown throughout the story through events and things. The final example is the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg, which represents God’s all-seeing eyes. These are just a handful of the many examples of symbolism and representation in the Great Gatsby.
Trouble emerges when the wrong people and the wrong time collide, but a tragedy is not always necessarily the solution of that collision. However, in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby got murdered in the end of the novel. Despite the cause of it, his death itself is tragic. This novel leads the way to the fateful end of such a collision between the wrong man and the wrong time.
As a result of Fitzgerald’s mother having trouble giving birth to a second child Scott grew up as a spoiled child. At the time living where he lived was lucky he carried himself as a child with a high society attitude. His parents both came from different backgrounds which showed through Fitzgerald as he was growing up. It was believed that his mother saw money as position, stability, and security; his father believed the most important things were good manners, instincts, courtesy, honor and courage. Fitzgerald’s morals mainly came from his father but his insecurities regarding society came from his mother. The Fitzgerald’s were a fortunate family living a Midwestern life.
The concept of one’s journey to reach the so called "American Dream" has served as the central theme for many novels. However, in the novel The Great Gatsby, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, portrays the American Dream as so opulent it is unrealistic and unreachable. The American Dream is originally about obtaining happiness, but by the 1920's, this dream has become twisted into a desire for fame and fortune by whatever means; mistaken that wealth will bring happiness. Fitzgerald illustrates that the more people reach toward the idealistic American dream, the more they lose sight of what makes them happy, which sends the message that the American dream is unattainable. The continuos yearning for extravagance and wealthy lifestyles has become detrimental to Gatsby and many other characters in the novel as they continue to remain incorrigible in an era of decayed social and moral values, pursuing an empty life of pleasure instead of seeking happiness.
Through out history, laws have been established with the intentions of making societies better. Instead of following these laws in fear of government punishment, the citizens followed them because they saw how they made improvements to their society. However, there have been times when laws did not have enough input from the citizens and were passed quickly. When this occurred the laws backfired on the government and the citizens went against them. That is what happened in the 1920’s when the 18th amendment passed to end sales, production, and distribution of alcohol. During WWI, the government came quickly to pass prohibition to decrease the alcohol consumption, but with little enforcement there were higher organized crimes for wealth, as portrayed by Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the unbelievable story of a man who was forsaken by his one true love, and his ongoing struggle to reclaim her heart. Fitzgerald does a outstanding job of capturing the idea of the true American dream. The novel highlights the concept of the affluent spending without consequence; this thematic structure of the text parallels the concept of the American dream in current popular culture and for this reason this story is a classic novel shared all over the world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic character in both his fiction life and his real life and “…was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self"(Voegeli). The inspiration for The Great Gatsby came from the experience Fitzgerald had with a Jewish bootlegger and his symbolism for the book is “never more ingenious than in his depiction of the bankruptcy of the old agrarian myth” (Trask). The realization that America had been changed and transformed into a new world arose. America has become a new world with a new set of traditional beliefs. The beliefs were onset by the growing fields of industrialization and urbanization. America is now a place in which “a revolution in manners and morals was inevitable” (Trask). The trend of this new life style and tradition was reinforced by World War 1 and the writers critiqued the traditional faiths. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald paints a story about love and intrigue. He shows the possibility of movement between the different social classes during the Roaring Twenties in the United States. The American dream was the thought that people who had talent in the 'land of opportunity' could gain success if they followed a set of well-defined behavioral rules. During this time period, Americans believed that satisfaction would automatically follow success. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald raises many important political questions: "What does it mean to live well, and on what terms people can live together?” and it shows America's thoughts and answers to these essential questions (Voegeli). These questions are referring to the different social classes and be...
The Quote, “All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual”, by Einstein fully illustrates the meaning in the work, The Great Gatsby; each character contrarily portrays characteristics accordingly to its wealth and social status. While character such as Tom and Daisy is bemused and reckless in the world of wealth, other characters such as Nick and Wilson live a submissive and cautious life style within a lower class. Even so, both juxtaposing groups experience similar joys and tragedies within their social class. Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby signifies the influence of wealth and social status during the 1920’s American society on characters through plots, dialogs, and setting.