Disillusionment In The Great Gatsby

1689 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Great gatsby dreams and reality essay

In today’s society in the United States, there seems to be a very narrow and rigid pathway that is held up as the model for how a young person should progress into adulthood. This model is, of course, to enter a four-year University directly after finishing high school, graduate with a “useful” degree, and then immediately accept the highest-paying job available. However, many young people I know are becoming disillusioned with this model. In our current situation, where all roads appear to lead to overwhelming student debt and unsuccessful job hunts, the question that is most often on my mind is: “what will the future be like for me, and am I adequately preparing for it?” The world is constantly changing, and we are in a state of uncertainty, …show more content…

Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!. Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s works were written in the context of the Lost Generation, and center around disillusionment in the post-World War I era. Cather’s O Pioneers! details personal conflicts around risk-taking and …show more content…

Towards the beginning of the book, Robert Cohn says: “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize that you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?” (Hemingway 19). Cohn is more upset by the fact that he may not be living his life to the fullest than Jake, who claims on the previous page that “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters” (Hemingway 18). In this matter, I tend to be more like Robert Cohn. During these years of my life, I am trying to find balance between pursuing experiences that will help me find direction and fulfillment and making sure that I am being careful to make preparations for my future. Increasingly, I am finding myself too nervous to do anything other than the careful thing, and like Robert, I am very anxious that I’m not taking advantage of all the opportunities in front of me. Since I’m young and have my whole life ahead of me, I’d love to spend my summers traveling somewhere exciting or taking summer courses that interest me and could open the door for me to find something really fulfilling to pursue. Instead, I’m spending my summer working on the cleaning crew at my hometown school and working at the grocery store. While I do need to work to finance my education, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m getting more and more tied down every year that goes by, and

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of 'The Great Gatsby'

    897 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jay Gatsby’s funeral is a small service, not because that 's what was intended, but because no one bothered to show up. Nick wanted to give Gatsby the popularity he desired, even in death, but only three people were present in the end. Gatsby’s father, Henry C. Gatz, shows up unexpectedly from Minnesota because he heard about the news in the papers. He believes that the man who shot his son must 've been mad, that no one in their right mind could commit such a horrible act. Daisy and Wolfsheim, the people closest to Gatsby in the book, do not attend. This exemplifies that it was always about wealth and social status for them, including Tom, and they never genuinely cared for Gatsby. Nick held up hope,

    Read More

  • The Flaws Of Human Nature In The Great Gatsby

    1442 Words  | 3 Pages

    Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s visionary writing style during the early twentieth century revolutionized a new style for other writers. “Theme is most dramatically expressed through character, and Fitzgerald used the people he created to convey his personal vision of the world” (Keshmiri 2). As Keshmiri states, Fitzgerald, unlike many other writers at the time, expresses his stories through the development of the characters. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned illustrate the many flaws of human nature and how these flaws contribute to the downfall of the characters through their obsession with status, their inability to accept reality, and the use of alcohol.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Final Essay

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    As depicted by Scott F. Fitzgerald, the 1920s is an era of a great downfall both socially and morally. As the rich get richer, the poor remain to fend for themselves, with no help of any kind coming their way. Throughout Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, the two “breeds” of wealthier folk consistently butt heads in an ongoing battle of varying lifestyles. The West Eggers, best represented by Jay Gatsby, are the newly rich, with little to no sense of class or taste. Their polar opposites, the East Eggers, are signified by Tom and Daisy Buchanan; these people have inherited their riches from the country’s wealthiest old families and treat their money with dignity and social grace. Money, a mere object in the hands of the newly wealthy, is unconscientiously squandered by Gatsby in an effort to bring his only source of happiness, Daisy, into his life once again. Over the course of his countless wild parties, he dissipates thousands upon thousands of dollars in unsuccessful attempts to attract Daisy’s attention. For Gatsby, the only way he could capture this happiness is to achieve his personal “American Dream” and end up with Daisy in his arms. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy is somewhat detrimental to himself and the ones around him; his actions destroy relationships and ultimately get two people killed.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Analysis

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick’s unreliability as a narrator is blatantly evident, as his view of Gatsby’s actions seems to arbitrarily shift between disapproval and approval. Nick is an unreliable and hypocritical narrator who disputes his own background information and subjectively depicts Gatsby as a benevolent and charismatic host while ignoring his flaws and immorality from illegal activities. He refuses to seriously contemplate Gatsby’s negative attributes because of their strong mutual friendship and he is blinded by an unrealized faith in Gatsby. Furthermore, his multitude of discrepancies damage his ethos appeal and contribute to his lack of dependability.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby:Literary Analysis

    1226 Words  | 3 Pages

    Think about being separated from the one you love. You thought this person would be in your life forever and always. You may have spent days and weeks thinking and planning your future together, but then one day they disappear from your life. That person has moved on, and chose to live a life that no longer including you. It would be assumed in most cases that the love of your life is no longer the person they were before, so should you stick around and try to win them back? In the case of Gatsby and Daisy, Gatsby did not realize Daisy would be different, and although he still thinks he is in love with Daisy, is he in love with her for who she is now, or the idea of everything she used to be the answer may shock you, and this is all due to the unreal expectations he has for her to fill. Because Gatsby is not in love with who she is at the time they are reunited. Instead, he is caught up in the idea of who she used to be. The actions of Gatsby, how he talks about her, and the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy once they are back together again show who Gatsby is really in love with, and that is the old Daisy.

    Read More

  • Horrors of WWI Reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Writing

    2584 Words  | 6 Pages

    Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...

    Read More

  • Great Gatsby

    742 Words  | 2 Pages

    By the end of World War I, many American authors were ready to change their ways and views on writing. Authors are tired of tradition and limitations. One of these writers was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a participant in the wild parties with bootleg liquor, but he was also a critic of this time. His book, The Great Gatsby is an excellent example of modernist literature, through its use of implied themes and fragmented storyline.

    Read More

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Lost Hope of Babylon Revisited

    1518 Words  | 4 Pages

    F. Scott Fitzgerald is known as the spokesman of the "Lost Generation" of Americans in the 1920s. The phrase, "Lost Generation," was coined by Gertrude Stein "to describe the young men who had served in World War I and were forced to grow up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken" (Charters 489). Fitzgerald exemplified the generation that Stein defined. His family, with help from an aunt, put him through preparatory school and then through Princeton University (Charters 489). Fitzgerald’s family hoped that he would stop "wasting his time scribbling" and would be serious about his studies (Charters 489). However, he left college before graduating and accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the Regular Army during World War I (Charters 489). During his military service, he spent most of his time writing his first novel, This Side of Paradise (Charters 489). The peak of Fitzgerald’s fame as a writer came with the publication of The Great Gatsby, in 1925 (Charters 489). Fitzgerald, writing in the third person, reflected back fondly on the Jazz Age because "it bore him up, flattered him, and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War" (Charters 489).

    Read More

  • Moral Destruction In The Great Gatsby

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Great Gatsby: The Destruction of Morals. In The Great Gatsby, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald shows the destruction of morals in society. The characters in this novel, all lose their morals in an attempt to find their desired place in the social world. They trade their beliefs for the hope of acceptance.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Essay

    812 Words  | 2 Pages

    Nick Carraway says: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” (Fitzgerald 170). Nick makes this observation about his family in the novel “The Great Gatsby” by F.Scott Fitzgerald. In the spring of 1922, Nick moves to West Egg and meets a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby; there he witnesses Gatsby longing for a life with Daisy Buchanan and failing to achieve the American dream. Tom and Daisy initially show their carelessness by deciding to marry each other when neither of them were fully committed. Their thoughtless behavior carries on through their marriage as they both partake in affairs and emotionally torture their partners. When the Buchanans show their next act of carelessness it results in the death of three people. In “The Great Gatsby”, Tom and Daisy continually show how careless they are and there are many repercussions to their actions.

    Read More

  • America and the Decay of Morality: The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises Introduction

    2099 Words  | 5 Pages

    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises are equally similar and different. The two stories are similar in their commitment to the failure of the American dream and its moral hollowness. However, the means and literary methods which the two authors choose to prove their point are distinctly different. Hemingway and Fitzgerald attempted to evoke aimless traveling across East to West and West to East through their writing styles in which the various nature of modernism in literature is reflected. Hemingway adopts his original sentence structure called “cablese” which consists of ordinary speech and exact words without any vague expressions, while Fitzgerald describes the protagonist, Gatsby through Nick’s perspective.

    Read More

  • Modernism In The Great Gatsby

    1924 Words  | 4 Pages

    One of the authors of "The lost generation" was F. Scott Fitzgerald. In modernism, Fitzgerald found a way to define his world. He lived a wild and tragic lifestyle in the course of the Roaring Twenties. His fictitious writings were actually reality-based and reveal some of his own struggles.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby Book Report

    3257 Words  | 7 Pages

    In writing this book, commonly refered to as the “Great American Novel”, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved in showing future generations what the early twenties were like, and the kinds of people that lived then. He did this in a beautifully written novel with in-depth characters, a captivating plot, and a wonderful sense of the time period.

    Read More

  • Textual Analysis Of The Great Gatsby

    947 Words  | 2 Pages

    F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most compelling twentieth century writers, (Curnutt, 2004). The year 1925 marks the year of the publication of Fitzgerald’s most credited novel, The Great Gatsby (Bruccoli, 1985). With its critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream (Berman, 1996), this dramatic idyllic novel, (Harvey, 1957), although poorly received at first, is now highly regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work (Rohrkemper, 1985) and is his publisher, Scribner 's most popular title, (Donahue, 2013). The novel achieved it’s status as one of the most influential novels in American history around the nineteen fifties and sixties, over ten years after Fitzgerald 's passing, (Ibid, 1985)

    Read More

  • Critical Examination of a Passage in Great Gatsby

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    This passage is from the great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It tells a story, specifically the history which Gatsby and Daisy had. Daisy promised to wait for Gatsby until the war ended. But as it is Daisy’s youth and need for love and attention has made her insecure to stay alone for so long. Soon she attended parties and dances. At one of them she met the safe and strong Tom Buchanan. Despite the fact that she loved Jay, he was not there, so she married Tom.

    Read More

More about Disillusionment In The Great Gatsby

Open Document