Literary Analysis Essay On The Great Gatsby

Gatsby Analytical Essay

Throughout life humans experiences many things, anything from something non-physical

such as emotions or physical as in driving a car. Fitzgerald highlights of what humans experience

most in their lifetime, from the time of birth to the last seconds of death, which is emotions.

Something the humans know but lack the knowledge of. In the novel The Great Gatsby by F.

Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald with the use of literary devices depicts the complexity of love

through characters to explain that what they call love is a dream.

Fitzgerald through his life experiences wrote how he felt. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda

Fitzgerald, at first accepts his marriage proposal but later breaks it off due to his lack of money

to where he cannot provide for her. Just like

Daisy, the night before her marriage with Tom
Buchanan, she wanted to cut it off because of a letter she got from Gatsby, in which later the
letter “…was coming to pieces like snow”(Fitzgerald 76). The simile of the letter to snow, that
Fitzgerald implemented creates the feeling of breakdown, of lost. The letter that shrivels to
nothingness parallels Daisy’s heart. Daisy’s true love, Gatsby, began to fade, and how she knew
that her life almost became perfect and all she needed was Gatsby but she had to accept Tom due
to the pressure of her so-called “loved ones”. Love to Daisy died as she did believed Gatsby did.
Love in Daisy mind, a dream, was Gatsby.
Fitzgerald, when he came into money, later contacted Zelda, his ex-fiancé, who did came
back to him because he had enough money to suit her needs. When reading something like
Fitzgerald love life, humans would see Zelda as a leech and Fitzgerald dumb for accepting her
back. However Fitzgerald is experiencing the term “blinded by love” where he only saw that he
got his love back. Just as Gatsby and Daisy for their first kiss after 5 years apart, they were
“Listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star” (Fitzgerald
111). The allusion of Gatsby and Daisy’s kiss was as perfect as the resonance of a struck tuning
fork. Their love at that moment reached so-called perfection. In love there is no perfection, how
they felt in that moment was not perfectness just merely nostalgia.
Throughout Fitzgerald's life, he has accomplish great feats as well as having major
downfalls.

When it came time where he published The Great Gatsby and got his wife, Zelda,

back Fitzgerald realized that what he saw was a mirage. Just as the first meeting after 5 years of

Gatsby and Daisy. Gatsby and Daisy connections "seemed as close as a star to the moon"(

Fitzgerald 93). The metaphor from a scientific view, our moon is not close to a star in fact the

opposite, the distance is astronomical. However as a view from Earth looking at the night sky it

feels as if the stars and the moon could reach each other. However they never reach, they get so

close they tease humans emotions, just like Gatsby. Gatsby saw his love life getting so close he

can almost reach it, but he is just teased to the fact that he can not reach it. Gatsby never realizes

it because he is to blind of how close he got.

Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby as a way to display the human emotionalroller-

coaster. How humans emotions are never complete, especially love. There are no math or science

put to the equations to know the complexity of emotions, Humans only know through experience

and through reading The Great Gatsby, the consensus of the book is that love can not be

perfected, it will only appear to

be.