To what extent is The Great Gatsby a moral novel. Discuss.
The society our nation lives in today has developed morals and principles through the lessons experienced from the past. The Roaring Twenties was a time of change and a chance to pave a path for the person you wanted to become. Morals and principles served as guidelines rather than rules and were merely preached that practiced. Thus, the severity of the immoral actions taking place created opportunities for lessons to be learned. In his novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrated various moral lessons through the downfall and corruption of various characters based on their immoral actions. The narrator, Nick Carraway is a young man who throughout the novel observes his friends and their attempts to achieve their deepest desires, and in turn learns from their mistakes. The novel provides us with an opportunity to discover right from wrong and although it illustrates corruption, morality shines through. The novel The Great Gatsby is predominantly a moral novel because from it, it can be learned to not let emotions cloud our judgment, to form your own path and not follow others and most importantly that the indulgence of money is corrupting and cannot buy happiness.
Firstly, the novel teaches us not to let our emotions cloud our judgment. For example, following Myrtle's death Wilson lets his current feelings of pain and anger push him to commit murder and then his suicide. "so Wilson was reduced to a man deranged by grief."(155) The aftermath of his wife's death was too much for Wilson to handle and his anguish clouded his once peaceful nature. Thus, Wilson's impaired judgment and its consequences demonstrate a moral lesson to be learned. Moreover, Gatsby's strong love for Daisy causes him to dedicate his whole life to trying to create a lifestyle suitable for her. He fails to acknowledge her selfish and uncaring nature, but rather is blinded by his past love for her. "He spoke as if Daisy's reaction was the only thing that mattered."(136) Although Daisy had just committed a murder, all Gatsby was worried about was her well-being and he overlooked his moral judgment by not worrying about the consequences of her actions. This shows that one should never let love for another blind them from reality. Finally, after killing Myrtle, while feeling worried and guilty Daisy allows herself to let Gatsby blame the entire incident upon himself.
Perhaps one of the greatest ways Fitzgerald establishes the horrific times of the 1920s occurs when he evokes sympathy for Gatsby regarding his tragic death and the after affects. One night, after being in New York City for the day, Daisy and Gatsby are driving back to Daisy’s home. Daisy’s husband, Tom, has not remained faithful to her since their wedding day and he is in an affair with a woman named Myrtle Wilson. The road from New York City back to Daisy’s home travels past the home of Myrtle Wilson. As Daisy and Gatsby are driving by, Myrtle sees the car and recognizes that Tom was driving it earlier. Thinking that Tom is currently driving the car, Myrtle thinks that Tom has come to get her and take her with him. Myrtle then runs out to the car, but the car does not stop because Daisy is driving it, and ends up accidentally hitting and killing Myrtle. However, when George Wilson finds out that his wife has been killed, he is wrongly told that Gatsby was the one driving the vehicle. George Wilson becomes so upset by this that he goes to Gatsby house and shoots him. This event creates sympathy for Gatsby because he gets killed for an crime that he did not commit. Gatsby’s tell also signifies his love for Daisy and how he was willing to take the blame for the murder, so that Daisy would not suffer any
The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel based on Gatsby’s dream and hope. In order to enrich the story, symbols are used to emphasize what the author is saying and they create a curiosity in the reader as they are frequently used throughout the story. These three symbols – green light, valley of ashes and the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg are not connected to each other but each of them represents important things in the story.
one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it; he did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” (Fitzgerald, 180). This novel, The Great Gatsby, was written by an insightfully amorous man names F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story was, loosely, based off of his life of love, trouble, parties, and death. The Great Gatsby is a story about an observant unbiased man named Nick Carraway who helps out young proscribed love. But he fails to perceive the foreshadowed future of the two estranged couple that is Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby. Throughout the entire novel, all the way till the end, Gatsby never gives up on his hope to win Daisy over from Tom. Whenever Gatsby feels that he has won, something happens that brings everyone, including him, disappointment.
"I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Daisy admits this to Nick on page 17. This short statement reflects a great deal on what the society of that time thought about women. They were supposed to marry money and be happy the rest of their lives. This represents a theme in the Great Gatsby that many people believe that money can buy you happiness and love. Many characters in this book try to buy things that they think will make them happy. For Tom it was Myrtle, and for Gatsby it was Daisy. Money only increased their problems, for instead of realizing that the thing they wanted would not satisfy them they continued to push at happiness with money expecting results. At the end of the book the reader comes to realizes that happiness and love is one thing money can’t buy for most people. There are many examples of this throughout this book.
The central theme is a comparison of the corrupting influence of wealth to the purity of a dream. Tom and Daisy Buchanan both lead purposeless lives that are filled with love. through corruption and wealth, while Gatsby lives his life striving towards his dreams. They all either have no purpose in life to begin with or lose all purpose and values due. the actions of another.
In famous novels throughout literature, characters often face conflicts between not themselves and other characters, but with time itself. In John Green's novel Looking For Alaska, the main characters confront the idea of "imagining the future as a kind of nostalgia". In this way, the main character Miles Halter, after the death of his friend Alaska, dreams of a future where he and Alaska are somehow reunited. However, the Alaska of his dreams is not as she presently exists, because she is no longer living. She is not even the Alaska that once existed, she is only Miles's own fantasy based on girl that he loves who was a part of his past. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby experiences the same type of longing for a return to his past in the future. In the pursuit of his dream, Gatsby faces reality as that which counterbalances his strong idealism as Nick Carraway observes it. In the novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby's failure to ultimately realize his dream is due to his belief in returning to his romantic past as an idealized conception of the future.
“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy who loves you.” Markus Zusak wrote this in his novel The Book Thief. People always want the things that they cannot have. Sometimes, even when they finally reach what they want they realize it is not what they want anymore. Now they want to find something new that is impossible and hard to get. The theme for Great Gatsby is that some people spend their whole life wanting and chasing after something that they do not already or cannot ever have. Three different examples from the book that help support this theme is when Daisy and Tom are cheating on each other, Jay Gatsby is searching and trying to revive the love he had with Daisy, and Myrtle’s death because of her relationship with Tom.
The movie created by David Merrick as well as the novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, both entitled The Great Gatsby, ate truly two fine pieces of art. The movie version shows the viewer what is happening in the story without internal comments from the narrator and the viewer can understand exactly what is happening without any intellectual thought involved. The novel, however, challenges the reader to look deep inside the writing in order to grasp the true effect of the novel and what kind of meaning is being portrayed. The novel also challenges the reader’s creativity and imagination. It lets the reader explore the character’s personalities in their own special way and the reader can relate these personalities to real life. The novel also allows the reader more freedom that the move, in the way that it lets the reader shape their own opinions of the different characters. As a person watches the movie version, all the characters are laid out for them and every detail of the character is seen, yet in the novel the character is described fully and it is up to the reader’s imagination to picture what the character looks like as well as the emotions conveyed by this character in the novel. The novel version of The Great Gatsby is a definite piece of art and clearly challenges the reader both intellectually and imaginatively to understand the words that describe the character accurately. Therefore the novel
Early events from Fitzgerald’s life appear in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald resembles Jay Gatsby, a caring man who obsesses over wealth and luxury and falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. Nick Carraway, also similar to Fitzgerald, is described as a young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. After the publication of his books, Fitzgerald fell into a life-style of parties, while writing to earn more money to please Zelda by. Gatsby obtains a lot of wealth at a young age, and dedicates his life to earning possessions and throwing parties that he believes will allow Daisy to love him. Fitzgerald, similar to Nick in The Great Gatsby found this new lifestyle thrilling and dramatic, and, like Gatsby, always admired the very rich. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s explanation of his feelings about the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was motivated by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he always wanted, even though she led him toward everything he loathed just like Gatsby.
this flashback, Jordan explains to Nick how she first met Gatsby. She explains to Nick
In the book The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates how people who seem to have wonderful lives because they are wealthy, can be selfish and poor in character. Those people lead to the decline of the American Dream for Gatsby. The 1920's was the age of prosperity on Long Island and that is why most people assumed that if you were rich and wealthy you had a good life. They also assumed that they had positive personalities. Fitzgerald proved them wrong. " One of the novel's dominant themes involves the decay of traditional American values in a suddenly prosperous society" (Howes). In fact, most of the characters in the novel were major factors to the fall of the American Dream. He exposes the greedy, conceited, and low people who live in it.
The simple definition of the American dream is a state of happiness a person hopes to achieve by obtaining materialistic prosperity through hard work. This however has not always been the dream. In early America the dream of many was to venture west, find land, and start a family, but as time progressed the dream has transformed into a need for materialistic possessions such as a car or a large house. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald reveals the how corrupt the American Dream has become and how truly irrelevant money and worldly possessions are to becoming genuinely satisfied. He does this through his portrayal of Gatsby’s confused love for Daisy or the idea of Daisy, Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s marriage, and the death of Gatsby.
...are shown that Gatsby is prepared to do everything in his power to acquire Daisy’s adoration again, even let her get away with murder and will blindly go to jail for her. This however only leads him to his ultimate doom, as he is killed by Myrtle’s husband, Wilson. He may be a liar, but readers empathize with him as his only fault for being dishonest is his love for Daisy and being so blind to see that she is not worthy of that adoration.
In life, we ask ourselves the question what we are? In addition, we also ask ourselves how our perspectives allow us to see this world? These questions are an opening idea’s, which requires the person answering it, to be fully aware of his or her life, and then have the ability to judge it without any personal bias. This is why, in the book that was and is in a sense is still talked about in class, The Great Gatsby, which is a book that follows a plethora of charters all being narrated by, Nick Caraway, a character of the book The Great Gatsby. Nick Caraway is the character in the book which judges and describes his and other character’s actions and virtues. Now we speak of a character whose name is Jay Gatsby or other whys known as James Gatz, which is one of the characters that Mr. Caraway, seems to be infatuated with from the start of the book. This character Jay Gatsby develops a perspective, which in his view seems to justify his actions by the way that he saw the world that he was living in. In this essay, I will explain why the ambitions of a person, can lead them to do things that are beyond there normal character.