...At a young age, Gatsby separates himself from his family and dedicates his life towards becoming wealthy and gaining social status. To erase his history as the poor son of farmers, seventeen-year-old Gatsby changes his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. Following the changing of his name, Gatsby disassociates himself from every aspect of his past and later attempts to convince other people that he inherited his money and went to a prestigious school, and “to this conception he was faithful to the end” (98). In reality, Gatsby attends “a small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota,” where he has to work as a janitor to pay his tuition. He begins doing various jobs for a millionaire man named Dan Cody, who becomes Gatsby’s mentor. Seeing Dan Cody on his yacht inspires Gatsby to consider the possibility of becoming a member of high...
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...Jay Gatsby the main character in Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby represents the self improvement that embodied America in all of its grit and glory during the 1920’s. It is this aspect of Gatsby that F. Scott Fitzegerald created which allows the reader to connect on a personal level making him one of the world’s most cherished and memorable fictional characters. Gatsby is a mere image of Fitzegerlds wildest imaginations and dreams. Fitzgerld always wanted wealth and notirity and he lives through is character to accomplish his goals. Fitsgerald also lives out his own inner complexity and confusions through Gasby as he himself hates the shallow thoughts and actions of the rich and famous while at the same time he despertaly wants to be a part...
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...The Great Gatsby, a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, gives a vast insight to 1920’s America. This period is also known as the Roaring Twenties on account of the lavish lifestyles that many in the United States led. The Great Gatsby is the story of Nick Carraway, a resident of West Egg New York, and a main character and the narrator of the novel, and his aspiration to fit in with the wealthy crowd that he is constantly surrounded by. Throughout the novel, many parallels are drawn between Nick and Jay Gatsby to F. Scott Fitzgerald and the people in his life. Fitzgerald is very similar to Nick and Gatsby in that he too had the lifelong struggle of fitting in with the wealthy upper class. The elitist mood of The Great Gatsby directly parallels...
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...The Great Gatsby and Leadership Certain leaders stand out in our memories when thinking about leadership. We remember them for their charm and charisma or maybe we remember the way they presented themselves. We remember that important conversation we shared which was so important to us, and that speech that left the crowd speechless and inspired. We remember the leader who picked us up when we were down and the leader who had faith in us when no one else did. Those leaders were special and unique. They were great and had the ability to lead like no other. Great leaders possess many leadership traits that make them exceptional. Jay Gatsby in my opinion withholds the concept of leadership tremendously. He is someone that everyone looks up to and tries to gain his qualities and roles. He has impeccable communication skills because he is able to portray his confidence, enthusiasm, and enough trustworthiness to engage his audience, no matter how big or small. He believed in himself and by doing so, made others believe in him too. A great leader has empathy. Jay will go the extra mile to gain a better understanding of you as a person, Just like how he confronted Nick in such a manner that was respectable and intriguing. Jay also portrays a great deal of adaptability. The ability to reinvent and reposition yourself is an advantageous skill. Gatsby started out as one thing, a poor boy from a poor family, and ended up as a self-made millionaire. While the steps he took throughout...
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...the level of society in which they are born. The Great Gatsby is a commentary on the pursuit of the American dream in which the characters who are most rigorously working to achieve the American dream meet their ultimate demise. Fitzgerald argues through this text not that the American dream is dead, but that the American dream is not something that ends well. He suggests that American dream has negative connotations like materialism and the decay of morals. Lastly the text argues that the aristocracy prevents the American dream from being fully realized. Myrtle Wilson is our first American dreamer in the text. She is introduced as “Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and,...
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...The Tragic Flaws of Hamlet and The Great Gatsby In Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the main characters both go through tragic flaws. Their love does not end up the way they want but they keep on trying to make it perfect. Hamlet and Gatsby both have a job they want to do but cannot pursue that goal because they have men that are standing in their way. They also have secrets that they keep from their fellow friends and family and no one knows the actual reason for their misbehavior. Hamlet and Gatsby both suffer tragedies as they try to live their perfect, dream life. Hamlet and Jay Gatsby are both in love with the women that means everything to them. Hamlets love for Ophelia is so insane that her father Polonius thinks that he is mad and lovesick. While Polonius and Claudius spy on Hamlet and see what the real problem is, they see Hamlet being violent with Ophelia after she tries to return his gifts. “The origin and commencement of his grief sprung from neglected love” (3.1.179-180). Polonius still believes that the reason behind Hamlets behavior is still crazy and caused by his love for Ophelia. Hamlet never really admits that he is in love with Ophelia until he sees her being buried at her funeral. “I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum” (5.1.263-265). Hamlet goes into deep sorrow when he sees Ophelia is dead and says that his love for Ophelia is greater than the love of forty...
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...The Great Gatsby Characterization In The Great Gatsby the characters show very diverse personalities and they all, for the most part evolve throughout the novel. Many of the first impressions we get from the first chapter prove to be very far from the truth. As we dig deeper into the stories and pasts of the characters we find that some of them have very troubled pasts which will later return to haunt them. As the novel progresses the characters of Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby transform and become almost complete opposites of the way we see them at the beginning. Nick is one of the few characters in this entire novel that doesn’t show any major changes throughout the novel. When we first meet him he is very innocent and honest. He sees the good...
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...2013 Project Title: Critical Analysis of Great Gatsby novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald Introduction The Great Gatsby is may be the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest novel. This novel offers damning and insightful views of the American nouveau riche in the 1920s. It is an American classic and a wonderfully evocative novel (Bloom, 2010). The author seems to have a brilliant understanding of lives that are characterised by greed and incredibly sad and unfulfilled. The Great Gatsby is at once a romantic and cyclical novel about wealth and habits of a group of New Yorkers during the Jazz Age (Bloom, 2010). Fitzgerald’s work is magnificent as he paints a grim portrait of shallow characters that manoeuvre themselves into some complex situations. The use of symbols and articulate language makes the novel to be best appreciated by mature readers; and this enables them to analyse literature and think critically (Bloom, 2010). The plot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is a love story of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The initial meeting of the two lovers takes place two years before the novel is written. Daisy was then a legendary young Louisville beauty while Gatsby was an impoverished officer. The two fell in deep love, but while Gatsby serves abroad; his lover Daisy marries the bullying, brutal but extremely rich Tom Buchanan (Fitzgerald & Stuart, 2005). After the end of the war, Gatsby dedicates himself to find wealth by any...
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...one; the seeking of acceptance, such as gaining social approval; or to seek personal desires, such as those in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. When a sudden, unexpected event such as the death of a loved one occurs at a point in one's life, it causes a very solemn impact to one's mentality. A void is formed and a sense of emptiness will overcome you, memories of a past relative or friend constantly bombarding your everyday life. In mournful situations such as this, people tend to change to mold themselves to the decease's teachings or personality in order to preserve his or her legacy. On a more social viewpoint, lies the common situation of peer pressure or to seek the acceptance of others. It is human nature to seek acceptance by one's peers and this is usually a source of change. Known to many as peer pressure, one will adapt and change to the norms that will allow him to be accepted by others. This often leaves one of the greatest changes on one's life as it is how he or she will learn to act. Change can also be sought after in order to be more appealing to that of the opposite sex, as can be viewed in Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. In this novel, the character Jay Gatsby undergoes a transformation to seek his long lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy decides that a rich girls don't date poor boys, which is the driving force that motivated Gatsby to pursue the vices and riches of life to appease Daisy. In conclusion, change is a process of growing up that can be affected...
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...figurative language in his passage and explain how the final metaphor contributes to the overall meaning of the novel. The Great Gatsby explores the arduous endeavor man must invariably go through to acquire a new identity in order to satisfy others, which reveals why the overbearing Gatsby undergoes a substantial transformation as F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminates through the incorporation of abstract nouns and juxtaposition. Fitzgerald’s elucidative language presents Gatsby as a man without an identity, however as he reinvents himself, his journey highlights the vice of society. The inclusion of abstract nouns promulgates Gatsby’s idealistic characteristics that lead him to live in a fictitious world that is of no real value. This suggests that his ideals are unrealistic and are just a “purposeless splendor” (Fitzgerald 76). The “purposelessness” lexically means that his life is of no significant value, however the connotative meaning implies that he has the potential to thrive and be reborn. The juxtaposition of “purposelessness” and “splendor” help convey the corruption of the American Dream since there are those who live lavishly and the disregarded others who cannot. Gatsby’s temperament rather than appearance calls attention to his personal issues and not the more pressing societal conflicts that take place. Fitzgerald reinforces the idea that Gatsby is a “nobody” (Fitzgerald 72) through Gatsby’s own broach of the subject. Gatsby’s inexplicable nature provides a subsidiary...
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...The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald Chapter 6 Color Analysis May 24, 2011 Jay Gatsby | -“torn green jersey” (104): The color green symbolizes wealth and money. At this time in the book, Gatsby is working for Dan Cody, the guy who greatly supplies his wealth. The fact that the jersey is torn signifies the hard work that Gatsby demonstrates which then leads to him reaping the benefits of hard work. This section furthers to talk about his parents and how they were “unsuccessful farm people” also that Gatsby “was a son of God.” This is to say that although Gatsby’s parents were hard workers, they were unsuccessful in reaching their ideal “American dream”. Gatsby is currently making those dreams happen. He was helping to complete his father’s business, and is therefore relatively “a son of God.”---- The green jersey also symbolizes the new life that he yearns for that is full of wealth. Right at this stage in the book, Gatsby is called different names: Gatsby, James Gats, Jay Gatsby, young Gats: Each name recognizes a different stages of growth towards the Wealthy life.-“His brown, hardened body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days.” (104): Brown is the color of earth, and of “getting down and dirty”. It further symbolizes the humility Gatsby underwent while with Dan Cody. Because the idea of wealth plagued Gatsby (“his heart was in a constant turbulent riot.”), he reaped the fruit of his labor as discussed with the color change discussed...
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...Throughout Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the central character – Jay Gatsby experiences the adverse elements of wealth. Fitzgerald illustrates money as the creator of dubious assurance though Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship. Additionally, he construes money as a temporary title by examining individuals’ actions before and after Gatsby’s death. Furthermore, he also portrays money as disingenuous matter that disrupts personal principles. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald demonstrates the negative aspect of money such as creating a false sense of security, causing of momentary admiration and disrupting one's morals. Money often creates an erroneous impression of security for many. Money gives Gatsby a deceitful confidence. During...
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...Compare and Contrast: Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver Griffin Gilmore Mrs. Clark Humanities 28 November 2012 In the novels Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald the two main characters, Jay and Dick both face problems in achieving their dreams and face much adversity trying to achieve it. In both novels pursuing their dreams leads to their demise due to their failure to realize that success is from within, not from the superficial qualities that the society around them looks up to. The first difference between Gatsby and Dick is how they value money. Jay Gatsby believes that with money he can buy his happiness, he plans on using his money to fall in love with him and have her leave her current husband (Tom) to be with himself. Dick on the other hand doesn't like all the wealth of Nicole and trues to distance himself way from it. When Nicole and himself start out they are living off of his few thousand a year. Nicole's parents then buy them their own clinic. Much like Gatsby his wealth by no means that he is happy. “had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature … he had never felt more sure of himself … than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he has been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety deposit vaults.” This just goes to show how even with their almost endless income, they were not satisfied, which properly illustrates the time period which took place then,...
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...Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden, sustained...
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...Serri 11/3/11 English 11-1 The Great Gatsby Character Questions It is almost impossible to grasp anything fully from one side. To truly understand a 3-dementional item you need at least two different angles. This is precisely what makes Nick Carraway the perfect narrator for The Great Gatsby. He is a stranger in a strange land, who sees the most eccentric part of the east coast. Therefore, the reader not only gets his own perspective on the situation but sees through Nick’s fresh pair of eyes. Also Nick has two very key personality traits, unique to the mid-west, which make him the ideal narrator for The Great Gatsby. He restrains his judgment and he is a good listener. His listening skills give him a sense of trust and people respond by telling him certain secrets. We definitely see this with his relationship with Gatsby. Nick’s opinion of Gatsby changes drastically, along with the reader’s. Ultimately, Nick believes Gatsby. Gatsby, on their ride together, tells Nick about his life. Our unbiased narrator seems to pass a little judgment on his neighbor’s story. “And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all” (p. 66). This is mentioned after Gatsby talks about his Oxford education. It is clear that Nick, at first, does not believe most of what Gatsby is saying. It is funny how his perception changes as the conversation continues. Once Gatsby mentions his wartime achievements...
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