The Great Gatsby is a novel based on the 1920s told from the perspective of Nick Carraway. As the story unfolds we experience and get to know the lives of many wealthy young people in the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Throughout the novel various images and events are used to reflect the moral disillusionment of these young people. In The Great Gatsby, the valley of Ashes is half way between West Egg and New York. It is an abandoned dumping ground that reflects lost morals. In the Valley of Ashes there is a billboard of a pair glasses. This billboard is a representation an unforgotten God, “They look out of no face, but, instead from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass under a non-existent nose” (Fitzgerald 23). The young wealthy people in the novel make amoral decisions and tend to go about life without taking responsibility and accepting consequences. …show more content…
Myrtle, the wife of George Wilson, is having an affair with Tom Buchanan. Despite the way Tom treats her and that she is aware of his marital status, she still is in a sense hopeful in regards to their “relationship.” Jordan Baker, Daisy’s close friend in the novel, is initially introduced as a fraudulent woman, “She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage…” (Fitzgerald 58). Jordan Baker’s deceiving personality and Myrtle’s reluctant personality to better herself and her situation reveals their moral disillusionment because they live life simply as if nothing is wrong or is able to change and be
The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, uses numerous allusions in its story. The Great Gatsby is a novel that takes place in the summer of 1922, in New York City. It tells of a very wealthy Jay Gatsby, who’s believed to have earned his money in dishonest or illegal ways, and his endeavors to court Daisy Buchannon. Daisy is the wife a another very wealthy Tom Buchannon, and he gets in touch with her through Nick Carraway, a middleclass neighbor who narrates the story. There are many significant and clever allusions and representations in Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby.
Arguably one of the finest works of American Literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald displays an satirical United States taking place in the early twenties in New York. The roaring twenties often portrayed a happy time immediately following World War 1 however, it gave of a false feeling of joy and many people were truly unhappy. Even though Nick Carraway shows a realistic image of himself, The Great Gatsby encompasses an illusion created in this time period and portrays this image through the atmosphere surrounding the actions of its characters; it ultimately shows a conflict against reality, identical to that of the early 20th century.
The story of The Great Gatsby is a novel that consists of a historical American context during the Harlem Renaissance. This was an excellent novel published in the 1920’s and was considered one of the best novels of its time. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald was an incredibly talented poetic author. Fitzgerald was able to emphasize and create the mood of the generation in a political time. The novel The Great Gatsby is a remarkable novel but also a very sad one. The novel took place during an age or era known as the “Roaring Twenties” which was a time of American wealth. Politics and corruption at the time is possibly what made Gatsby to be the business man he was.
The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered a great novel by many people around the world. There are many reasons that people have put into their consideration which has made it a novel that people are wanting to read frequent times. The novel starts on with a midwest native, Nick Carraway who arrives in New York in the year of 1922 in search of the American dream. Nick, a would-be writer, moves in next-door to a millionaire Jay Gatsby and across the bay from his cousin Daisy and her already cheating husband, Tom. Thus, Nick becomes drawn into the captivating world of the wealthy and as he bears a witness to their illusions and deceits which creates a story of tremendous love, dreams, and tragedy in the novel. Therefore, some of the reasons which interest people into reading the amazing novel is how it explains a few events in figurative language, how it shows the american dream and how it explains the plot development.
Myrtle grows dangerously jealous without meeting Jordan because she thinks Daisy is in the car. The author describes Myrtle’s expression of seeing Jordan by writing, “Her expression was curiously familiar - it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife” (Fitzgerald 125). This quote illustrates Myrtle’s flaw of blindness because, after this encounter, Myrtle's emotions of jealousy and envy heightened, leading her to play a massive role in her death, chasing after Tom in a street full of moving vehicles, trying to get him to leave “Daisy” once and for all and pick her to provide her with a life of abundant
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” (Fitzgerald 79). In Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” the protagonists live lives of secrecy, one in which is full of despair and desperation. This desperation is caused by an emptiness that resonates from within and in order to further eliminate it from their mind and hearts they aspire to fill the void they experience. The idea “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” from Henry Thoreau’s “Walden” becomes present as the characters find themselves unsuccessful in fulfilling their life goals to find happiness through the attainment of wealth, status, love, etc. Several characters in the novel mistakenly believe utmost fortune cause the desperation to cease, while
She realizes that about herself, but continues to think of herself very highly. She knows what she is but she hides her insecurities with a mask that has to do with her self-image. This mask hides her insecurities from the desires she wants her life. Myrtle is a married woman to a man named George. Myrtle initially got with George in hopes of him having money. When Myrtle finds out he does not she wants to back out but it is too late. Myrtle only wants people to think she has money, we see her doing unimaginable things to get this image. One of the levels of wrong is treating her husband poorly, but her lowest action is cheating. She commits adultery with Tom Buchanan, who is also a married man. Tom is an extremely wanted and high rank man with extensive amounts of money. Myrtle thinks she would be good enough for Tom by giving him what she wants. Myrtle sees an opportunity to have the life she has dreamed of with Tom. You see Myrtles jealousy and desire for Daisy’s life when she chants “Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" to Tom. (Fitzgerald 41). In reality Tom is just bored and has to real desire to be with Myrtle. Some people think Myrtle could be recognized as a “gold-digger”, but in actuality she has trained herself to think that her mask is actually her true self. Myrtle truly believes that her happiness comes from
The 1920’s were a time of peace after World War I. However, the harrowing events of the war caused people to become disillusioned with the American Dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates this in his novel The Great Gatsby. Different elements of the book represent different ways in which the American Dream declined. Tom and Myrtle’s affair shows how people lacked morality, Daisy’s marriage with Tom demonstrates how people gave up happiness for money, Wilson’s anger at the billboard of T.J. Eckleberg represents how the American people felt that God was punishing them, and Nick’s final words to the reader exemplify that repetition of the past is inevitable. Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald created situations to exhibit disillusionment with
Myrtle also adds to this stigma. She longs for a life that is fun and glamorous, but reality is she is the wife of a pump mechanic, meaning she will never have access to mobility in class or status. She is a lower class woman, which led her to engage in an affair with Tom Buchanan; it is the closest she will come to feeling higher up socially. Myrtle will do just about anything to be a part of the upper class despite the consequences. There was even a point in time when Tom physically hits her, breaking her nose and yet she still stayed with him just to continue lavishing in this fantasy she so eagerly wanted to become real (Fitzgerald, pg 37). That scene and the dynamic of her and Tom represent the subordination of the lower class and the mistreatment of women within the lower class.
The disillusionment of the American Dream is a frequent but important written theme in the American literature. Fitzgerald’s famous book The Great Gatsby is one of the most important representative works that reflects this theme. F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America's Jazz Age during the 1920s. His classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's American Dream. The Great Gatsby can be seen as a far-reaching book that has revealed many serious and hidden social problems at that time. As one of the most popular and financially successful
The novel The Great Gatsby is a story that takes place in the 1920’s. The story
“The Great Gatsby” is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald set in the 1920’s and is a recollection of a man named Nick Carraway's memories of the summer he met Jay Gatsby the person he could not judge. Jay Gatsby changed the most throughout the novel because He started the novel as a rich and extravagant man with a mysterious background, but it was revealed that he didn't start his life this way, James Gatz was a seventeen-year-old fisherman on Lake Superior who had big dreams that he thought he never could make a reality. But he adopted a persona that modelled the ideal person through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old, and met his good companion and friend Mr. Dan Cody. But towards the end of the book the window that is Jay Gatsby is shattered
Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George, and the lover of Tom Buchanan, is brutally murdered toward the end of the novel. After an uncivilized afternoon in New York, Daisy and Gatsby head swiftly back to East Egg. Gatsby explains to Nick, “It all happened in a minute, but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew” (Fitzgerald 109). Myrtle ran out toward the car looking for Tom but sadly for her it is not him. Many know about Tom’s affair, but not with whom he is having it, especially Daisy. Daisy never slows the car down, and she never realizes who she hits. This shows that Daisy is oblivious to Myrtles existence. Myrtle is sleeping with her husband, she ruins their marriage, and Daisy kills her. The irony exists in this because Daisy actually saves her marriage by killing
Life was not meant to be easy just gonna have to live with that. You need to be Strong, Fearless, Unbreakable, let go of the past and change now then you start allowing yourself to be your true self. The Great Gatsby a novel written by F. Scott is about a mysterious man who is wealthy lives in a mansion and has parties on Saturdays but he is not who he says he is he covers up his true identity. He is nick mysterious neighbor who is known as the man of power and wealth.
Myrtle Wilson, a relatively minor character, belongs to the lower classes, expresses a desire to upward social mobility, but is largely prevented from doing so due to her gender. She uses love to acquire wealth and has an extramarital affair with Tom. She is not happy with her lower social status and her husband George Wilson, a representative of the lower classes and a simple man with no grand ambitions, states in the novel: “The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never even told me about it,” (Fitzgerald 28). Myrtle allows us to look at her accumulation of things, such as the down-town apartment which was “… crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continuously over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” (Lindberg 16; Fitzgerald 35).