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Jay Gatsby Influences

Decent Essays

The Great Gatsby is generally regarded as a story of love and tragedy, but in actuality, it was a story of a sad man chasing a baseless obsession with a woman and in trying to obtain this relationship, succumbing to immoral practices and ultimately dying alone. The author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a widely acclaimed author who had a life of tragedy and loss that greatly impacted his writing. He was able to see not only the light-hearted, celebratory, and successful side of the American Dream, but also the negative effects of overindulging with alcohol and incessant partying. He was able to indirectly write about himself and his losses in the stories he wrote. Unfortunately, he was not able to see how successful he had become. …show more content…

The most evident way he did this was by saying “old sport”. In saying this, he was able to successfully reflect his affluence and showed his supercilious attitude towards others. He threw elaborate and grand parties weekly, but he did not care about the individuals that attended the parties. The only reason he threw them and would talk to the people there at all was to find people who knew Daisy or could get him closer to her. The longer he follows through with his illusion, the farther he drifts away from figuring out that she is a human being that makes choices and decisions …show more content…

All of his decisions are based on his need to feel superior and his interminable chase after the idea of Daisy that he has created. Part of the genius of the novel that Fitzgerald included was the two-dimensionality of the characters. Almost all of the characters lacked a human aspect of their characterization. Fitzgerald wrote them this way on purpose. He wrote the characters of The Great Gatsby the way that he saw people around him in his everyday life: shallow and vapid. Instead of filling the novel with well-rounded characters, he filled it with characters who at best made questionable decisions, even with good intentions in mind. His decision in doing this is extremely important to the themes portrayed in the novel. The Great Gatsby brought a lot of the social issues that were going on in the 20’s into the light, and in a brilliant way. Writing Jay Gatsby as a static character was an integral part of the themes that Fitzgerald hoped to depict with the The Great Gatsby, and an extremely effective way to expose the general public of the 20s for whom Fitzgerald truly saw

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