The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald Essay

Throughout the novel, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s unrequited love for Daisy is evident, as well as George Wilson’s love for his wife, Myrtle. Unlike Gatsby, Wilson is the least important character in the novel due to his important role in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unique plot scheme that led to Gatsby’s murder. However, both characters have similarities and differences the reader is incapable of detecting due to Wilson’s brief mentions in chapter two and seven. Gatsby and Wilson’s love is similar due to their love murdering them both and their affection by remaining loyal to their women, but Gatsby was more ambitious to obtain a wealthy girl like Daisy and Wilson was forcing Myrtle to move west.

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses his life experience in his works. He explains, ‘that was always my experience-- a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy 's school; a poor boy in a rich man 's club… However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has coloured my entire life and works.’ The short story of Winter Dreams was written around the same time that Fitzgerald was developing ideas for The Great Gatsby. Whilst this wasn’t published until 1925, Winter Dreams débuted in 1922 and the similarities between the novel and short story were intentional. Winter Dreams became a short draft, which Fitzgerald based The Great Gatsby on. Both resemble Fitzgerald’s real life; although both were written before most of the comparable events occurred. Preceding this, The Jelly Bean, a short story from Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age (published in 1922) invited the reader to follow Jim Powell through his dreams of social advancement and love, which parallel Fitzgerald’s later stories and life experiences. In addition, Fitzgerald’s The Rich Boy, a short story published in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men suggests that the author’s life experiences shaped his work up to and even after The Great Gatsby, which is considered to be Fitzgerald’s greatest work.

1. We see all the action of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of one character whose

The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a story about a wealthy man named Gatsby. Gatsby lives a luxuriant life in West Egg of New York. Gatsby’s wealth has an unknown secret because nobody seems to know where his wealth emerged from. Despite of having so much fortune, Gatsby’s true American dream has not been achieved. In the great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald develops Gatsby as a failed American dream to show the impossibility of the American dream in the 1920’s.

     The booming parties in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reflect life in America during the 1920s. Gatsby displays his prominent fortune by throwing grand parties. From next door, Nick Carraway witnesses the scene of Gatsby’s fabulous summer parties:

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many of the characters live in an illusory world and only some can see past this. In the novel, West Egg and its residents represent the newly rich, while East Egg represents the old aristocracy. Gatsby seeking the past, Daisy is obsessed with material things, Myrtle wanting Tom to escape her poverty, George believing that T.J. Eckleburg is God, and Tom believing he is untouchable because of his power and wealth are all examples of the illusion v. reality struggle in the novel and Nick, the only character aware of reality, witnesses the fall of all the characters around him to their delusions.

Donald Trump once said, “My whole life is about winning. I don 't lose often. I almost never lose.” Jay Gatsby has a similar outlook on life. Gatsby and Trump view themselves as winners because their pockets are stuffed with cash. Jay Gatsby and Donald Trump can agree on one thing: money. Both men are ruthless, business tycoons, and measure their success in life based on their wealth. Jay Gatsby meets his demise towards the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, while Donald Trump is just getting started on a new business venture. Donald Trump is the modern-day Jay Gatsby. Donald Trump and Jay Gatsby find comfort in lavish lifestyles, are willing to go to desperate measures for a business deal, and attempt to win the hearts of the ladies they love.

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about half of the main characters present themselves as something they are not. Throughout the novel, the theme of passing is apparent in Nick, Jay Gatsby, Daisy, and Myrtle Wilson, although they are all passing, each does it for a very different reason. Many scholars have touched on the idea that these characters are not who they appear to be and that their passing is associated with social class issues of the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s characters are built around the idea of passing and social class restrictions.

When Cody died, he left the boy, now Jay Gatsby, a legacy of $25,000. Unfortunately

In describing Gatsby’s parties, Fitzgerald makes particular word choices at the authorial level and uses Jordan’s ironic claim about large parties to portray a typical Gatsby party as an amorphous amalgamation of different social classes, which in the end, shows that Gatsby represents the 1920’s push to break typical class boundaries. At the first party Nick attends, he and Jordan were talking about Gatsby’s mysterious origins when Jordan “chang[ed] the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy’” (49).

He describes them as “rotten”, lacking any genuine relationships and only wanting more money and larger parties. Gatsby throws all of these parties, which are full of random people and moral bankruptcy, in an attempt to achieve his American Dream, which is Daisy Buchanan. He believes that his massive parties and his lavish lifestyle will attract Daisy, but in the end, she chooses Tom over him, meaning Gatsby’s American Dream isn’t achieved, showing money doesn’t buy happiness. After achieving this lifestyle, Gatsby wants to achieve one more thing, and that is winning over Daisy, and he plans to do this through this lifestyle. It is through this lavish lifestyle and huge parties that Gatsby attempts to win over Daisy.

An Austrian physician by the name of Sigmund Freud, a well renowned psychologist, aside from his studies, was once rumored do have done enough cocaine to kill a baby horse. Other than his cocaine addiction he also developed the theory of Psychoanalysis, which in short means that he studied the longstanding difficulties in the ways that people think and feel about themselves, the world, and their relationships with others. Sigmund Freud’s ideals of psychoanalysis was translated to in a way where we are able to analyze media in all it’s shapes and forms. Psychoanalytic media analysis argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the characters within a movie, and the literary work is a manifestation of the Id, Super-Ego, and Ego. The text that I will analyze using the psychoanalytic media theory will be the film The Great Gatsby, originally a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I will be using Freud’s primary psychoanalytic theory of the ID, Ego, and Super-Ego to analyze the movie The Great Gatsby, and also analyze the potential cultural and societal impacts of an authors use of psychoanalytic theory.

Thesis: The pursuit of the American Dream is a dominant theme throughout The Great Gatsby, which is carried out in various ways by F. Scott Fitzgerald, how the author represents this theme through his characters and their actions is one small aspect of it.

Any American is taught a dream that is purged of all truth. The American Dream is shown to the world as a belief that anyone can do anything; when in reality, life is filled with impossible boundaries. In the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us a glimpse into the life of the upper class during the roaring twenties through the eyes of a moralistic young man named Nick Carraway. It is through the narrator's dealings with the upper class that the reader is shown how modern values have transformed the American Dream's pure ideals into a scheme for materialistic power, and how the world of the upper class lacks any sense of morals or consequence. In order to support Fitzgerald's message

In The Great Gatsby, a classic novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is in love with Jordan Baker, George Wilson is in love with Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby is in love with Daisy Buchanan. Regrettably, all of these women are unworthy of the love and affection bestowed upon them by these men. Throughout the course if this essay, the love between these individuals will be analysed and the reasons why these women are unworthy will be highlighted.