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symbolism in gatsby
symbolism great gatsby theme
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Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, is seen today as one of the true great American novelists. Although he lived a life filled with alcoholism, despair, and lost-love, he managed to create the ultimate love story and seemed to pinpoint the ¡§American Dream¡¨ in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. In the novel, Jay Gatsby is the epitome of the ¡§self-made man,¡¨ in which he dictates his entire life to climbing the social ladder in order to gain wealth, to ultimately win the love of a woman: something that proves to be unattainable. As it turns out, Gatsby¡¦s excessive extravagance and love of money, mixed with his obsession for a woman¡¦s love, is actually the autobiographical portrayal of Fitzgerald.
While attending Princeton University, Fitzgerald struggled immensely with his grades and spent most of his time catering to his ¡§social¡¨ needs. He became quite involved with the Princeton Triangle Club, an undergraduate club which wrote and produced a lively musical comedy each fall, and performed it during the Christmas vacation in a dozen major cities across the country. Fitzgerald was also elected to ¡§Cottage,¡¨ which was one of the big four clubs at Princeton. ¡§Its lavish weekend parties in impressive surroundings, which attracted girls from New York, Philadelphia and beyond, may well have provided the first grain of inspiration for Fitzgerald¡¦s portrayal of Jay Gatsby¡¦s fabulous parties on Long Island¡¨ (Meyers, 27).
Although Fitzgerald was a ¡§social butterfly¡¨ while at Princeton, he never had any girlfriends. However, at a Christmas dance in St. Paul, MN during his sophomore year, he met Ginevra King, a sophisticated sixteen-year-old who was visiting her roommate, and immediately fell in love with her. Although Scott loved Ginevra to the point of infatuation, she was too self-absorbed to notice. Their one-sided romance persisted for the next two years. Fitzgerald would send hundreds of letters, but Ginevra, who thought them to be clever but unimportant, destroyed them in 1917. The following year, Ginevra sent Scott a letter that announced her marriage to a naval ensign. Just before Fitzgerald was to meet with Ginevra after a twenty-year absence, he proclaimed to his daughter, with mixed feelings of regret and nostalgia: ¡§She was the first girl I ever loved and have faithfully avoided seeing her up t...
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...ed by someone who had actually endured such feelings. For in The Great Gatsby, ¡§Fitzgerald uses fiction to tell his own story-- reflecting on the superior and brutal qualities of the rich and on the impossibility of becoming one of them¡¨ (Meyers, 123).
Works Cited
„hDaiches, David. Critical Approaches to Literature. Longmann, New York: David Daiches, 1981.
„hFitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970.
„hGuerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1979.
„hMeyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1994.
„hPriestly, J.B.. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald. London: The Bodley Head
Ltd, 1958.
Bibliography
„hDanziger, Marlies K. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961.
„hDiYanni, Robert. Literature fourth edition. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 1998.
„hLevin, Harry. Fitzgerald the maker¡¦s of modern literature. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1941.
„hhttp://gatsby.cjb.net/ The Gatsby Online Research
„hhttp://www.novelguides.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/gatsby/ Classic Notes Online
...icit in the cause of white supremacists, and is in fact as personally involved with the subject of his scholarly article as Wright is with his own less academic essay. Phillips’s evidentiary support is subject to a striking caveat, one which puts almost any source to work for his purposes, “When…slavery was attacked it was defended not only as a vested interest, but…as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization. Its defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant, but it may nearly always be read between their lines.” This has the effect of providing an assumed motive for all of his sources; Phillips’s reader also begins to ‘read between the lines.’ The most troubling aspect of his article is that, in the guise of a serious historian, he twists historical fact to suit his thesis, rather than suiting his thesis to the facts.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby provides the reader with a unique outlook on the life of the newly rich. Gatsby is an enigma and a subject of great curiosity, furthermore, he is content with a lot in life until he strives too hard. His obsession with wealth, his lonely life and his delusion allow the reader to sympathize with him.
Wealth, fun and love is what The Great Gatsby is all about.The author's full name, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald wrote many books and he’s known one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby is about a man who fell in love with a woman he met outside of war and throughout his life getting money, spending money and partying is all his life consists of. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life has influenced The Great Gatsby by including his personalities, preferences and longing for love.
The Canadian and American governments designed a residential school system to assimilate Indigenous children into Western society by stripping them of their language, cultural practices as well as their traditions. By breaking these children’s ties to their families and communities, as well as forcing them to assimilate into Western society; residential schools were a root cause of many social problems, which even persist within Aboriginal communities today.
The over-representation of Aboriginal children in the Canadian Child Welfare system is a growing and multifaceted issue rooted in a pervasive history of racism and colonization in Canada. Residential schools were established with the intent to force assimilation of Aboriginal people in Canada into European-Canadian society (Reimer, 2010, p. 22). Many Aboriginal children’s lives have been changed adversely by the development of residential schools, even for those who did not attend them. It is estimated that Aboriginal children “are 6-8 times more likely to be placed in foster care than non-Aboriginal children (Saskatchewan Child Welfare Review Panel, 2010, p. 2).” Reports have also indicated that First Nations registered Indian children make up the largest proportion of Aboriginal children entering child welfare care across Canada (Saskatchewan Child Welfare Review Panel, p. 2). Consequently, this has negatively impacted Aboriginal communities experience of and relationship with child welfare services across the country. It is visible that the over-representation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system in Canada lies in the impact of the Canadian policy for Indian residential schools, which will be described throughout this paper.
Schissel, Bernard, and Terry Wotherspoon. “The Legacy of Residential Schools.” Inequality in Canada: A Reader on the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class. 2nd ed. Ed. Valerie Zawilski. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010. 102-121. Print.
The end result, rather horrifying as these children were dumped back to their tribes, when they became too old, without a clue of how to survive. Furthermore, children whom returned were discouraged from completing further education due to the fact that they were barely educated in these schools. Most children returned home without semblance of how to raise their own children or show affection. The generational difference also further segregated these children from their parents because most of them failed to understand the culture that they were pruned to deny from childhood. According to the Manitoba Justice institute, the creation of Residential Schools was what created the high rise of abuse and violence among Aboriginal families because the time spent in these facilities isolated the children from nurturing families and taught them abuse. The trauma felt by the children of Residential schools would transcend their behavior to the next generation leading to a vicious
F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to have written a novel about the glittering American twenties, but his novel was really about the decay of American society, the tragedy of love, and the decline of the American dream. The Great Gatsby illustrates all of Fitzgerald’s ideas about American society. Despite the perceived notion of the glitz and glamour of 1920’s society, it was all a thin veneer of extravagance covering up a dark and dismal world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a tragic tale of love distorted by obsession. Finding himself in the city of New York, Jay Gatsby is a loyal and devoted man who is willing to cross oceans and build mansions for his one true love. His belief in realistic ideals and his perseverance greatly influence all the decisions he makes and ultimately direct the course of his life. Gatsby has made a total commitment to a dream, and he does not realize that his dream is hollow. Although his intentions are true, he sometimes has a crude way of getting his point across. When he makes his ideals heard, his actions are wasted on a thoughtless and shallow society. Jay Gatsby effectively embodies a romantic idealism that is sustained and destroyed by the intensity of his own dream. It is also Gatsby’s ideals that blind him to reality.
The Great Gatsby is the story of one man's journey of trying to achieve what is commonly referred to as the American Dream. Fitzgerald successfully makes the reader become attached to Gatsby by giving the reader some elements of Gatsby’s back story to latch on to. He achieves this by using Gatsby’s love stroking heart to to capture the imagination of the hopeless romantic, and he then uses Gatsby’s deep seeded ambition of becoming better to capture the ambitious reader. Throughout the story Fitzgerald makes Gatsby out to be the hero, and he accomplishes this by having Gatsby’s goals in life become relatable to the common reader, because everyone wants to be able to change their lives around, everyone wants to someday fall so madly in love with someone else that they would follow that person to the ends of the earth, regardless of the obstacles, and Gatsby is the perfect embodiment of these hopes and dreams. What strikes a deeper chord is that the reader can tell that Fitzgerald truly loved his creation and this can be seen by the way he describes him. Sadly, like many other great writers do, Fitzgerald realised that this life like world that he has created, would need to have malevolent forces that are always conspiring against the main character in this case being Gatsby behind the scenes. Fitzgerald does this by embedding these forces into the society that surrounded Gatsby.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the government began abolishing the compulsory residential school education among Aboriginal people. The government believed that Aboriginal children could receive a better education if they were integrated into the public school system (Hanson). However, residential schools were later deemed inappropriate because not only were the children taken away from their culture, their families and their people, but the majority of students were abus...
During the 19th century the Canadian government established residential schools under the claim that Aboriginal culture is hindering them from becoming functional members of society. It was stated that the children will have a better chance of success once they have been Christianised and assimilated into the mainstream Canadian culture. (CBC, 2014) In the film Education as We See It, some Aboriginals were interviewed about their own experiences in residential schools. When examining the general topic of the film, conflict theory is the best paradigm that will assist in understanding the social implications of residential schools. The film can also be illustrated by many sociological concepts such as agents of socialization, class inequality, and language as a cultural realm.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most compelling twentieth century writers, (Curnutt, 2004). The year 1925 marks the year of the publication of Fitzgerald’s most credited novel, The Great Gatsby (Bruccoli, 1985). With its critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream (Berman, 1996), this dramatic idyllic novel, (Harvey, 1957), although poorly received at first, is now highly regarded as Fitzgerald’s finest work (Rohrkemper, 1985) and is his publisher, Scribner 's most popular title, (Donahue, 2013). The novel achieved it’s status as one of the most influential novels in American history around the nineteen fifties and sixties, over ten years after Fitzgerald 's passing, (Ibid, 1985)
Some of the residential school students were so scarred from the way they were treated in the schools, that they even started putting the same abuse that they had received in the schools, onto their own children. The abuse has left the students with mental trauma and many of the students were unable to erase the memories of abuse from their minds. Many the survivors of the Canadian Residential Schools have been inflicting their children and spouses with physical abuse similar to the abuse that they had received previously in the Residential Schools. In an article talking about the victimization of aboriginals they stated, “Males who had experienced abuse as children were found to be at a significantly high risk to repeat the cycle of violence with future spouses” (Scrim as cited in McGillivray and Comaskey 1996). This sad cycle shows that even though the last Residential School closed in the late 1990’s, the experiences that students had during their time is still negatively affecting their lives today. Many of the former students of the Canadian Residential Schools have turned to substance abuse in hopes to try and cope with their struggling mental health. It is shocking to see that a school this harsh could have such long lasting impacts on its students. In an article related to helping people understand the trauma
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, reveals thin threads woven between himself and the novel, revealing the truth about a corrupted society filled with discontentment and superficiality. From marriages to women to an impossible dream, all these aspects of Fitzgerald’s life influences his work, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s novel quite closely resembles his own circumstances through his portrayal of the characters and the society of the 1920’s. Though Fitzgerald himself lived in a society of shallowness, he was able to portray that the emptiness in society would not bring anyone happiness. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the characters in The Great Gatsby to represent the people in his own life and to show that wealth causes corruption.