Show Me a Hero and I’ll Write You a Tragedy: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was exceptionally equivocal towards the American dream. He saw it as intriguing and lustrous yet dangerous and complex. His thoughts and his works express his extensive and adventurous imagination. Fitzgerald lived a life of disappointment and depression. His novels are representations of his life and his struggles. He had many marital issues and eventually divorced which led him into the pit of alcoholism. His books reveal his emotion and therefore rarely entertain a happy ending. Both books I have selected revolve around the struggle of love. The Great Gatsby is about the struggle for love and Tender is The Night is about the struggle to keep love. These themes are directly related to his own life issues. These experiences that F. Scott Fitzgerald has lived through has translated into his work and therefore the reader notices common themes throughout his stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald incorporates continuity between the themes of classifying people, money and love, and idealism in his novels.

In his books, Fitzgerald groups people into two distinct classifications to portray social stratification, which stipulates a barrier between them. Fitzgerald does this in order to express the very prevalent distinction between the different types of people and what they are like. Fitzgerald creates a discrepancy to depict the exclusiveness in society. a. “I lived in West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two... Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water.” (The Great Gatsby 5). This separation distinguishes the Buchanan’s from the others such as Gatsby. This idea of wealth and where you are located divides the two types of people geographically and socially. West...

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...has a more secure wealth. Fitzgerald portrays his theme through Gatsby’s own downfall until he is destroyed. “Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.” (Tender is the Night 3). This quote is very important to the book because it describes Dick Diver’s point of view. Dick marries his own phycology patient primarily because of her youth and wealth. He marries a young girl Nicole and basically becomes her father and lover. Later in the story he meets Rosemary who is a very young girl and Dick seems to become very infatuated with her. Fitzgerald is telling the reader that no matter what; a material thing cannot cause true love.