Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

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Recommended: Importance of Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald reached a celebrity status upon his publication of This Side of Paradise and attained all new heights of stardom after his release of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald reveals a great deal about himself in The Great Gatsby as he ascribes aspects of himself to different main characters in the novel. Fitzgerald uses these symbolic characters to aptly represent humans and social classes in the Jazz Age, defined by the OED as “The 1920s in the US characterized as a period of carefree hedonism, wealth, freedom, and youthful exuberance”. The Great Gatsby depicts the events of New York in 1922, the Jazz Age, from the perspective of Nick Carraway, in which Nick acts as the vessel for the reader’s eventual understanding of the hollowness of the upper class and the decline of the American dream, major themes of the novel. Fitzgerald employs symbolism to reveal veiled messages analyzing the real world and its wide variety and contradictions, through the events and symbols in The Great Gatsby.
Although many writers such as Lionel Trilling have suggested an allegorical nature to the characters in The Great Gatsby these characters instead act as symbols for multiple aspects of the real world. F. Scott Fitzgerald immediately characterizes and foreshadows events of each main character through a symbolic nomenclature; each name can be analyzed to determine which location they live in, and each main character’s given name symbolizes aspects of their personality. Characters such as S.W. Belcher, Miss Haag, and Mr. P. Jewett, all names representing lower status, live in West Egg, while comparative individuals Chester Becker and Doctor Webster Civet, all sophisticated names, reside in East Egg; Fitzgerald’s symbolic nomenclatu...

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