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The great gatsby's influence
The Story Behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
The Story Behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
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In “The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald uses imagery, metaphors, and perspective to illustrate the differences of the East and the West, which reveal how complex and confusing the time period was. Fitzgerald describes the East and West through Nick Carraway’s perspective after the events of that summer left him confused and ill-at-ease. The West is described as a comforting and simple place. Nick remembers his winters spent there, where there were “street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” The tone is nostalgic, Nick seems to be questioning why he left in the first place. The West represents the Victorian time period, it’s very comfortable and familiar, a place where “dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.” Yet, one can see how Nick felt trapped in the “bored, sprawling, swollen towns” of the West. …show more content…
It attracted people who wanted more, who wanted an exciting, new life, people such as Nick, Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby. The East, however, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Fitzgerald uses diction such as “grotesque”, “distortion”, and “solemn” to describe the East. These words create an ominous and mysterious tone. The people in the East are Modernist; they’re glamorous and beautiful like the “drunken woman in a white evening dress” described in Fitzgerald’s metaphor for West egg. The woman symbolizes how superficial the East was. The big houses and fancy clothes led people to think the Modernist East was beautiful and fun and exciting, but there was a lot of covered-up suffering, as illustrated by the fact that the woman is on a stretcher. The East was also careless, which caused a lot of the suffering. The line “but no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.” illustrates the carelessness of the time period, how people would get hurt, or even die, without anyone so much as blinking an
The most memorable figures in literature are not created simple, instead their lives are not easy to understand. These characters have multiple perspectives of the imaginary worlds that they are placed in, which allow readers to associate themselves with such a literary idol. One of these notorious figures recognized as a powerful symbol is Jay Gatsby; this man is described as a “criminal and a dreamer” in Adam Cohen’s article of The New York Times. When reading “Jay Gatsby, Dreamer, Criminal, Jazz Age Rogue, Is a Man for Our Times”, the audience is exposed to many sides of Gatsby. We are able to observe this complicated yet fascinating character through various rhetorical techniques in which Cohen uses to fully convey the image of the “mysterious Prohibition-era bootlegger”.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic, The Great Gatsby, tells a story of how love and greed lead to death. The narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, tells of his unusual summer after meeting the main character, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s intense love makes him attempt anything to win the girl of his dreams, Daisy Buchanan. All the love in the world, however, cannot spare Gatsby from his unfortunate yet inevitable death. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald utilizes the contrasting locations of East Egg and West Egg to represent opposing forces vital to the novel.
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in his book, The Great Gatsby, structures the characters Tom and Gatsby to demonstrate the difference between old and new money, and the class conflict within the upper class.His purpose is to emphasize the differences between the old and new money through the characters Tom and Gatsby. He adopts a wary tone when describing Tom and a fanatical tone to describe Gatsby through connotative words, advanced punctuation and sentence structure, and other details.
In a nation, two communities can often differ from each other. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses his writing to contrast the morality described by Nick Carraway in the Midwest, to the corruption and inhumanity that is quite starkly present in the East. When Nick Carraway describes the west, his west, he portrays it with a sense of calm and jubilation. When he and the train carriage which he is in pulls into a station in the Midwest, he says the following, “When we pulled out into the winter night… the snow… began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights… a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air”. In this quote, there is a sense of happiness and welcoming, as the snow is described as stretching
The Great Gatsby is a novel written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and is based throughout the ‘roaring 20’s’. Throughout the novel there are affairs and corruption, proving life lessons that the past cannot be repeated. Fitzgerald uses many forms of symbolism throughout the text some of these include; colours, the eyes of T.J Eckleburg, clocks and the East and West Eggs. The Great Gatsby is a story of love, dreams and choices witnessed by a narrator against the ridiculous wealth of the 1920’s.
In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Gatz, a man of low social standing, felt that he lost the love of his life, Daisy, because he did not meet her desired standards of sophistication. Therefore, James Gatz decided to reinvent his identity as Jay Gatsby in an effort to demonstrate to Daisy, that she had only ever loved him. In doing so, Gatsby decided to construct his new character traits based off of Daisy 's husband, Tom Buchanan, who she seemed to be attracted to. Through Gatsby 's rhetorical effort to persuade Daisy, Fitzgerald had Gatsby recognize and employ Aristotle 's first version of ethos, appeal of your own character, and Aristotle 's second version of ethos, appeal to the character of one 's audience. However, Gatsby fatally flawed his rhetorical strategy which caused him to lose
Considering that many authors use figurative language techniques in their writing to help convey a specific message; there is no wonder why Fitzgerald and Twain both use the tools for the purpose of criticising people in more of a low key fashion. Fitzgerald uses many different figurative language devices in The Great Gatsby, like similes. Because it is set in the roaring 20s, partying is a big element to the storyline. When Gatsby throws extravagant parties, Nick thinks to himself “...men and women came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars.” (Fitzgerald 44). Nick refers to the social statuses of the young people in the 1920s. It proves that they really just want to party, get wasted, and that they absolutely
In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes the demise of the American Dream. Through greed, pursuit of empty pleasures and cynicism many characters throughout the novel realize that life is not always as luxurious as it seems. Based on the East and West egg, both communities live very expensive lifestyles.
Dubbed the ‘roaring 20s’, because of the massive rise in America’s economy, this social and historical context is widely remembered for its impressive parties and sensationalist attitude. However, Fitzgerald also conveys a more sinister side to this culture through numerous affairs, poverty and a rampage of organised crime. By exposing this moral downfall, Fitzgerald reveals to the responder his value of the American dream and his belief of its decline. As a writer, Fitzgerald was always very much concerned with the present times, consequently, his writing style and plot reflects his own experiences of this era. So similar were the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters to his own that he once commented, “sometimes I don't know whether Zelda (his wife) and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. In 1924, Fitzgerald was affected by Zelda’s brief affair with a young French pilot, provoking him to lock her in their house. A construction of this experience can be seen in the way Fitzgerald depicts the 1290s context. For example in ‘The Great Gatsby’, there are numerous affairs and at one point, Mr Wilson locks up his wife to pre...
Fitzgerald's book at first overwhelms the reader with poetic descriptions of human feelings, of landscapes, buildings and colors. Everything seems to have a symbolic meaning, but it seems to be so strong that no one really tries to look what's happening behind those beautiful words. If you dig deeper you will discover that hidden beneath those near-lyrics are blatancies, at best.
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a book about a young rich man that had a mysterious past. The author intentionally chose Nick as the narrator of this story. He is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he often contradicts himself. He said he was taught by his father to not criticize people, but he often criticized people including Gatsby. Critics in real life often behave like Nick and are hypocritical.
This passage shows Nick making his way through New York at night, seeing the sights and narrating the way this external stimuli makes him feel. It exemplifies the manner in which Nick interacts with the world around him, often as an observer, rather than participant, and is integral to the development of his character. Fitzgerald utilizes vivid imagery throughout the paragraph, paired with a strong narrative regarding Nick’s experience in New York; furthermore provoking the audience to ponder a theme central to the novel.
There are many themes that are implemented in the Great Gatsby that Fitzgerald uses as a technique to juxtapose two contrasting topics. During this time of the Roaring Twenties, business and economy was booming, however there’s still was a underlying hint of urban corruption and the gap between the rich and poor became greater. Through the technique of juxtaposition, Fitzgerald paints a detailed picture of society in the 1920’s and its cultural clashes. By comparing the characters living in the East and West Egg, Fitzgerald highlights the contrast between morality and corruption in society during the 1920’s. Additionally, his contrasting descriptions of Tom and Daisy’s house to the Valley of Ashes offers a juxtaposition of the rich and poor.
Setting is essential to any good novel, it envelopes the entire work and pervades every scene and line for, as Jack M. Bickham said, “when you choose setting, you had better choose it wisely and well, because the very choice defines—and circumscribes—your story’s possibilities”. F. Scott Fitzgerald created a setting in The Great Gatsby that not only is an overarching motif in the story, but implants itself in each character that hails from West Egg, East Egg, and the Valley of Ashes. West Egg, symbolizing the new, opportunistic rich, representative of the American dream, East Egg, the established, aristocratic rich, and the Valley of Ashes, the crumbling decay of society, are linked together in the “haunted” image of the East, the hollow, shallow, and brutal land that Fitzgerald uses to illustrate the hollow, shallow, and brutal people living there (176).
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald took place in the 1920’s when the nation was undergoing rapid economic, political, and social change. Looking through different literary lenses the reader is able to see the effects of these rapid changes. The marxist lens reflects the gap between rich and poor while the feminist lens showcases the patriarchal society.