The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many of these events from Fitzgerald's early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick's case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South.

Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless lifestyle of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy's love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.

Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed "the Jazz Age." Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the E...

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...ontation between Gatsby and Tom in the Plaza Hotel in Chapter VII.

Falling action - Daisy's rejection of Gatsby, Myrtle's death, Gatsby's murder

Themes - The decline of the American dream, the spirit of the 1920s, the difference between social classes, the role of symbols in the human conception of meaning, the role of the past in dreams of the future

Motifs - The connection between events and weather, the connection between geographical location and social values, images of time, extravagant parties, the quest for wealth

Symbols - The green light on Daisy's dock, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, the valley of ashes, Gatsby's parties, East Egg, West Egg

Foreshadowing - The car wreck after Gatsby's party in Chapter III, Owl Eyes's comments about the theatricality of Gatsby's life, the mysterious telephone calls Gatsby receives from Chicago and Philadelphia.

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