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The theme of society in the great gatsby
The theme of society in the great gatsby
Society and class theme in the novel the great gatsby
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a novel with underlying themes of social class, wealth, and the rise and fall of the American Dream. Fitzgerald conveys these themes +through symbolism. One of the symbols used in The Great Gatsby to represent the American Dream is the Valley of Ashes. The Valley of Ashes is located between West Egg and New York City and is described as a dreary, gray, and depressing home to the lower class, such as the Wilson family. The people inhabiting The Valley of Ashes are hopeless people who struggle through poverty while those who inhabit West Egg live luxurious lifestyles. The inhabitants of The Valley of Ashes are victims of the American Dream and of the wealthy that used them to pursue their own desires. The Valley of Ashes symbolizes the failure of the American Dream and the moral and social decay inflicted by the desire of wealth. The people living in the Valley of Ashes are burnt out just like the landscape around them. The men are described as …show more content…
Automobiles throughout the book signifie power. Mainly only the higher class such as Gatsby are able to afford cars, showing that those in the upper class have the most power. In The Valley of Ashes there are very few cars showing a lack of power and a feeling of helplessness among those living there. Wilson fixes cars to make a living and it is implied that Tom sells him cars in the quote, “‘when are you going to sell me that car?’ ‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’ ‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Tom coldly. ‘And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Wilson quickly” (25). Tom looks down on Wilson just as the higher class look down on the lower class. Tom doesn’t care about anyone’s concerns but his own showing the greed associated with the pursuit of one’s own
The valley of ashes is “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent efforts, or men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (23). Here, The Valley of Ashes is regarded as complete destitution and hopelessness. The people known as the lower class do not wish to live in the valley of ashes. This is why people, like Myrtle try to do anything to get away from it but instead it becomes unachievable for them.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's, The Great Gatsby, the pursuit of the American dream in a corrupt period is a central theme. This theme exemplifies itself in the downfall of Gatsby. In a time of disillusionment the ideals of the American dream are lost. The classic American dream is one of materialism and when Gatsby incorporates Daisy, a human being, into the dream he is doomed to fail.
Through his vivid depiction of the valley of the ashes in the acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald unveils the truth about 1920s America: economic prosperity did not guarantee happiness and resulted in depreciating conditions for those that were not able to connive their way to the top.
The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, deals heavily with the concept of the American Dream as it existed during the Roaring Twenties, and details its many flaws through the story of Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and ambitious entrepreneur who comes to a tragic end after trying to win the love of the moneyed Daisy Buchanan, using him to dispel the fantastic myth of the self-made man and the underlying falsities of the American Dream. Despite Gatsby’s close association with the American Dream, however, Fitzgerald presents the young capitalist as a genuinely good person despite the flaws that caused his undoing. This portrayal of Gatsby as a victim of the American Dream is made most clear during his funeral, to which less than a handful of people attend. Gatsby makes many mistakes throughout the novel, all of which Fitzgerald uses these blunders as a part of his thematic deconstruction of the American Dream.
Through these quotes, Fitzgerald believes the American dream is unattainable in the Great Gatsby because some people in the novel had advantages unlike others. A major instance of said inequality would be applied to the citizens who are living in the Valley of Ashes; representing the forgotten poor underclass with lost hopes and dreams who have failed to live up to the American dream or even got a chance to start. Therefore, the Valley of Ashes is a blatant symbol of just how “dead” Fitzgerald really believes the American dream to be, and how he wants the readers to interpret it. Fitzgerald wrote “.ashes take the form of..men who move dimly and are already crumbling through powdery air..immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades.”. Tell’em
Throughout The Great Gatsby, various locations are introduced that correlate to specific types of inhabitants. The geography of the novel is primarily comprised of four scenes: East Egg, West Egg, the valley of the ashes, and New York City. Although all of the localities are situated in the East, Nick muses at the end of the novel that the story is, in actuality, “of the West” (Fitzgerald 176). This discovery insinuates that the materialisms of the East besmirched the characters of the West, symbolizing the deteriorating effects the quest for riches has on traditional values. Employing the four major settings, Fitzgerald is able to translate the moral and social corruption of society which dramatically contrasts with the conventional ethics of the West. F. Scott Fitzgerald utilizes setting and its inhabitants in order to represent the theme of artificiality as well as the corrupt nature of the materialistic pursuit of wealth.
“But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paint less days” Represents a certain motif, consisting of the words Great and Bright, However it is stated that his eyes are dimmed. This exemplifies that even though people can see, they are not seeing clearly due to the ash covering everything.
Jay Gatsby is one of the few characters that has come significantly close to being successful in achieving his version of the American Dream, while others were scrounging to have a stable state of living in the “Jazz Age”. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows how the richer occupants in the East Egg have little to none tolerance for the lesser few in West Egg. The symbolism of the green light, billboard and Valley of Ashes assists the plot and emphasizes the themes in the novel.
The Great Gatsby takes place in New York City and on Long Island, in the two places known as “West Egg” and “East Egg”. East Egg is where the aristocrats, who have money from generations, live. West Egg contains the lower and middle class people who earned money during their lifetime. They are despised on by the East Eggers, including Daisy, who is an East Egger, never attends Gatsby parties, who is a West Egger. One of the most important places in the novel is the “Valley of Ashes”, a desolate wasteland on the way from New York and Long Island. The valley where “motor road hastily joins the railroad,” and sometimes has “a ghastly creak” (Fitzgerald Gatsby 23). It represents the destruction of the modern society as they byproducts of the trains go there. However, it is also the place where Myrtle dies, which indicating how the moral bankruptcy of big cities ends up in the smaller cities. Through this Fitzgerald portrays what New York symbolizes – a place when match fixing can occur, where lavish parties happen, and where money is used ruthlessly by bizarre and wealthy people. The setting allows Fitzgerald to portray the wealthy society of 1920s and the destruction it
Happiness symbolises a form of content, a form of satisfaction that can lead to several types of actions. In the Great Gatsby, happiness is portrayed in unusual forms with different characters, however every single character has some form of a dream in mind. Fitzgerald juxtaposes his influence of T.S. Elliot’s use of Valley of the Ashes showing poverty, decay and lost spiritualism with the rich lifestyle of West Egg as he shows the wealth, parties and liveliness of this Egg. The Egg represents the symbol of birth and life, as well as the fragility of society and mainly the fragility of dreams. Each character in the novel has their own interpretation of the ‘American Dream – the pursuit of happiness’ as they all lack happiness due to the careless nature of American society during the Jazz Age.
The Great Gatsby's Valley of Ashes plays an important role in conveying the moral themes of the book through Catholic symbolism. Robert C. Hauhart, the author of Religious Language and Symbolism in The Great Gatsby’s Valley of Ashes, argues that the valley represents something more important than a setting. Hauhart explains that the Valley of Ashes unites many of the moral themes of the book because of what occurs there and the religious symbolism of the ashes. As the only source of Catholic imagery in the whole story it has a unique role in conveying Fitzgerald's themes.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald employs the use of characters, themes, and symbolism to convey the idea of the American Dream and its corruption through the aspects of wealth, family, and status. In regards to wealth and success, Fitzgerald makes clear the growing corruption of the American Dream by using Gatsby himself as a symbol for the corrupted dream throughout the text. In addition, when portraying the family the characters in Great Gatsby are used to expose the corruption growing in the family system present in the novel. Finally, the American longing for status as a citizen is gravely overshot when Gatsby surrounds his life with walls of lies in order to fulfill his desires for an impure dream. F. Scot. Fitzgerald, through his use of symbols, characters, and theme, displays for the reader a tale that provides a commentary on the American dream and more importantly on its corruption.
In The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are many symbols that not only shows the greed and simple mindedness of the time, but also provide great clairvoyance into not only the story, but the character themselves. Jay Gatsby’s mansion is a superb example of this and is relatable to almost every part of the novel; it symbolizes the essence of the American Dream, being that from such a small start, Gatsby is able to have such a magnificent mansion, but it also has a negative connotation to what it symbolizes, which is the blindness to reality, and the true form and essence of Jay Gatsby himself.
Scott Fitzgerald was a writer who desired his readers to be able to hear, feel, and see his work. He made it his goal to be able to make readers think and keep asking questions using imagery and symbolism. The Great Gatsby was not just about the changes that occurred during the Jazz Age, but it was also about America’s corrupted society which was full of betrayal and money-hungry citizens. It was the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg that overlooked all the corruption that occurred throughout the Valley of Ashes. It was the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg that serves as a symbol of higher power who witnesses everything from betrayal to chaos in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
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).