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The Great Gatsby

In the 1974 film The Way We Were, when Katie (played by Barbra Streisand) and Hubbell (played by Robert Redford) attend a party with a group of Hubbell’s snobby, upper-class friends, Katie ends up becoming frustrated and yells, in response to someone portending a knowledge of F. Scott Fitzgerald “He died of too much booze, and canopies, and people like you!” While there may be a kernel of truth in this response, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby attacks the American dream as an illusion filled with pretty people saying pretty things who are really immature, selfish, and deluded. We see this expressed most clearly in the characters of Daisy and Gatsby as viewed from the narrator’s, Nick’s, perspective.

At first light, Gatsby appears to be the personification of rich, American, success. Gatsby seems so in control of his life at the outset of the novel from Nick’s perspective that he even owns a little piece of heaven, “Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens” (Fitzgerald 21). Gatsby is a member, in fact a leader, of the West Egg, Long Island community. However, he appears to be the embodiment of perfection because of his manner, his style, his dress, and his ostentatious wealth.

Yet, this seemingly ideal American success story is the son of unsuccessful farmers who by his sheer will invented himself as Jay Gatsby. When Nick finds this out, he understands Gatsby as he never has. He knows he is really not the mysterious, classy, heroic figure he’s come to know, but the self-made product of an adolescent’s image of the heroic, i.e. an artificial and illusory one “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anyt

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The Great Gatsby. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:56, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1686453.html