Themes in The Great Gatsby
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby develops a number of themes related to Fitzgerald's view of his society and also to his particular concerns with the role of the artist in society. The novel makes use of a number of symbols and symbolic actions. The social classes in the novel are intended to be symbolic of the age, an age in which one group was considered the "lost" generation, lost because it had lost its way after World War I. There is a symbolic interaction between the Long Island world of money and leisure and the more frenetic and working-class image of the city of New York, and the characters in the novel can move between the two realms as much of the working class cannot. The city becomes a metaphor for a mechanistic and materialistic society. The city is also a source of ambivalent feelings, for the writer is both attracted to the energy and life of the city while also seeing it as a microcosm for all the ills of American society. The ideal of the American dream is another symbol shown to be an empty dream. For Fitzgerald, the artist is equated with the romantic, and the romantic--such as Jay Gatsby--is lost in that sort of society. For Gatsby, the dream proves illusory, and the reality is the hypocritical society of West Egg. The first symbolic representation in the novel is found in the division between East Egg and West Egg, with the difference being a matter of the age of residents' money. West Eggers see themselves as superior to the peo
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nown as the Lost Generation. The 1920s is a decade with a peculiar reputation for frivolity, but it was also a decade of strong contrasts. The period was one in which those who were doing well thought it would last forever, and the vapidity and self-centeredness of the West Eggers is all the more stark to us today because we know what happened in 1929 when the bubble burst, making the attitude of these people seem all the more foolish and short-sighted than it seemed to Fitzgerald from his perspective in 1925. The horrors of the war affected American society and made returning to life in the 1920s seem all the more important, but the idealism of pre-war America had been destroyed by the realities of war. Gatsby represents a romantic illusion of the American dream, a dream now perverted by the materialism of the 1920s. Fitzgerald lived through this era and comments on it in this novel.
Gatsby is described by two people who know him better than anyone else in the novel. Wolfsheim reports on Gatsby as gangster and bootlegger, while Henry C. Gatz talks about the young Gatsby, whose youth seemed to be a reflection of the all-American ideal. The West Eggers believe they stand for certain American values, values more elevated tha
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Approximate Word count = 2920
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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