Major Characters in The Great Gatsby
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald des
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes three adjacent neighborhoods on Long Island. One is East Egg, where the established wealthy families live. The second is West Egg, which consists mostly of the "newly rich" (Long 106). The third is the "valley of ashes," a lower class neighborhood which is depicted as a "waste land" of gaudy billboards and corrosive dust (Fitzgerald 24). Nick Carraway and Tom Buchanan visit the valley of ashes a few days prior to the Fourth of July. Because of this reference to America's Independence Day, Long indicates that Fitzgerald's intention is to make a "comment on the new republic and the society it has fostered" (108). Le Vot further claims that the valley of ashes refers to "the failure of the American dream, which could only be materially realized at the cost of this debasement of nature" (157). In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that the residents of East Egg and West Egg are equally symbolic of the corruption and decay of traditional American values. Thus, in Bewley's words, "the theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream" (11). The American dream is focused on the idea that anyone can become a success if they work long enough and hard enough. However, this dream had become debased by Fitzgerald's time because success is typically defined only in terms of materialistic values. The Great Gatsby makes the point that the quest for materialism is an empty promise because material things are tran
. . .
is "watching over nothing" (Fitzgerald 146). This emphasizes the fact that Gatsby's desire for attaining Daisy is nothing more than an empty dream. Thus, like the American dream itself, Gatsby's dream is both corrupt and meaningless.
Daisy Buchanan is described as giving an impression of both beauty and excitement. However, she is also described as being essentially hollow or empty on the inside. Thus, like the American dream, Daisy is all materialistic and has no spiritual base. She and her friend, Jordan Baker, are depicted as having "impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire" (Fitzgerald 12). This shows that Daisy doesn't care about anything except for the materialistic values which are connected with her desires. Bewley stresses Daisy's relationship to the American dream and indicates that this relationship connects her strongly to the general theme of the novel. Thus, it is apparent that Fitzgerald was interested in illustrating "the emptiness of Daisy's character - an emptiness that we see curdling into the viciousness of a monstrous moral indifference as the story unfolds" (Bewley 19). Daisy is fundamentally unattainable to Gatsby because she really belongs more to Tom's world than to Gatsby's. Both Daisy and
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Tom Buchanan, West Egg, Gatsby Nick, Daisy Buchanan, Le Vot, Middle West, Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, Gatsby Essentially, Dan Cody, american dream, tom buchanan, scott fitzgerald's, green light, jay gatsby, version american dream, example nick, valley ashes, version american, le vot, fitzgerald's gatsby, scott fitzgerald's gatsby, harold bloom ed, fitzgerald's gatsby harold, gatsby harold bloom,
Approximate Word count = 1860
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
