Premium Essay

The Great Gastby Essay

In:

Submitted By ngomylinh
Words 2311
Pages 10
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (published on April 10, 1925) is one novel that anyone would regret not reading. It has gone down in history as one of the most important works in American literature — and, to many, the great American novel. Fitzgerald has succeeded in offering up commentary on a variety of themes — justice, power, greed, betrayal, the American dream and so on through Nick as a narrator. There are two most impressive symbols in the novel. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg remains obsessing in readers’ minds.
The first is a perfect example of the manner in which characters The Great Gatsby. Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, to whom “ he bought house to be near her, he threw all those parties hoping she would wander in one night”. In Chapter 1 he reaches toward the green light on the other side of the river, in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream: “all man are created equal and that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. Though, The Great Gatsby illustrates the downgrade value of American Dream, instead of striving for equality, they just want to get as rich as they could get. The American social in Gatsby’s time is extremely loathed by Mr. Carraway:” I’m inclined to reserve all judgments. But even I have a limit. Back then; all of us drank too much. The more in tune with the times we were, the more we drank. And none of us contributed anything new. When I came back from New York, I was

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

The Great Gatsby

...Pursuing the American Dream The Great Gatsby, written by Scott F. Fitzgerald in 1925, follows the life of the various characters that lived in West Egg, a fictional town on Long Island. It is narrated by Nicholas “Nick” Caraway, a Yale graduate and one of the main characters. By the way the book is written, one can deduce that Nick lived through all the events, or wrote what others told him about the events he was not present in, and wrote the book by end of it all. Its main theme is the pursuit of the American Dream, and what characters have to do to reach it, and how it can all crumble down. Basically, in this essay I will show the different ‘American dreams’ that are strongly projected in this novel. The first dream, the one with the strongest portrayal, was the desire of escalating in the social status ladder. There were characters with a high social status for their family’s name, like Tom Buchanan who inherited his family fortune. He was described as the kind of person that thinks money allows him to treat people as the lowest scum; even though his mannerism and tastes were exquisite, his attitude towards those who were not on the same status as him was detestable. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” (Page 188, The Great Gastby) Tom counts as an example of the...

Words: 1661 - Pages: 7