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The Great Gatsby

great gatsby essays, notes

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6 views2 pages

The Great Gatsby

great gatsby essays, notes

Uploaded by

belgin.erdeeem
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Gatsby

Great Gatsby is a story that takes place in the American alcohol ambargo years, the exact date
is 1922’s Summer which the market was in the all time high and becoming rich from scratch.

The Great Gatsby was a story that gives us several themes like the American dream. It
criticizes that by showing how corrupt rich people are and for Gatsby how easy it is to ignore
moral issues behind it. Our narrator Nick talks his experiences but his main goal was to show
us the love story between Gatsby and Daisy. I think writer manages to show what 1920s
America was like.

While reading it you can feel like you are in the room with them and narrating the story from
firsthand. Gatsby’s ambition and desire ends him, I guess we can tell that Gatsby was a Tragic
character. He had a dream, Dream of being with daisy and he did everything he could do to
achieve it. He organized parties, tried to catch daisy’s attention and he suffered through it.
Gatsby watched the green light across the daisy and Tom’s house every night.

His tragic flaw was obvious, of course he was not going to succeed in his love story, who
does ? Gatsby wasn’t only about the love between Gatsby and Daisy. Story was telling us
Nick’s suffer too. Nick was lost in the new American world, he was not able to keep up with
the others, he was clean, not corrupted but through the story, American dream ate him too.
Nick loses faith in everyone around him because of their superficiality, decadence, and moral
degradation. Nick becomes more and more cynical due to the excesses of Gatsby's parties, the
broken relationships, and the absence of real connection.

According to Nick, everyone was corrupted except for Gatsby, I think he thought like that
because Gatsby did everything for love but I don’t agree with that. Gatsby was corrupted too,
he was just stupid enough to omit it. (batu diyo, ben demiyom)

1 American Dream in The Great Gatsby:

• Built around five pillars:

• Opportunity: Reinventing oneself, as seen with Gatsby (formerly James Gatz).

• Equality: Gatsby’s attempts to blend with old-money elites.

• Freedom: Gatsby’s parties symbolize a rejection of class constraints.

• Upward Mobility: Gatsby’s wealth, achieved through dubious bootlegging.

• Hard Work: Critiqued as Gatsby’s means to wealth are morally corrupt.

1. Gatsby's Two-Fold Dream:

• Wealth and Social Status: Symbolized by his lavish lifestyle and efforts to
mimic old money.
• Daisy Buchanan: Represents the culmination of his dreams, tying his romantic
and material pursuits.

2. Barriers to Gatsby’s Dream:

• Old Money: Gatsby can never fully integrate into the hereditary wealth class.

• Time and the Past: His fixation on rekindling his past with Daisy ultimately
dooms him.

Literary Analysis and Quotes

• Symbolism of the Green Light:

• Represents unreachable aspirations.

• Seen as a metaphor for the elusive nature of the American Dream.

• Gatsby's Reinvention:

• Described as a “platonic conception of himself,” underscoring the artificiality


of his persona.

• Nick’s Observations:

• Gatsby’s pursuit is tied more to nostalgia than forward-thinking ambition.

• The final line emphasizes the futility of striving for the past: “So we beat on,
boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Conclusion and Reflection

• Critique of the American Dream:

• The novel portrays it as an ideal riddled with corruption and unattainable goals.

• Gatsby’s tragic flaw lies in his inability to accept the impossibility of recreating
the past.

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