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Does Fitzgerald Present Myrtle's Relationship In The Great Gatsby

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"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald discounts The American Dream through Gatsby and Daisy's relationship, Myrtle and Tom's relationship, and Nick's experience of the East. Daisy is married to Tom, Gatsby loves Daisy, and Myrtle loves Tom. Nick is their neighbor and friend who is present for all their drama. Daisy only wants to be with Gatsby because of his money, and she demonstrates that when she says, “They’re such beautiful shirts... It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such- such beautiful shirts before” (Fitzgerald 92). Gatsby does not realize that their relationship isn’t real and believes she and her acquaintances like him. He thinks that he is invited to a party with them, but he isn’t. .“My God, I believe the man’s coming… …show more content…

“Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business” (Fitzgerald 16). Throughout the novel Nick sees rich people being careless, like Tom and Daisy, and poor people being exploited, like Myrtle and Gatsby. He eventually decides that “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…” (Fitzgerald 179). Nick is appalled by Tom, Daisy, and Jordan and the last thing he says to Gatsby is: “They’re a rotten crowd… you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (Fitzgerald 154). He never speaks to Gatsby again after this because Wilson murders Gatsby, thinking it was him who had the affair with Myrtle. Nick then finds out that Tom was the one who gave Wilson that impression: Tom says, “What if I did tell [Wilson]? That [Gatsby] had it coming to him… [Nick] saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified” (Fitzgerald 179). Nick finally realizes that the East was full of corruption and irresponsibility, so he moves back to the Midwest. “After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction” (Fitzgerald 176). He is the only character to realize his illusion and escape tragedy at the hands of

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In Chapters 1 and 2 Nick states “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, … represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” 2. In chapters 7 and 8, Tom learns about the affair between Daisy and Gatsby. Nick points out the irony of losing both women in his

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In the novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the male-female relationships are characterized by a loss of control which portray the nature of these relationships as destructive and lonely. From an outsider’s perspective, these relationships seem joyful and full of love but underneath are catastrophic. They create false images for themselves to look good in the public eye and hide from their true feelings. Daisy and Tom, the happy, wealthy couple, are stuck in a fatal relationship. Daisy and Tom are in love at one point; however, throughout the novel they lose feelings for each other.

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In The Great Gatsby, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, portrays the characters in relationships wanting relationships with others that they can’t socially have. Gatsby is in love with the idea of Daisy. Gatsby’s love for Daisy is definitely more intense than Daisy’s love for Gatsby. His love for Daisy seems tied up in an obsession with her wealth and the status she represents. Daisy has promised to wait for Gatsby, but is in love with the idea of Tom.

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When he first meets her and they date Gatsby figures that it is not serious and that he won’t get attached to

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In the novel The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is a very wealthy man who lives in West Egg. He grew up not having money at all but changed that in order to better himself. He was born by the name John Gats and then later changed it once he had made all of his money. Jay Gatsby made his money illegally through organized crime; he sold illegal alcohol and stolen securities. From making all of this money, he now has one of if the biggest houses in West Egg.

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Nick had attempted to escape from this lifestyle but because he was unable to make a complete decision in the beginning, he kept living it through the Buchanans; they were Nick’s window to the past. He witnesses Tom’s affair being “insisted upon wherever he was known” (21) without shame, and Daisy “[turn] out the light” (117) in her relationship with Gatsby, as it it never happened. A quiet bystander, never interfering, he experiences their life of ignorance, one with no repercussions, the one he had. Unwilling to remove himself from them, he instead complies to their wants, their decisions that create a sense of accomplishment. Doing nothing to change and move on from his past, Nick makes his choice to move to the east pointless.

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Success is defined as an accomplishment of a goal; however, there is the question as to what truly outlines the idea of success. The novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, revolves around Jay Gatsby, who is depicted as a man of great wealth. The theme, that changing your social class will lead to tragedy, is represented through Gatsby’s actions. As a matter of fact, Gatsby had to work his way up to a social class that was deemed acceptable for one person: Daisy. Daisy was his only motivation for all of his actions, which includes the parties he threw.

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The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald takes after Jay Gatsby, a man who rotates his life around one wish: to be taken together with Daisy Buchanan, the adoration he lost five years prior. Gatsby's dominant goal drives him from poverty to success, into the arms of his loved lady, and in the end to death. This story shows what occurred to the American Dream, which is considered being rich, happy and famous, in the 1920s-1930s, a time period in which the dreams of being rich became tainted anyways. The American dream not only causes destruction but it also caused corruption. Gatsby, Myrtle, Daisy and so many other people were ruined and corrupted because of the American Dream.

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At the first party Nick goes to, one of the girls he meets says a rumor about Gatsby: “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once” (48). This immediately brings into question the kind of man Gatsby is. Even though this is a rumor, the fact that it has been spread around shows how these people, most of whom don’t know Gatsby personally, don’t view him as the perfect man that Nick does. Rather, they view him as a mysterious enigma of a man with a cloudy past with potentially morally wrong actions. These judgemental guests even go as far as to question his loyalty to America by claiming he was a German spy during the war.

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The American Dream suggests that every American citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work. One of the major ways that Fitzgerald portrays this is by alluding to outside events or works of literature specifically from that time period. Another major relationship that develops in The Great Gatsby is between Tom and Daisy. F. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to things such as the World’s Fair and “The Love Nest” to display the eventual dismantling of Tom and Daisy’s relationship. Both of these separate plots consolidate under the idea of Gatsby trying to become the epitome of the American Dream, as seen through his strive for a “perfect life.”

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In this instance, it is the culprit of his demise due to the belief that he was responsible for killing Myrtle Wilson. When Nick prompts the idea of leaving for a bit, he tells him, "he would not consider it. He could not possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do" (113). This demonstrates his dedication to Daisy, as he refuses to leave the town until he knows Daisy's final decision regarding her staying with Tom or moving on with him. Even though Nick attempts to hint that it is unsafe for Gatsby to stay, he foreshadows Gatsby's eventual death.

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In the book, Nick despises most characteristics of rich people but most of all dislikes the childishness of their demeanor. He tells us at the end of the book that “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.” It is this which Nick does not approve of, the influencing of other peoples lives and then leaving them to sort it out. In The Great Gatsby, the rich do not solve the problems they create, they leave that for the poorer people. Nick tells us that it is mainly the social strata that Daisy, Tom, Jordan and Gatsby belong to which does this.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a reflection of the American Dream. Written in 1925, the book tells the story of a man named Jay Gatsby, whose main driving force in life is the pursuit of a woman called Daisy Buchanan. The narrator is Gatsby’s observant next-door neighbor, Nick Carraway, who offers a fresh, outsider’s perspective on the events; the action takes place in New York during the so-called Roaring Twenties. By 1922, when The Great Gatsby takes place, the American Dream had little to do with Providence divine and a great deal to do with feelings organized around style and personal changed – and above all, with the unexamined self .

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“Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern Life” (Fitzgerald 176). Nick found that that the life of glitz and glamour was no longer captivating. The east was changing him into the exact person he hates. The corruption of the east showed him how much he had changed and wanted to move back to the west,to his

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The Great Gatsby By [capitalization issue] Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates the materialistic lives of the wealthy and upper-class people during the Jazz age. The lives the characters in the novel are living are very much shown through their wealth. Throughout the novel the issues of the american dream, and wealth are shown both literally and metaphorically. An example of people only being happy though materialistic things is Both Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby both drive beautiful cars as a way of projecting their wealth. Gatsby’s car was described as very luxurious and very expensive,

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