Great Gatsby Essay

Wealth, power, and dreams. These are all themes discussed in The Great Gatsby, a novel written by famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925, during the midst of the roaring twenties. The story is replete with symbolism, irony, and an overall commentary of the overconsumption of society during the 1920’s. The story follows three main parties, this being the Buchanans, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway. Through the perspective of Nick we learn the true complexities of these characters and their motivations through greed, motivation, infidelity, and longing for something that is lost. We endure the eternal struggles of the upper class while perceiving them from an outside perspective of their life

And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, tailed all day with maps and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears repairing of the night before”(Fitzgerald 39). This decade brought a new wave of economic and social changes. Americans now had access to a sizable amount of disposable income. Gatsby's parties display this idea of self indulgence and carelessness, with no thought of the fallout from these actions. Through this perspective we can see that these exorbitant events have little to no effect on those it pertained, seeing as it could be easily cleaned up, only for the cycle to continue the following night. This is important to note because throughout the book there is the underlying message that in the drive to embrace post-war materialism and consumer culture, Americans had lost their moral compass. It shows the consumer struggle of the period while being 100% accurate, considering the novel was written in the middle of the decade. If we were to read pieces from the modern era about the 20’s, it would not be authentic and as immersive as Fitzgerald was with The Great Gatsby. He used his vivid and evocative language to capture the tone and

Although fiction, the book depicts the harsh reality and mindset of those that lived in the 1920’s. By forgetting this piece of history the authenticity and message that Fitzgerald holds within his novel would be diluted and filtered with modern day takes on this type of literature. Although authors today could accurately depict and write stories that take place in this time period, it would lack the soul necessary to tell a meaningful story. Fitzgerald wanted the world to read his works. He pursued his passion for writing tirelessly, wanting to make an impact on people's lives and perspectives. Within Gatsby Fitzgerald fills the book with a strong emotional core, using his detailed and evocative language to perfectly depict the tone and setting. After the books’ big success, Fitzgerald went on to do interviews talking about the significance and warnings sporadically intertwined throughout his book, seeking to emphasize the reasons behind his writing. In the height of his popularity you would commonly see that, “In interviews he gave to newspapers in the late 1920s,... Fitzgerald predicted that Americans would soon pay the price for the decade’s glorious excesses….[Fitzgerald] was