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The Great Gatsby Obscene Word Analysis

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As the embodiment of the American Dream, Gatsby is both present and unreachable. Gatsby, although corrupt for most of the novel, turns out “alright” in the end. In her article, “The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word”, the author, Barbra Will, focuses on how Gatsby’s characterization and the obscene word on his steps complete the ending to The Great Gatsby. With his past life being full of corruption, the audience, as well as Nick, is forced to forget about Gatsby’s past. When Gatsby’s past is forgotten, he can more clearly represent the audience. When diving deeper into the characterization of Gatsby, it is clear that Fitzgerald makes Gatsby appear as both a ubiquitous presence and as an intangible force at the same time. The scene in which an obscene word is …show more content…

Gatsby’s troubled past contradicts with his present personality. After Gatsby dies, Nick is torn between believing that Gatsby is a great friend and that Gatsby is a corrupt bootlegger. In order to believe that Gatsby is a good friend, Nick must forget about Gatsby’s criminal past. By erasing the obscene word on Gatsby’s steps, Nick is choosing to erase Gatsby’s corrupt past and remember Gatsby as a good friend. Barbara also mentions how frequently Fitzgerald mentions eyesight and Gatsby’s vanishings. Gatsby’s mysteriousness is brought to the forefront when he suddenly vanishes from conversations, and when the owl-eyed man cannot see through Gatsby’s clever lies. Gatsby’s mysterious behaviors are as obscene as the obscene word written on his steps. Barbara claims, “the text stakes its ending on the inevitability of our forgetting everything about Gatsby that has proved troublesome about his character up to this point” (2). The ending of The Great Gatsby can only make sense by forgetting about Gatsby’s corrupt and mysterious

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Chapter seven of The Great Gatsby is memorable due to its strong concentration of rhetoric. Rhetoric gives the audience a deeper read into a story, and in this case the story of Nick Carraway and his friendship with Jay Gatsby, a man who seeks to be reunited with his past lover Daisy Buchanan. Using characterization, figurative language, and concrete diction, Fitzgerald highlights the events of chapter seven to create a lasting impact to the audience. “She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn’t even stopus car” (Fitzgerald 139).

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Authors often fuse intricate pieces to their writing to foreshadow later events and enhance their writing. In one of the most famous pieces of American literature, The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald integrates small dialogues that drop hints to forecast terrible outcomes. The novel occurs during the roaring nineties and accentuates the wild and carefree lifestyle of Long Island’s enclaves. Even though their lives might seem unproblematic, one couple in particular, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, is facing marriage troubles because of their loss of love. While Tom has a love interest with Myrtle, Daisy Buchanan rekindles her relationship with an old lover, Jay Gatsby, after witnessing Tom’s undeniable affair.

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Nick is made the narrator of the story that he is to tell of Jay Gatsby and is the reliable one who tells us that he must “reserve all judgments”. Nick’s values are rather parallel to Gatsby’s values of loyalty and honesty. Throughout the story, Nick’s admiration of Gatsby grows as they become friends although he “disapproved him from beginning to end.” As we are told the story from Nick’s point of view, the reader is forced to accept his thoughts and observations of the whole society, but most of all Gatsby. Nick realises that Gatsby has invested his whole self into trying to achieve his dream and Nick is in admiration of his determination.

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1201 Words | 5 Pages

Recounting heartbreak, betrayal, and deception, F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a bleak picture in the 1920’s novel The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, witnesses the many lies others weave in order to achieve their dreams. However, the greatest deception he encounters is the one he lives. Not having a true dream, Nick instead finds purpose by living vicariously through others, and he loses that purpose when they are erased from his life.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” Fitzgerald had something great to reveal to his readers in The Great Gatsby. To give some background, the novel is about a man, Nick, who is on the outside peering into the lifestyle of the extremely wealthy. His neighbor, Gatsby, has persistently worked for the past few years to meet Daisy again after he woefully departed from her to fight in the war. In the classic novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald has something to say and he uses effective diction, symbolism, and characterization to convey his idea that Americans must ceaselessly work towards living their own version of the great American Dream but they must not get caught up in wanting too much.

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Gatsby’s loss of Daisy is indicated in the dissonance between Gatsby's glorification of the past and the way Nick describes it. While Gatsby describes his past with Daisy as beautiful and full of love and light, Nick describes the past as “lurking” in the “shadow[s].” Something that lurks and is shadowy is unpleasant, un-seen, and out of reach, the opposite of the way Gatsby so positively glorifies his past with Daisy. This description of the past is juxtaposed with Gatsby’s supposed emotional and passionate kiss with Daisy, thus indicating that Daisy is slipping through his fingers. After kissing Daisy, Nick describes the kiss as “elusive” and “uncommunicable forever.”

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On one hand, Gatsby gains enormous wealth through his own effort from the bottom of the society, which could be regarded as “the great” from a practical perspective in his guests’ eyes. However, in the end, his success becomes just an illusion. His ultimate dream—Daisy’s love –cannot be gained even if he is that wealthy, and his tragic death indicates that “the greatness” of his striving is easy to be destroyed. On the other hand, “the great” also reveals that Gatsby used to be a great figure in his numerous guests’ eyes, when he is able to hold glamorous parties every week. However, ironically, eventually he is just a nobody that none of his friends except Nick care after his death.

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Nick’s caring and dedication to Gatsby’s house display the loyalty and faithfulness he and Gatsby had in each other. As Nick goes over to Gatsby’s for the last time, he notices “an obscene word [on the white steps]” (Fitzgerald 179-180). Instead of simply passing by and forgetting about it, he chooses to get down on his hands and knees to erase it. Though Gatsby is no longer alive to witness Nick’s favor, Nick does his best to

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of several great American classics that depicts the past without censorship. It is also considered to be an excellent literary example that reflects the 1920’s aristocratic lifestyle .However, as the reader comes to find throughout the novel, the narrator of the story, Nick, is a rather unreliable one, tending to contradict himself many times. For example, at the very beginning of chapter one, he states that “Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby...that temporarily closed out [his] interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men”(6). This comes across as odd, as one would think that at the end of the novel Gatsby certainly does not seem to “turn out all right”.

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1387 Words | 6 Pages

The readers would expect that a “great” figure like Gatsby would be surrounded by his friends, colleagues, family, and lover at his final proceeding, but the reality is exactly the opposite. He is forgotten and not admired, and his lifetime finesse which he anxiously displayed through his parties does not seem to be remarkable anymore. Ideally, if Gatsby has truly achieved the American Dream, he should be a personification of someone who is eulogized, revered, and loved even until his last moment. However, this is not the case for Gatsby and this leads the readers to realize how he was not “great” enough to fulfill his American Dream. Interestingly though, Gatsby does not cease his chase after American Dream.

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1378 Words | 6 Pages

Similarly to Nick’s speculation of New York City, he believes there is another untold, darkened secret of Gatsby. This changes the perspective of Nick and the novel into prioritizing whether or not the mystery behind Gatsby’s character is theory or reality. The current perspective of the novel initially portrays Gatsby as a conflicting character to Nick, which results in Nick being judgemental towards even the slightest disparity of Gatsby’s actions. Now that Nick is able to identify variation within Gatsby’s character, he is open to recognize the deviating characteristics of

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1726 Words | 7 Pages

Initially, “The Great Gatsby” can be seen as a painfully typical love story. As much as it is pretentious and unfortunate, it is a love story nonetheless. What makes it different than the average romantic novel is the symbolism and meaning that lays underneath the expensive lives of Nick Careaway and his upstart friends. The themes of “The Great Gatsby” are diverse and incoherently complex. The variety of motives and characteristics make reading the novel a sincerely unique experience, since the story and its’ morals will usually be what the readers makes them out to be in the end.

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951 Words | 4 Pages

In the last passage of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the reader gains insight into Gatsby’s life through the reflections of Nick Carraway. These reflections provide a summary of Gatsby’s life and also parallel the main themes in the novel. Through Fitzgerald’s use of diction and descriptions, he criticizes the American dream for transformation of new world America from an untainted frontier to a corrupted industrialized society. In the novel, Fitzgerald never mentions the phase “American Dream,” however the idea is significant to the story.

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1218 Words | 5 Pages

The Great Gatsby Literary Analysis “They were careless people…” says Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. In a story depicting the 1920s during a time of prosperity, growth, and the emergence of the America as a major global power, this statement may seem to be contrary. But in reality, Nick Carraway’s description of his friends and the people he knew, was not only true, but is an indication of those who were striving for the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests that the American Dream is foolish, the people who pursue it are immoral and reckless, and this pursuit is futile. First, F. Scott Fitzgerald proposes that the American dream is foolish.

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Jay Gatsby, one of the main characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is a wealthy man with dubious sources of money; Gatsby is renowned in New York due to the lavish parties he holds every friday in his mansion. These are spectacles that fully embody the wealth and glamour of the roaring twenties, and are narrated through the eyes of another character Nick Carraway, an ambitious 29 year old man that recently moved back to a corrupt new york in a cramped cottage next to Gatsby’s palace. After admiring the careless behaviour of the parties from a distance, Nick gets a personal invitation to Gatsby’s next party, he promptly becomes infatuated by the extravagant and frivolous lifestyle the parties portray, along with the superficial

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