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Theme Of Disillusion In The Great Gatsby

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Compare how Fitzgerald presents dreams and disillusion in two texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald presents dreams and disillusion in a novel that T. S. Eliot welcomed as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James" , The Great Gatsby, as well as, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. Fitzgerald presents these prominent themes through a range of techniques, such as extensive, hyperbolic passages, colour imagery and The American Dream. A. Robert Lee asserts that, "Gatsby offers a quite sumptuous reworking and critique of the American Dream" , yet Fitzgerald presents the theme of the American Dream in contrasting ways in the two novels. Furthermore, The Great Gatsby and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz both explore dreams and magic at different stages of life, which are relative to the current stage of the characters’ lives, Jay Gatsby and John T …show more content…

On the last page of the novel, John quietly says that, “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness” . The metaphor, “a form of chemical madness”, is a description of the sensory overload that John is experiencing whilst visiting the Washington Estate. The fortune that has surrounded John through his upbringing is reflective of the wealth that Fitzgerald himself grew up in. Fitzgerald was born in 1896 to an upper-middle class family in Saint. Paul’s, Minnesota, and at the time of his birth, Fitzgerald’s father was an executive at ‘Proctor & Gamble’. Thus, John’s childhood is fairly reflective of Fitzgerald’s own upbringing in a financially secure family of aristocrats.
Conversely, in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s childhood was the complete opposite of the economic security and wealth that John, Kismine and Jasmine find themselves in. In Chapter Six, Nick provides the reader with some insight into Gatsby’s past

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