Why Gatsby isn’t so Great The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a classic American novel that encompasses important themes such as corruption, love, lust, and the American Dream. These themes, as well as others in the novel, are topics that seem to recur throughout history, especially during the early to mid twentieth century. I believe that although Fitzgerald had an unnatural faculty for writing profound stories, the ideas and characters in The Great Gatsby were relatively common and not very creative. A mythological analysis of this piece of literature will allow for a greater understanding of these commonly used themes as well as a deeper look into a few of the common symbols used in the book. Most characters in The Great Gatsby fit into an archetype of some sort. For example, Daisy and Myrtle might be described as the temptresses of the novel. They …show more content…
This idea figures that the unholy wealth accumulated by Gatsby through his “bootlegger” (Fitzgerald 141) ways and his association with Meyer Wolfshiem, was the direct cause of his unfortunate murder. As the narrator explained, part of the reason why his death was so miserable was due to the fact that out of the thousands of people who had attended his parties, not one came to his funeral. Although this idea holds true for Gatsby, the outcome for other unrighteous characters conflicts with this idea. Wolfshiem was another one of these characters and he had even worse methods of making his millions, yet the last mention of his name in the book is when he collects all of Gatsby’s remaining possessions from his house. Whether he suffers from all his wrong doings after the conclusion of the book is left to the imagination of the reader, but it appears that Wolfshiem never faces the consequences of his actions as Gatsby