Great Gatsby

Great Gatsby

The novel is very influential in modern American literature as a result of this; it is assigned for classroom work since it has literary together with historical relevance in the contemporary issues affecting the American society. The novel is related to the American Dreams, which states that everyone has equal opportunity regardless of their skin color or their race. The novel teaches that one was maybe coming from a humble background and work hard in education and become successful in their life, and this opportunity is available for everyone. The American declaration after independence was ” we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, their creator endows them with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ” (Älfvåg, 80).

In the “Great Gatsby ” the author addresses the dream by calling it “pursuit of happiness ” by this, he meant the dream could not be achieved. The idea of attaining the goal remains a consumerist ideology; the issue of ” pursuit of happiness ” as well as liberty is a choice at a personal level, which is like gambling or when a person has an opportunity to make between what they want to buy when they have money. The novel was written in a period where people were prohibited from taking alcohol, and there was a division of classes, some people were in the upper level, and others were in the lower class.

Two notable characters are Tom Buchanan, who is a representative of old cash as well as George, who is a poor man who owns a garage and fixes Tom’s car. Myrtle, together with Gatsby, are used for illustration of social mobility and class challenges. Myrtle is a character who was trying to climb from a lower class to the upper level, so what he does, he decides to associate with Tom. Gatsby, on the other hand, masks on his past, and he can fix himself in the upper class, by this, he is used to representing America’s history and the allegory of their dream (Churchwell, 180). He can be described as a true American Citizen who is determined, innovative, ambitious, and cunning. Gatsby is used to representing the American Dream embodiment when he is in a relationship with Daisy, but his main interest is material gain. Out of the desire to be wealthy, he joins a thief called Meyer, and the thief teaches him the easiest way to get illegal money by selling to the people illegal alcohol as well as manipulation of bonds from the stock market. Gatsby’s dream is to be productive and be accepted by the people of high class, but at last, the American Dream remains an illusion as well as social mobility since it could not be easily achieved as it seemed.

Nick is the narrator of the story, but he doesn’t believe the leaders even though he doesn’t judge them since he says “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened my many curious nature to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bones ”. Fitzgerald uses Nick like a narrative device –” the device of having events observed by a central consciousness … a character who stands somewhat apart from the action and whose vision frames it for the reader ”  (Spirovska, 27).  The views of readers and that of literary criticism puts it that Nick cannot be ” apart from the action.” Still, he is just caught in a dilemma posed by Gatsby, and he knows this clearly since he says ” I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life ”.

Daisy makes Gatsby have a great desire to acquire power and materials. Daisy is materialistic, and the men around her who are Tom and Gatsby try to win her, and according to them, anyone who could win her would have achieved greatness. Daisy is a symbol of inspiration for Gatsby and his self-delusion towards his acceptance of the class of wealth. The author talks of Daisy’s redemption and gives a summary of her character when looking at the way Nick views her ” an emptiness that we see curdling into the viciousness of a monstrous moral indifference as the story unfolds … communicated with a force of imagery so rate in modern American writing, that it is almost astonishing that he is often credited with giving in to those very qualities which The Great Gatsby so effectively excoriates ”.

The author values Daisy not because she is a woman and a source of romance, but as one of the people who appreciate the dream and possess it. As the days went by, her value became greater that she thought the time she was marrying Tom, and Tom, one of the representatives of authentic aristocratic of upper-class people. ” …the man is not attracted by the fortune in itself …so much as the position at the peak of social hierarchy, and the girl becomes the symbol of that position, the incarnation of its mysterious power ” (Gu, 45).  Daisy is used as a symbol of Gatsby’s dream, and it’s created by the journey he takes to obtain his aristocratic image and status. He tries to break the barrier that is there between the wall that hinders him from being productive and the reality by creating disturbances.

New York is set in a way that separates the upper-class people from the low-class people. The “Great Gatsby ” is on the long Island, and Buchanan’s estate is situated at the East Egg. Gatsby’s, at last, acquires a mansion at West Egg. The reader is made to experience the situation in New York in the 1920s, Fitzgerald defines the town as “Great Neck provided the setting and background material for Fitzgerald’s new angle. It was at the time a favored residence for show –business figures and promoters … an excellent place for parties ”.  The people who lived in these areas were classified as social elite and the represented social climbers, and they used to imitate aristocracy. The author doesn’t describe the character of individuals, but he lets the reader judge their integrity by the way they react to a particular situation. Even the setting of the book helps the reader to construct their perspective towards the character and the devastating the Long Island of ashes valley.  The valley of ashes connects the people of high class to New York since it presents to them the reality of poverty.

In the time of the novel setting, which is the 1920s was the period of the industrial revolution, the novel gives the history of America, which includes its economic status, racial status, as well as social conflicts that existed in New York. When the reader reads the novel, he can understand the financial situation of the State together with its economic State.  The economic status of the State had gone down, and it improved with the coming of the stock market, and the economy grew very fast. The novel tells of the alcohol banning, the emerging of the Jazz age, racial connotations, the Great War, and all these activities led to the destabilization of the economy. The novel is greatly influenced by the activities like racialism, social as well as financial dynamics of those times.  In times of economic prosperity, some citizens got opportunities to gain finances and social mobility. The time the economy was shooting, it created disadvantages to the people who had invested in monopoly industries since they never got maximum profit from what they were selling if at all the Americans decided to invest in the same field.

The novel is set in a temporal aspect, and the author knows why he says, ” tried to find the visible act that revealed the moral quality inherent in a particular moment. He was haunted by time as if he wrote in a room full of clocks calendars ”.There was a repeated rise and fall of the Americans Economy, and this affected families and individuals in particular, and people concentrated on material gain, thus disregarding others. The author says, ” The change went deep into the texture of American society and deep into the feelings of Americans as individuals ‘’ (Hill et al., 32). The leaders taught people achievement of the dream, but they were blind to the reality of the thought, ethical resource as well as the effort that needs to be applied so that to make the dream a reality.

Everyone in the novel represents a specific ethical decadency as well as social decadency. Myrtle is an immoral woman who is adulterous, and she is a concubine to Tom so that she can be associated with the people of high class. She uses her body together with her sexuality as tools to make sure she gets what she wants. Through immorality she can achieve social mobility as well as class distinction. Tom Buchanan uses his ancestry blue blood to manipulate women to have affairs with him. He uses this to convince Daisy to stick by his side after she realizes of his other relationships with other women so that he could still have his new status preserved.  This clearly shows all the people could do to gain the social status of high-class people.

Wasp’s character is used to represent Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, who had a dialogue of improving the economy.  According to the Novel, religion is present to justify capitalists in the market of the United States, and this makes the rich people make the blue-collar citizen overwork for them, and they misuse them. The Americans had an interest in the way people viewed them, and they struggled to remain in the aristocratic class as well as elite culture. All the citizens wanted was to accumulate dollars since property ownership ware referred to as wealth. Wealth was not on property ownership “but rather in dollar per year as income ” (Richmond et al., 220).

There is a competition between the bourgeoisie and WASPs to know who owned a lot of property as well as the possessions since WAPs lacked roots of nouveau riche, and this makes Gatsby hold extravagant parties. The only people who attend the party are friends and relatives; they do it privately to avoid displaying their wealth. Bewley says, “The Great Gatsby embodied a criticism of the American experience –not of manners but a basic historical attitude to life ” (Pet, 91). The novel doesn’t give America the credit of having a lot of wealth, but it criticizes what they do to other states to gain what they want to wish. America manipulates other countries to maintain their economic status so that they can dominate other nations, and they take constant evolution. They try to reconstruct their State so that they will remain in their wealth state. The citizens in America were not interested in making the dream a reality. Still, they were interested in getting their freedom, ‘fresh start,’ and social mobility only the pursuit who were involved in meeting the dream.

In conclusion, the novel is about the Dream in America that was never to be real. People were interested in self-gain and disregarded humanity. The novel tells of the strategies America uses to gain wealth at the expense of other nations. The people in the novel uses all means to gain wealth, including immorality, just to be associated with people who are high status. The same way the characters use illegal methods to gain properties is the same America has a state uses unlawful means to maintain their status.

Work cited

Älfvåg, Hugo. “The Dream: A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Conceptualization of the American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” (2020) 67-93.

Churchwell, Sarah. “In Search of Bunny Burgess, or Down the Rabbit Hole: Anecdotes, Secret Histories, and The Great Gatsby.” The Cambridge Quarterly 46.2 (2017): 140-161.

Gu, Jia. “Nick: An Unreliable Narrator in The Great Gatsby.” 2016 5th International Conference on Social Science, Education, and Humanities Research. Atlantis Press, 2016 42-67.

Hill, Crag, and Victor Malo-Juvera, eds. Critical approaches to teaching the high school novel: Reinterpreting canonical literature. Vol. 32. Routledge, 2018.

Pet, Sue Ringler. “Powerful Influence and Absurd Neglect.” Using Tension as a Resource: New Visions in Teaching the English Language Arts Methods Class (2019): 91.

Pet, Sue Ringler. “Powerful Influence and Absurd Neglect.” Using Tension as a Resource: New Visions in Teaching the English Language Arts Methods Class (2019): 91.

READING, TOWARDS A. SOMATO-POETICS OF. “CHAPTER NINE SYN-AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: TOWARDS A SOMATO-POETICS OF READING ZUZANNA KOZŁOWSKA.” Literature, Performance, and Somaesthetics: Studies in Agency and Embodiment (2017): 171.

Richmond, Hallie Smith, and April Salerno. “Helping High School Readers Interpret Challenging Texts Using Lenses from Literary Theory.” Poetry and Pedagogy across the Lifespan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018. 211-235.

Spirovska, Elena. “Reader-Response Theory and Approach: Application, Values, and Significance for Students in Literature Courses.” SEEU Review 14.1 (2019): 20-35.