Gatsby Mystery
The Mystery Underlying the Great Gatsby

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald released The Great Gatsby to instant and permeating acclaim. The novel, often cited as being among the greatest American novels, is credited as such for capturing with startling emotion the sociocultural vagaries of high society in the early 20th century. The Great Gatsby is particularly compelling for the mystery which unfolds around its title character. Inexplicably wealthy, seemingly detached from the affairs of his neighbors and yet obsessed with feeding their impressions of him, Jay Gatsby is symbolic of the contradiction of American social mobility. Even as he becomes wealthy beyond the fantasies of most men, his low birth relegates him as an outsider. The mystery that pervades his story is powered by his own need to sublimate this low birth under displays of mirthless party-throwing and material excess.

Perhaps more than any other concept couched in Fitzgerald's novel, that….

The rapid connection of plot strands which brought into physical incidence the numerous affairs and hostilities that resolved, however bleakly, the novel's various impasses, make somewhat absurd an otherwise brilliantly grounded work. And yet, Fitzgerald has been characterized by his critics as demonstrating the utmost of disclipline with Gatsby for creating a work so fraught with symbolism and yet relayed in so direct and palatable a fashion. As Eble (1964) would observe, "Fitzgerald's clear, regular hand imposes its own sense of order throughout the text. For all revisions, the script goes about its business with a straightness of line, a regularity of letter that approaches formal elegance. " (Eble, 1) To this end, the dramatic events leading to the resolution of the text make this chaotic denouement a tolerable linear progression and an outcome consistent with the general thrust of the text.
To this end, the novel casts an emotive….

Uprooted from their native "bored, swollen, sprawling towns beyond the Ohio" to Paris or, closer to home, Long Island, they at first reveled in the freedom that supporting their lives on the strength of their own ambitions entailed. Gatsby's ambition was love. But when that love is finally and conclusively denied, nothing is left to take its place. The last support buckles.
hat remains after the collapse, Nick realizes, is a twilight world populated only by brute material forms without the spiritual content necessary to make them truly "real." This is the true face of the Lost Generation: no longer hoping for a message of salvation that never arrives, and "perhaps" no longer even caring. Nick imagines Gatsby shivering at the prospect of spending the rest of his life among the other "poor ghosts," drifting -- "fortuitously" or otherwise -- from dream to dream, party to party, girl to girl,….

Gatsby
Jazz Age Disillusionment in the Great Gatsby

The 1920s saw the United States undergo one of its most dramatic periods of cultural and social evolution in its young history to that point. ith the end of hostilities in orld ar I and the focus on its own internal growth now taking center stage, the emergence of a distinctly American kind of wealth began to achieve prominence. Even as this measure of wealth would become yet more prominent in America, the disillusionment thereby associated would also become ever greater a presence. So is this well-demonstrated in the primary characters populated F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 Jazz Age masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Using the occasionally objective Nick as a lens, Fitzgerald views the characters of Tom, Daisy and Gatsby himself with an unflinching criticism that seems to scold America for its burgeoning materialism.

Among them, Tom is perhaps the most unflinchingly archetypal character in the….

Fitzgerald focuses much like a scriptwriter on her body parts to set the sensual stage. Her throat is "full if aching, grieving beauty told only of her unexpected joy" (Fitzgerald 90). There is such passion evoked through these words that it is difficult not feel ecstasy and agony at the same time and understand Gatsby obsession with her. To emphasize her superior nature, her face is described as bored and haughty. She identifies with other woman of her class such as the actress they meet who is also put on a pedestal of being "a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman" (Fitzgerald 106). The interesting function of Daisy's character is to fuel the fire of Gatsby's obsession but to also complete his journey of attaining the American Dream found within attaining social status. He creates her as he is focused on their mutual past and winning her attention….

Gatsby and Six
Passing for white -- Both a white and a black man can 'pass'

The Great Gatsby, only six degrees and six decades separate from ill Smith's Paul

Perhaps, if F. Scott Fitzgerald were to write his famous The Great Gatsby today, Gatsby would be a Black man. Gatsby, much like the protagonist of the film "Six Degrees of Separation," the cinematic version of John Guare's play of the same name, is 'passing' for a member of the Long Island Hamptons aristocracy, just as the young Black hustler Paul as depicted by ill Smith is passing for the son of Sidney Poiter. By definition Paul is passing as a son of the new Black aristocracy of talent, prep schools, and poise, just as Gatsby is passing a member of a wealthy and class bound society where image and parentage and where one went to school means everything.

In their act of 'passing,'….

Gatsby
Marx and the Great Gatsby

In the 1920s, the United States was enjoyed a new and unprecedented period of industriousness and growth. ithin this period, its advancement as a production society would seen one of its most torrid phases of expansion. But just as this time would prove the economic merits of capitalism, it would begin to demonstrate the considerable dangers that also accompany this system. This dichotomy is captured best in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. In the title character and his surrounding culture, we are given a compelling critique of the materialism and inequality which are the ultimate ends of capitalist greed. Approaching the text through the lens of social theorist Karl Marx, one comes face-to-face with the culturally, socially and ethically destructive mores of unrestrained capitalism.

e initiate the discussion with a perspective offered by Marx. The innovator of Communism warned that in any production-based society,….

Jay Gatsby is the central, enigmatic focus of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. hen the reader first meets Gatsby, it is through the description of Nick Carraway, who notes that his neighbor of the less fashionable (i.e. 'new money') area of est Egg, Long Island has purchased a palatial mansion. Every weekend, people in motor cars come to Gatsby's parties; every Monday, the staff cleans up the debris. No luxury is too great for Gatsby: "every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York… There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb" (Fitzgerald 3). The source of Gatsby's wealth is vague and gradually it emerges that he made his fortune as a bootlegger.
Gatsby tries to affect a posture….

Great Gatsby -- a Theoretical Analysis
The Great Gatsby is one of the legendary novels written in the history of American literature. The novel intends to shed light on the failure of American dream that poor can attain whatever he wants and emphasizes on the hardships presented by the strong forces of social segregation. In order to understand this novel, there are various theories which tend to be helpful in order to understand various angles of this novel. Some of these theories are Freud's psychoanalytical theory, Marxist theory and Feminist theory. Each theory presents a different lens of looking at the same story and presents an ideology ruled by social factors and individual desires.

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is the lead character and the story surrounds around him. He is a young chap from Minnesota who later on moves to New York. The main purpose of moving here in 1922….

Great Gatsby
Reading the highly-acclaimed novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, is an excellent way in which to learn about New York City and about America in the 1920s through literature. Certainly there are scenes, characters and quotes that are exaggerated and enhanced beyond what the real world at that time represented -- which is the license that writers of fiction are afforded. But the big picture of The Great Gatsby -- beyond the star-crossed love theme between Gatsby and Daisy -- is for the most part a portrayal of a slice of Americana out of what was called "The Roaring Twenties" and the "Jazz Age," and this paper references examples and themes from Fitzgerald's novel.

The Fading of the American Dream

The novel shows that money has corrupted key characters, notably Gatsby. And the sudden wealth that led to the corruption of values and morals happened after orld ar I….

Great Gatsby: A Novel of Reinvention
"The 1920s were characterized by conservatism, affluence, and cultural frivolity, yet it was also a time of social economic and political change. The first modern decade in American history paved the way for the reforms of the 1930s. American popular culture began to reflect an urban, industrial, consumer oriented society" (Ingui, 89). The strong economic boom following the Great ar gave birth to a time known as "The Roaring 20's. This was a prosperous era, characterized largely by wealth and change. "President Calvin Coolidge declared that the business of America was business. In many ways, his statement defined the 1920s. Amid all the tensions, an unprecedented flood of new consumer items entered the marketplace, and progressive calls for government regulation were rejected in favor of a revival of the old free enterprise individualism" (Hermansen). This summarized statement of the decade best encapsulates the conditions….

identity of the self usually involves success. That success may include cars, luxury items, mansions, beautiful kids, and a beautiful spouse. It varies from person to person. Some people view success through self-actualization as well, having the ability to harness one's potentials and talents and becoming something more than what they thought possible. In The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald and The Talented Mr. Ripley by Highsmith, men attempt to find success through illegal means in order to fulfill their need of self-actualization and material gain. To them, success and self-actualization came from being wealthy and living in extravagance, not from being uniquely talented or philanthropic.
Only Gatsby, the man who gives is name to this book, was exempt from my reaction= Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened….

Fitzgerald wrote his novel during the Roaring 1920s, but his book seems uniquely relevant to our own times. The Roaring 1920s was coming to a rapid slow-down of material prosperity, and questions of who was a 'real' American arose as social mobility had introduced individuals of new races and ethnicities into higher American society. Fitzgerald suggests that it is important to question what lies beneath the veneer of American society and good breeding. He demanded his readers also carefully examine the assumption we can all pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and whether the material goals we strive for will really bring fulfillment at all.

orks Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Hayes Barton Press, 2007.

Mellard, James. "Counterpoint as Technique in "The Great Gatsby." The English Journal.

55. 7. (Oct., 1966): 853-859.

Millet, Frederick. "The Great Gatsby: Analysis." Michigan State University. 2004.

October 12, 2008. https://www.msu.edu/~millettf/gatsby.html

Pearson, Roger L. "Gatsby: False Prophet….

In fact, other than her beauty and her high class status, it is hard to see why Gatsby loves her so much. But Daisy's materialism, for Gatsby, is not a negative quality. "Her voice is full of money," he says (94). This indicates that Gatsby sees Daisy's obsession with wealth as a good thing, a kind of a way to egg him on to make something of his life. Daisy is Nick Caraway's second cousin but unlike Nick, she is obsessed with money to the point that she ignores human feelings. hen Gatsby left to go to war, she ended their relationship. Tom Buchanan at the time was much more financially stable than Gatsby, and even though Tom strikes almost everyone who comes in contact with him as a rich, superficial person, Daisy loved Tom's money.
Daisy has aspirations to be loved and appreciated, of course, but between love and….

2. Discuss the green light in The Great Gatsby and the rain in A Farewell to Arms as symbols of fertility and death.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the green light represents hope, renewal, and (since Gatsby associates the green light with Daisy) Gatsby's desire for her, as well as (in Gatsby's mind) Daisy's fecundity and fertility. In nature, green is the color of life: trees, grass, and other living things. As such, the green light symbolizes Gatsby's own hopes and wishes for the future, which revolve around Daisy. Since Gatsby associates the green light so much with Daisy, it also represents for him a sort of beacon leading him toward her.

Although within The Great Gatsby the green light symbolizes hope, life, fecundity, and fertility, in Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, rain, which occurs often, symbolizes the opposite: impermanence, dissolution, and death, thus foreshadowing Frederic and….

Yes, there are many essay topics in literature that can be debated from opposing viewpoints. Some examples include:

1. The role of fate vs. free will in Shakespeare's plays
2. The moral ambiguity of the protagonist in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
3. The portrayal of gender and sexuality in Virginia Woolf's works
4. The effectiveness of satire in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"
5. The value of studying classic literature vs. contemporary literature

These topics can lead to interesting and thought-provoking debates, as they allow for different interpretations and perspectives on the themes and messages presented in literary works.
6. The impact of historical context on....

Unit Lesson Essay Topic Ideas

History

The Causes and Consequences of the American Civil War: Analyze the complex factors that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War and explore its far-reaching social, political, and economic consequences.
The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on European Society: Examine the technological, economic, and social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, considering its effects on workers, urbanization, and the balance of power.
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire: Investigate the reasons for the rise and eventual decline of the Roman Empire, analyzing its political, social, military, and economic strengths and....

Research-Based Essay Books

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
"In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" by Nathaniel Philbrick
"Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America" by Beth Macy

These books provide in-depth, well-researched accounts of historical events, scientific discoveries, and societal issues. They rely on extensive interviews, archival research, and scientific data to support their arguments and conclusions.

Persuasive Essay Books

"How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
"The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg

These books aim to persuade readers....

Here is a possible thesis statement about "The Great Gatsby":

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby," the pursuit of the American Dream ultimately leads to downfall and disillusionment for the characters, revealing the emptiness and corruption at the heart of the 1920s Jazz Age society.
Here is a possible thesis statement about "The Great Gatsby":

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby," the pursuit of the American Dream ultimately leads to downfall and disillusionment for the characters, revealing the emptiness and corruption at the heart of the 1920s Jazz Age society. By examining the characters' relentless pursuit of wealth,....