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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1924 portrays the young and the wealthy enduring city life and superficial quarrels. Throughout Fitzgerald’s array of accurate descriptions of the haughty upper class and the depressing realizations of the down-and-out forgotten society, stand his interpretations of how reality was truly defined in the 1920s. There are 5 main characters in this novel starting with the protagonist, Nick Carraway who narrates the story from his perspective. Daisy, Nick’s cousin is married to a wealthy man named Tom Buchanan and has a friend named Jordan who is casually dating Nick. Fitzgerald utilizes symbolism through green colored light, the valley of ashes, and Gatsby’s yellow car to portray the complete and utter moral destruction of the 1920s.In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald portrays America’s obsession with financial aspirations and dreams through the use of green light. Frequently, Gatsby, a fellow West-Egger such as Nick appears to be a successful man. He is young and resilient, resides in a mansion, has a sports car, and butlers and maids to answer his every beck and call. He hosts parties almost every weekend and keenly depicts a man that has it all, however this is only the perception of the people around him. As Fitzgerald dives deeper and deeper into the motives of this man, the reader gets a clear view of Gatsby’s true intentions; he is in love with a married woman named Daisy, a fling from his past. Although she has moved on, he has not. In fact, the sole purpose of purchasing his mansion was to be closer to Daisy in hopes of just seeing her. After a quick rekindling of the fire, Daisy eventually goes back to Tom and leaves Gatsby’s heart in shambles. At the end of the novel, Nick speculates that “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us”(189) as if this was Gatsby’s only motivational force.