great gatsby project
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The Great Gatsby
By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Historical Fiction
Love is sometimes the result of self-deception and denial.
The American Dream is futile and corrupt.
The desire of wealth and power can sometimes replace morality.
No man can step in the same river twice.
Appearances are often deceiving.
Themes
Critical Lens Quotes
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness –
Virginia Woolf
Moving on is simple, it’s what you leave behind that makes it so difficult. – Anonymous
“To thine own self, be true.” - William Shakespeare
(Hamlet)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged man who is enamored by a 12 year old girl that he nicknames Lolita. He will not accept the fact that Lolita will never return his deep passion for her and
that he is nothing more than a pedophile.
“Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indiff erent, twilight eyes--for all the
world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate--while we moan and die.”
Setting:Summer of 1922
Long Island & New York City
Social class is irrevocable. Gatsby and Myrtle try to escape their social classes
and are killed in the process.
Even in a world of wealth and power, there is a social caste system. The
people of West Egg are described as new money. East Egg is home to people born into a long legacy of wealth and power. Despite their differences, the
two groups are exactly the same: corrupt and immoral.
The Valley of Ashes is the wasteland left behind by the rich. The people who call it
home live in extreme poverty. The Valley symbolizes the delusion and futility of the
American Dream. Poor people like the Wilsons must scrape
for a living in a place destroyed and abandoned by
the rich.
Point of View
The Great Gatsby is narrated in the 1st person point of view by Nick Carraway. He is a from the Midwest. He is totally detached from the lavish and corrupt society of the East Coast. He is likable, moral, and highly
reliable. Yet, his most important trait, mentioned very early in the novel, is his refrainment of judgment upon others.
Nick is essentially an outsider looking in. Nick’s refrainment from judgment gives him
the opportunity to become invisible, This POV supports the themes because Nick tells the story as is, uncut and without much side
comments or opinions.
Characterization Protagonist: Jay Gatsby
Jay Gatsby is a wealthy man who resides in West Egg. He is madly in love with Daisy Buchanan, a lost love from his past. He is
a static character because he is introduced as ambitious and lovesick over his beloved Daisy and dies the same way. In addition,
he is a tragic hero because Gatsby is powerful, successful, and incredibly wealthy. He embodies the so-called
American Dream. He has it all, but that isn’t enough, he has to have Daisy.
Antagonist: Gatsby’s Dream
This very dream built him up and ultimately tore him down. It drove his actions and made him successful. Yet, it clouds his judgments and prevents Gatsby from coming to grips with reality. This dreams digs
an early grave for Gatsby.
Daisy Buchanan: the object of Gatsby’s obsession and the driving force to his life of crime. Daisy is cavalier and is in love with money, ease, and material luxury.
Her love for Tom is not true love. She is in love with the lifestyle that Tom provides
for her. She is the epitome of the decadence and immoral values of high
society in the 1920s.
George Wilson: the lifeless and exhausted owner of a run-down garage in The Valley of Ashes. Like Gatsby, he is a dreamer. He represents the futility and deceit of the
American Dream, a dream that is nothing more than an unfeasible nightmare.
Characterization drives a story forward by giving motives and reasons for what characters say or do. There is frequently establishment of
background information about characters, which tells a reader more about them so
readers can identify with them and/or further understand what the characters do.
Fitzgerald purposefully makes the characters overly histrionic and
exaggeratedbecause this helps stress and draw attention to his overall message.
Conflict The major conflict in The Great
Gatsby is the internal battle that Jay Gatsby is fighting. He is obsessed
with winning back the affections of Daisy Buchanan. The conflict is his inability to let go of the past and
the realization that Daisy has moved on with life without him. He cannot and will not accept this and
his stubbornness and hopeless obsession is what leads to his
death.
PlotExposition: Nick moving into the cottage next to
Gatsby’s mansion and meeting the mysterious Jay Gatsby.
Rising Action: Gatsby’s lavish parties and his arrangement of meeting Daisy at Nick’s.
Climax: Gatsby’s long awaited reunion with Daisy and the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom at
the Plaza Hotel.
Falling Action: Daisy’s rejection of Gatsby, Myrtle’s death, and Gatsby’s murder.
Resolution: Gatsby’s funeral, Nick’s last meeting with Tom and Jordan Baker, and Nick moving back
into the honesty and morality of the Midwest
Myrtle Wilson’s affair with Tom Buchanan represents the desire of the have-nots to escape the confines of their social classes. In actuality,
Myrtle does not love Tom. She loves what he can do for her socially. With Tom, she is capable of
embodying a woman of high society rather than her second-class self in reality. Myrtle’s desire for the
glamorous life of aristocracy causes her morality to take a backseat.
After the Plaza Hotel debacle, Nick finds Gatsby standing alone in the darkness outside of the
Buchanan house. He is waiting to save Daisy from a belligerent Tom. However, that doesn’t come to pass and the next day Gatsby decides to take a
swim, ordering his butler to wait for Daisy’s call. Gatsby never gets that call and he has a life-
changing epiphany. Daisy has moved on and the world is no longer idyllic and therefore he must die.
ToneFitzgerald is critical of the Jazz Age and
the American Dream. the American dream was originally about discovery,
individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this dream,
especially on the East Coast.
America became a place where the corrupt finish first, pockets lined with gold, while the dreamers, holding fast to the American Dream, aren’t even in
the race to true success and happiness.
Fitzgerald met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre when, during the Great War, was assigned to a
camp near Montgomery, Alabama. Like Daisy, Zelda was a southern belle, rich, and beautiful. After the
war, Fitzgerald moved to New York to seek his fortune so that he can marry Zelda. However, Zelda
was unwilling live off his small salary. She broke their engagement. Fitzgerald went on to write The
Side of Paradise, which made him an instant celebrity. A week later, Zelda became Mrs. F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
While reading, we take Nick’s retelling of the story as the truth because of
Fitzgerald’s pristine description of him. Yet, Nick’s account of the story is laced with
cynicism, the attitude that Fitzgerald possessed about the 1920s.
Mood
The day that it was pouring rain was the day that Gatsby planned to meet daisy. The
rain creates a melancholic and anxious mood. When the weather clears up, this represents the change in the character’s
feelings. Jay and Daisy are now comfortable and enjoying their memories and being
together.
As tension begins to rise, the weather becomes very hot. The climatic
confrontation between Tom and Gatsby happens on the hottest day of the summer.
“
Literary Techniques Symbolism: Dr. TJ Eckleburg is an old billboard that overlooks The Valley of Ashes. The billboard is almost a Godlike figure in The Great Gatsby as it symbolizes the morality (commonly associated with religion) that is absent in a period in which
evil and corruptions runs rampant.
Foreshadowing: throughout the novel, foreshadowing is prevalent. One example is the constant mentioning of
Gatsby’s pool. This foreshadows a big event that is going to be associated with that same pool. George Wilson ultimately
kills Gatsby in his pool.
Flashback: in some points of the novel, Nick deviates from the present to talk about Gatsby as a penniless young man. Prior to Gatsby’s funeral, Mr. Gatz, Gatsby’s father, tells Nick
of his determined son, evidenced in a strict schedule and specific to-do list he wrote as a young kid. Gatsby was always striving for that American Dream and it only intensified after he meets Daisy and loses her because of the war. Daisy, like
the American Dream, is unattainable and impossible.
Yesterday – The Beatles
Paul McCartney talks of longing for yesterday, where he and his love were together and he was at complete ease.
However, today, she is gone, leaving without giving him a reason and his world
erupts in problems. The shadow of the past is hanging over him. He considers himself to be less than what he was yesterday and he
believes in “yesterday”. This relates to The Great Gatsby because Gatsby was living in the past, where he and Daisy were
together and madly in love. Like McCartney, Gatsby’s world is shrouded in the shadows of the past and he desperately longs for yesterday. He is not the man he used to be. He is now lovesick and
forlorn.
Black Swan In Black Swan, Nina Sayers is a young ballerina
a part of a prestigious New York City dance company. Like Gatsby, she is obsessive and
fixated on an unattainable dream. Her obsession is complete perfection and
flawlessness. She makes a perfectionist look like an underachiever.
Her obsession with striving for perfection is much more profound because of her
schizophrenic condition. She ultimately meets her demise trying to attain that perfection she
so longed for. Unlike Gatsby, she attains her dream. Her last words were:
“Perfect. It was perfect.”