... , all wars fought, all faith in man shaken", what's more, he depicted the postwar unprecedented boom of material revelry and at the same time presented the disappointment of the postwar generation for America, the concern for the loss of conventional values and ideals, and the regret for the disillusionment of American Dream.The Great Gatsby is well-known as the most mature work of Fitzgerald, whether in thought or in writing techniques ... symbols and meanings. Hence symbolism in fiction aims to present the hidden things and thoughts under phenomena. Fitzgerald himself had the experienc...

• Word Count: 1437
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The central conflict in "The Great Gatsby," (announced by Nick in the fourth paragraph of the book), is the conflict between Gatsby's dream and the reality that "the foul dust which floats in the wake of his dreams." Gatsby, Nick tells us, "turned out all right in the end"; the dreamer remains as pure, as inviolable, at bottom, as his dream of a greatness, an attainment "commensurate to man's capacity for ... ." What does not turn out all right at the end is of course the reality: Gatsby is slain, the enchanted universe is exposed as a world of wholesale corruption and predatory violence, and...

• Word Count: 664
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... chase of their self interested pursuits, where the upper class dominate the lower, and where cruel, duplicitous and unfeeling men like Tom, get the love of beautiful women that are longed for by the nice guys of the world, dreamers like Gatsby. Again about Nick's analogy on symbols taking the interpretation of what individuals give them, we see in the last scenes of The Great Gatsby that Wilson, Myrtle's husband believed that ... Dr T.J Eckleburg's eyes is the ever watching eyes of God. Wilson spent the whole night telling Michaelis about Myrtle's love affair and how he ... ...

• Word Count: 7760
• Approx Pages: 31
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The American dream is a tacit promise given to all citizens in this country, which states that regardless of social class, any individual can aspire to new heights based upon the ideology of meritocracy. The American dream is a "recurring theme in American literature"(Pearson) and in American society. However, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed novel, presents the American dream as an illusion which can never be achieved, and according to recent events in America, Fitzgerald is evidently correct. The personification of Daisy as the American Dream, the issue of meritoc...

• Word Count: 1239
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... man, just as it was embodied in Fitzgerald's own family by his grandfather. The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. The characters are Midwesterners who have come East in pursuit of this new dream of ... been channelled into the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, but fundamentally empty form of success. How is this developed? In the chapter-by-chapter analysis, especially in the Notes, The Fitzgerald's critique of the ...

• Word Count: 798
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate