In The Hope of Love: The Great Gatsby
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nowadays, it is fashionable to criticize cinema for killing the desire to read books in people. Let us disagree because sometimes it is famous films that help us discover new books. In the case in point, we are talking about the novel The Great Gatsby.
The author of The Great Gatsby is Francis Scott Fitzgerald. During the life of the author, the novel was not very popular - the first reviews were far from positive. And only in the second half of the 50s, his work received a second life. Now, contemporaries are finding more and more new meanings in The Great Gatsby that were not noticeable before.
The scene of the story is laid in 1922, in the period of the decomposition of morality, cheap alcohol, and fashionable jazz. The author himself said the following about the work: “My novel is about shattering illusions that give the world such brilliance that having experienced this magic, a person becomes indifferent to the notion of true and false.”
Fitzgerald like nobody else managed to express the very spirit of his era called “the Jazz Age.” In his work, there is a combination of fragile poetic beauty, brokenness, inner emptiness, thirst for life and pleasure, and, as a result of all this, godlessness and immorality. The novel perfectly expresses the tragedy of the era where luxury and fun are on the surface, but under them, there are only despair and death.
The protagonist of the novel, Jay Gatsby, is a man of mystery. People know everything and nothing about him at the same time. A variety of gossip is spread: “he killed a man,” “he studied at Oxford,” “he fought the war,” “he is a cousin of the devil.” But everyone knows only one thing for sure: Gatsby is fabulously wealthy. He has luxurious apartments where hundreds of people gather, have fun, and drink his champagne. Jay Gatsby is an amazing and composite character which, as a result, develops into the image of an ideal man. His goal is to climb up the social ladder of well-being and become a kind of a legend. He is driven by a dream. The dream he had cherished for many years. He was sure that he would return the past, although life proved to him the opposite over and over again. His dream is a charming young woman named Daisy: a dream and reality.
Daisy is the only love of the Great Gatsby. She is a wonderful beauty from the world of the rich, a kind of a young woman looking for older men who is extremely wealthy and successful. However, she is not just a beautiful dummy - she is a plant that grows only on gold fertilizer. Wealth grew into her life so firmly that it made her a completely different person. In fact, she is a big child who was not taught any mercy, love, and responsibility for her actions. She lives from entertainment to entertainment, forgetting the main purpose of life.
Compared to other characters of the book, Jay Gatsby is really great. Great by his faithfulness, the power of love, generosity, and sacrifice. On the other hand, Fitzgerald fills the title of the novel with irony. It would seem that Jay Gatsby brought the Great American Dream to life like no one else. He made a fortune and achieved power, but neither money nor power made him happy. He didn’t need all these riches without his beloved woman. All that he sought was grinded down into dust, turned into the wind on the empty roads of life. Here is the true tragedy of Gatsby.
The novel makes a positive impression and can be truly called extremely popular. The author was able to show how cruel and indifferent people are to everything except their own pleasure and profit. And only a few people are able to preserve real feelings in this whirlpool of money and hypocrisy because of which many are doomed to premature death.
Literary works about love can teach us a lot. They help understand your own experiences, finding a reflection in the plot of literary masterpieces. Read the wonderful book The Great Gatsby, and you will certainly find something useful for yourself.