gatlove Money, Love, and Aspiration in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby :: Great Gatsby Essays

Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby How do the members of such a rootless, mobile, indifferent society acquire a genius of who they are? Most of them dont. The Great Gatsby presents large numbers of them as comic, discorporate names of guests at dinner parties the Chromes, the Backhyssons, and the Dennickers. Some, of course, have some measure of fame, plainly even Jordan Bakers reputation does not do much for her other than channel her entre to more parties. A very few, such as Gatsby, protrude out by their wealth his hospitality secures him a hold on small-army peoples memories, moreover Fitzgerald is quick to point up the emptiness of this, ... In this connection, Fitzgeralds insistence on Gatsby as a man who sprang from his own Platonic conception of himself is important. Conceiving ones self would seem to be a final boldness of rootlessness. And it has other consequences for lamb, money, and aspirations as well. When ones sense of self is selfcreated, when one is present at ones own creation, so to speak, one is in a paradoxical position. i knows everything about oneself that can be known, and yet the significance of such intimacy is unclear, for no outside contexts exist to create meaning. The result is that a self-created man turns to the departed, for he can know that. It is an inescapable context. For Gatsby and for the novel, the past is crucial. His sense of the past as something that he not only knows but also thinks he can control sets Gatsby apart from chip and gives him mythical, larger-than-life dimensions. When he tells Nick that of course the past can be repeated or that Toms love for Daisy was just personal, he may be compensating for his inability to recapture Daisy but he must believe these things because the post-war world in which he, Gatsby, lives is meaningless and well-nigh wholly loveless. A glance at the relationships in The Great Gatsby proves this latter(prenominal) point. Daisy and Toms marriage has gon e dead they must cover their dissatisfactions with the distractions of the idle rich. myrtle and Tom are using one another Myrtle hates George, who is alike dull to understand her the McKees exist in frivolous and empty triviality. regular(a) Nick seems unsure about his feelings for the tennis girl back in the Midwest. ...