Metaphors Great Gatsby
Metaphors - Great Gatsby“That’s the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
-1924
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald fingered these thoughts into his typewriter one morning in 1924, upon writing his greatest novel and one of the most acclaimed literary works of all time, The Great Gatsby. The brilliant final draft of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby’s quest for Daisy Buchanan, examines and critiques Gatsby’s particular vision of the 1920’s American Dream. Written in 1925, the novel serves as a bridge between World War I and the Great Depression of the early 1930’s. Although Fitzgerald was an avid participant in the stereotypical “Roaring Twenties” lifestyle of wild partying and bootleg liquor, he was also an astute critic of his time period. The Great Gatsby certainly serves more to detail society’s failure to fulfill its potential than it does to glamorize Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age.”
Mathew J. Bruccoli of The University of South Carolina argues, “The Great Gatsby does not proclaim the nobility of the human spirit: it is not politically correct; it does not reveal how to solve the problems of life; it delivers no fashionable or comforting messages. It is just a masterpiece” (vii). This fictional masterpiece is just that, fiction. This is important to the reader’s understanding of the history that it tells, because it is not entirely true. Fitzgerald’s social insight in The Great Gatsby focuses on a select group: privileged young people between the ages of 20 and 30. In doing so, Fitzgerald provides a vision of the “youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves” (157). He describes Daisy as “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” (157).
Fitzgerald knowingly describes only part of the social class system. A small, yet powerful class of wealthy Republican men and women, well dressed and obsessed with money, power, and gossip. This story has no room for the poor and unfortunate souls who suffer from “normalcy” and real life problems, not covered by the large security blanket of wealth. Unlike the people accustomed to the mood and manners of the so-called “Jazz Age,” who were caught in “a ten year binge during which everybody got rich and danced the Charleston in speakeasies while drinking bootleg hooch” (x). This so-called “American Dream” of wealth and happiness was not shared by all in the 1920’s. Many upper-class whites of the time were set on closing borders to immigrants, for fear of becoming a minority themselves. The issue of racism was still very apparent in this time period. Wealthy men like Tom Buchanan preached, “Civilization is going to pieces” (17). “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be- will be utterly submerged. It’s all...
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