F.S.Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

F. S. FITZGERALD

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby was written in 1925 and is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest twentieth – century novels.
The author shows us the glamour and the moral ugliness of the so-called ´roaring´ 20s by means of Nick Carraway, the narrator.
Nick´s neighbour, the name sake of the book, Jay Gatsby, takes up with Nick only because he wants to exploit him as a conciliator to join connection with Daisy.
Daisy is Jay´s early, but changeless love, by chance Nick´s cousin. But she has been married with Tom Buchanan – they both belong to the society of the very rich, for whitch is typical lavish, aimless and shallow browsing through the life.
But Jay is a person with dubious stock, so to win back the love of Daisy he has to become a member of the high society. He gains the wealth as a bootlegger.
He meets Daisy when he is rich and relatively famous. Daisy confesses she has never forgotten their early love-affair, but she decides to contimue to live with her husband in the invulnerable circle of the rich, even though knows her husband has a mistress – Myrtle.
Gatsby remains alone and he is finally kiled by the husband of Myrtle. The irony is that the offender of a car accident, which causes Myrtle´s death, is not Gatsby, but Daisy.
Gatsby symbolizes the American belief that money can buy love and happiness. But the book also describes the failure of the American dream, that their democracy is based on the idea of equality of people. However the truth was that social discrimination and divisions to the slasses still existed, whitch is also proved by Myrtle´s and Gatdby´s attempts to break into the group of their idols.

In my opinion Gatsby is really the most interesting character in this short novel . For me the most elusive, but also the most admired thing is that the only power, whitch pushed Gatsby to work so hard, to achieve all his property, is love – the reason of his life and being.

Others fitzgerald books: Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise