The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was aiming to show the American dream, with all of its grandness and all of its faults, through the life of Nick and Gatsby.  After all the extravagant parties, Nick explains how“an extra gardener toiled all day…repairing the ravages of the night before.”  Nick also points out that “five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.”  The American dream, from Fitzgerald’s perspective, is one where grand parties must be cleaned up after by lowly janitors and large amounts of fruit are devoured in short periods of time with only the trash leftover.
The modern American dream is illustrated in addition when all of the “oranges and lemons” are made into juice from a machine that could “extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour.”  No longer people need to do things by hand.  Rather, these people offer solutions that make the world more efficient so that people can have more supplies at their disposal.  At the core of it is more, more, and more.  For occasion, it is not enough for Gatsby to have “thin five piece affair.”  Gatsby needed “a whole pit of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums.”  The importance of it all seems a pivotal part of Gatsby’s American dream.
“The Great Gatsby” is one of the most distinctive of love stories, it is a depressing peek into the heart of the hopeless, it is a view of the impossibility of the American dream, and it is about spiritual vacuity and the death of love. “The Great Gatsby” looks at the world through eyes that have seen the end of religion, that wants to construct a meaningful world in a chaotic universe, but ultimately only the meaningless goals of materialism and money can be achieved. “The Great Gatsby” is about pretence and farce, lust and love, greed and envy.
Some readers of “The Great Gatsby” will read it mainly as a love story between Gatsby and Daisy, but for me this is to miss the bigger picture totally. The novel shows us bits of Gatsby, without ever letting us look at him directly or hear by any first person narrative what his views and thoughts are. Rather we are shown Gatsby through the na vie eyes of Nick and the charmless sycophants that people his parties. Therefore, “The Great Gatsby” really becomes a question of identity, of what type of person he is, and by extension, what type of people we, the readers are.
Gatsby himself can be seen as an allegory of the American dream. He has “pulled himself up” and is a “self made” a man. He attempts for material possessions and has great credence in his own abilities. However, ultimately his is a fa ade: his “great love” is misplaced and out of kilter with society and meaningful human interaction, and whilst he does achieve so many of his material ambitions he is still left hollow, alone, unfulfilled and spiritually poor.
F.S. Ficgerald in “The Great Gatsby” shows – he watched it as a whole new culture came along, created a change, became the norm and then imploded in upon itself…
“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights.  In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby has been filmed four times, best of on my opinion is The Great Gatsby, in 1974, by Jack Clayton – the most famous screen version, starring Robert Redford in the title role with Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan & Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, with a script by Francis Ford Coppola.

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