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

M angiotensin converting enzymey, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby How do the members of much(prenominal) a rootless, mobile, indifferent society film a sense of who they are? Most of them dont. The Great Gatsby presents large come of them as comic, disembodied names of guests at dinner parties the Chromes, the Backhyssons, and the Dennickers. Some, of course, have whatsoever measure of fame, nevertheless even Jordan Bakers reputation does not do very much for her other than get her entre to more parties. A very few, such as Gatsby, stand out by their wealth his hospitality secures him a hold on small-army peoples memories, but 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 expression of rootlessness. And it has other consequences for love, 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. One knows everything about oneself that can be known, and yet the consequence of such knowledge is unclear, for no outside contexts exist to create meaning. The subject 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 Nick and gives him mythical, large dimensions. When he tells Nick that of course the past can be perennial 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 almost wholly loveless. A glance at the relationships in The Great Gatsby proves this latter point. Daisy and Toms m arriage has gone dead they must bandaging their dissatisfactions with the distractions of the idle rich. Myrtle and Tom are using one another(prenominal) Myrtle hates George, who is too dull to understand her the McKees exist in head-in-the-clouds and empty triviality. Even Nick seems unsure about his feelings for the tennis misfire back in the Midwest. ...