Gatsby

“Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God--- a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about his father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” Pg.28

“The tragedy here is pure confession, a supplication complete in the human note it strikes.” Pg. 28

“Fitzgerald could sound the depths of Gatsby’s life because he himself could not conceive any other.” Pg.28

“Out of his own weariness and fascination with damnation he caught Gatsby’s damnation, caught it as only someone so profoundly attentive to Gatsby’s dream could have pierced to the self-lie behind it.” Pg.28

“The book has no real scale; it does not rest on any commanding vision, nor is it in any sense a major tragedy.” Pg.28

“But it is a great flooding moment, a moment’s intimation and penetration; and as Gatsby’s disillusion becomes felt at the end it strikes like a chime through the mind.” Pg. “It was as if Fitzgerald, the playboy moving with increasing despair thorough this tinsel world of Gatsby’s, had reached that perfect moment, before the break of darkness and death, when the mind does really and absolutely know itself--- a moment whe

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

“The play dramatizes the efforts and frustrations of a family in pursuits of the American Dream. 29

“Gatsby having failed in his dream, now went out with all its lights, save for that last unexpected and uninvited guest whom Nick heard at the closed Gatsby door one night, the guest “who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over. Younger (mama), came north with her husband years before the play begins in order to fulfill the American Dream for her children. Read one improving book or magazine per week. Mama also imagines a garden that she can tend along with her dream house, and the small potted plant acts as a temporary replacement for her much larger-scale dream

Beneatha's dream differs from Mama's in that Beneatha's dream is in many more ways self-serving. Although the family has survived except for Mr. 25

“She is valued as well for the connotations that shimmer in the words “high” and “white” --- a rarefied kingdom pure and free, where the imagination reigns unsullied by the ashy wasteland of the real world and romps like the mind of God. 29

“Fitzgerald seems to say to us, of how little Gatsby wanted at bottom—not to understand society, but to ape it; not to compel the world, but to live in it. Younger, who died of over work, dreams of leisure.

Approximate Word count = 1228
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.