A Literary Analysis of The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Alright, folks – who’s ready to take a whirlwind tour through the glitzy, glamorous, and ultimately quite tragic world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s immortal novel The Great Gatsby? This literary classic offers a whole lot more than just visuals of fabulous parties and dapper dudes in linen suits sipping mint juleps (though it’s got that in spades too).

No, Fitzgerald’s seminal work is a penetrating critique of the moral bankruptcy and crumbling human values lying beneath the opulent Jazz Age veneer of 1920s New York high society. Through the story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his ill-fated obsession with recapturing his lost love Daisy Buchanan, the novel creates a profound character study examining the corrupting influence of unchecked wealth and power on the American Dream itself.

Introduction

On its surface, The Great Gatsby almost reads like a tawdry soap opera of romance and betrayal mixed with breathless social satire. We’re captivated by the lavish bacchanals Gatsby throws every weekend with their kaleidoscopic fountains and free-flowing liquor. We gawk at the frivolous leisure activities and snobbish name-dropping of Daisy, Tom Buchanan, and their rarefied East Egg crowd. And of course, we’re left riveted yet disturbed by the unfolding mystery around just who Gatsby really is and how he achieved his staggering riches.

But dig below that splashy first act, and you’ll find Fitzgerald steadily establishes the souring view that pursuit of wealth and social status above all else crumbles the moral fabric of his characters beyond repair. Whether it’s Gatsby’s underworld ties, the Buchanans’ casual racism and culture of infidelity, or everyone’s total lack of regard for human dignity beyond shallow status symbols, The Great Gatsby skewers the notion that riches and social influence alone can fulfill the American promise.

In fact, the American Dream itself is portrayed as a hopelessly naïve and unattainable mirage propped up by the era’s most privileged echelons to justify the unethical and criminal excesses of their lavish lifestyles. For behind all the glamor and excitement, Fitzgerald shows us an uglier reality of rampant moral decay, backstabbing, and soulless materialism masking far dirtier truths.

Analysis of Main Characters

1. Jay Gatsby

First introduced as a wealthy eccentric hosting incalculably opulent festivities every weekend, Gatsby quickly emerges as far more than a simple robber baron or well-bred socialite. Our narrator Nick Carraway casts him as a mysterious romantic pursuing the “orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” – in other words, a quixotic dreamer pursuing the recapture of youthful love no matter how unrealistic or self-destructive his grand ideals become.

At first, we’re captivated by Gatsby’s infectious charm, almost reckless idealism, and boundless capacity to pursue pleasure and achievement through sheer force of will. Living by his own mantra of raking the inner heat that burned through him, he surrounds himself with spectacle and material excess in hopes of regaining the past and impressing his lost love interest Daisy Buchanan – whom he still pines for years after their romance was broken apart by war and social standing.

As the novel unfolds, Gatsby’s backstory as a hardscrabble youth turned self-made millionaire born “James Gatz” and wartime hero lends a tragic romanticism to his delusions of building a life with Daisy among society’s upper crusts. Yet Fitzgerald steadily reveals how that very relentless pursuit of an idealized “American Dream” lifestyle led Gatsby down a path of corruption, criminality, and distance from his own humanity in service of attaining elusive status and wealth.

2. Daisy Buchanan

If Gatsby represents the dangerous romantic fantasy of material success solving all of life’s problems, then Daisy Buchanan stands in for the cold reality of what this pursuit does to the soul. Not content with her stifling marriage to the oafish aristocrat Tom, Daisy embarks on an affair with Gatsby fueled as much by nostalgia and guilt over abandoning her youthful ideals as burning desire for his unrestrained lifestyle.

Yet Fitzgerald depicts Daisy as ultimately too constrained by the expectations of her upper-crust status to ever fully commit to Gatsby’s world of illicit earnings and romantic wanderlust beyond their brief frolic. An icon of callous privilege, careless entitlement, and purely mercenary values, her almost gleeful negligence toward humanity around her like the death of Tom’s mistress reveals Daisy’s once vivacious spirit has withered into empty vapidity.

“Her voice is full of money,” Fitzgerald writes in one beautifully damning line, suggesting careless wealth has rendered Daisy incapable of genuine emotions or connections. She exists only as a basking status object to be attained by men, leaving Gatsby’s fantasies of love merely a sad delusion doomed to be crushed beneath her frigidity and the institutional power of her milieu. Between Daisy and Tom’s increasingly twisted dynamic, the aristocratic luster has fully corroded into rotten bigotry and casual violence toward those outside their elite circle.

3. Nick Carraway

As outsider narrator witnessing all this, Nick Carraway lands somewhere in between the idealistic hopes that drew him from the Midwest and the grim observations of societal rot he cannot avoid amid Manhattan’s elite. Though appalled by the “carelessness” of the Buchanans and the shady obscurity of Gatsby’s wealth, Nick still finds himself intoxicated by the aura of human possibility pulsating beneath all their frivolous indulgence and hypocrisy.

His status as semi-participant and semi-critical observer places the reader in a similar push-pull dynamic, sympathetic to the longing for escapist glamor in one breath while revolted by the uglier behaviors and prejudices enabling that gilded lifestyle the next. By continually undercutting our romantic notions with sobering reality, Fitzgerald’s tragic third act reckoning compels us to confront the harsh truth that genuine human progress requires far more than the American dream’s material promise alone.

Themes and Symbols

1. Wealth and Greed

Perhaps the most evident theme animating The Great Gatsby’s character arcs and philosophical critique is the concept of wealth itself as simultaneously the ultimate American Dream aspiration yet also a morally corrupting pursuit when pursued as a sole aim. Fitzgerald weaves meticulous symbolism exploring this dichotomy, from the lush Valley of Ashes blight between New York’s privileged enclaves to the obscenely opulent parties highlighting Gatsby’s conspicuous consumption.

2. The American Dream

Speaking of the legendary riches-to-rags ideal, the American Dream notion of hard work and ambition uplifting anyone to success gets directly interrogated in Gatsby’s tragic arc. His humble origins in North Dakota working menial jobs give way to illicit business dealings and crime as the quickest path to luxury and the ability to impress Daisy. Fitzgerald suggests in portraying his unraveling that hollow chasing of tokens rather than ideals corrupts Gatsby at his core, turning his vision of self-actualization into a delusional compulsion.

3. Society and Class

As hinted earlier, The Great Gatsby operates on multiple levels as a scalding indictment of the pernicious cultural values permeating America’s top social strata in the post-WWI Jazz Age. Fitzgerald skewers the East Egg aristocracy’s institutionalized racism, infidelity, cheating, and callous disregard for human life beneath their tan leisure. Meanwhile, Gatsby’s underworld ties and shadowy business with Meyer Wolfsheim (believed to represent real-life mob figures like Arnold Rothstein) indicts the greed and criminality of nouveaux riche social climbers as well.

4. Love and Idealism

Yet for all its cynical portrayal of the rich and morally bankrupt, Gatsby’s literary legacy endures due to the heartbreaking idealism and belief in the transcendent power of romantic love that flickers beneath all the squandered potential. Fitzgerald imbues the poetic longing of a hardscrabble kid against the world reinventing himself as a Prince in pursuit of his lost love with such vibrant lyricism and empathy that even as Gatsby’s dream combusts in illogic, we can’t help but see shattered fragments of human nobility in his struggle.

Literary Devices and Style

1. Symbolism

From T.J. Eckleburg’s looming bespectacled billboard symbolizing an omnipresent judgment on the soulless values reigning in the Valley, to the protracted biographic metaphor of Gatsby’s childhood quest to lift himself out of a repressive prior milieu, Fitzgerald layers The Great Gatsby in rich symbolism underscoring the deeper philosophical divides pitting societal aspiration against human dignity, emotional bonds against mercenary shallowness.

The meticulously detailed descriptions of both East and West Egg’s tangible envyironments heighten this symbolic clash through vivid contrasting imagery steeped in socioeconomic overtones, a sense of longing yet inevitable peril tinting every surface surrounding the protagonists’ orbits.

2. Intricate Prose and Poetic Language

Speaking of which, the author’s true narrative gift lies in leveraging such intricate symbology through elevated poetic prose elevating the mundane and unsavory alike as reflections of higher truth. Fitzgerald captures a certain Jazz Age sense of hyperawareness to romanticized longing coursing beneath society’s cynical surfaces. Descriptions like these split the difference between gorgeous glitzy imagery and aching ambivalence with a master’s touch, rendering all human desire for permanence and anchorage in a mercurial world as both appeal and folly spanning the same breath.

3. Contradiction and Contrast

Of course, a key aspect of The Great Gatsby’s symbolic style is its embrace of stark contradictions and contrasts, both in the sense of apparent clashing cultural values between “new money” and aristocratic milieu as well as individual characters torn between their generous yet flawed human impulses and baser instincts for destruction. Nowhere is this paradoxical element finer embodied than in our narrator Nick Carraway, an avatar for the reader’s alternating seduction by and repulsion toward the high society chaos unfolding around him.

Fitzgerald maintains an exquisite balance throughout between unearthing the icon resonance apparent in flawed figures like Gatsby or Daisy while continually reminding how their manic pursuit of status ultimately impedes any tangible happiness or meaning. It’s clear he sees his characters’ collective complicity in their own captivation with isolated status or wealth as the root barrier to any extricated spiritual awakening or joy in communion with others outside their spheres.

Conclusion

Ultimately, perhaps The Great Gatsby’s greatest enduring triumph arises from how compellingly Fitzgerald captures the irresolvable contradictions of pursuing elevated ideals through worldly means and wealth alone. Despite the breathless romance and subjective delusions coloring Gatsby’s great ambition, by the novel’s climax we as readers are powerless to stop his aspirations from becoming corroded into the same tawdry low behaviors he sought transcendence from.

There’s a cyclical, almost cosmically resigned acceptance that under society’s prevailing values, the overwhelming power of money cannot help but desecrate and reshape any purer motives in a self-damning feedback loop. Success ceases to become mere material accumulation while wealth begets insurmountable isolation from more connective human fulfillments like love, nobility, humility and authenticity.

And yet, Fitzgerald still maintains a curious respect and empathy for Gatsby’s feverish longing to scramble free from this paradigm through sheer force of irrational desire. Even when we know his fantasies are doomed, there remains a haunting specter of heartbreaking beauty to both Gatsby’s unshakeable self-delusion and Daisy’s tragic inability to fully reciprocate the mantle of pure spontaneous human feeling.

So while The Great Gatsby reads in many ways as a sober rebuke to The American Dream’s empty economic promise if not supplemented with loftier spiritual values…the beating wound at its core still pulses with stubborn romanticism. A last vanishing vestige of human nobility clinging to our most irrational yet exquisite ambitions gasping against the cold pragmatism of status and stratification. Nick Carraway’s immortal final lines are essentially Fitzgerald communicating the true tyranny of learned social impulses – not through atomic unchecked greed of bad actors, but society’s pervasive discouragement of any awe-inspired mythmaking itself.

We’re left to ponder then whether a wholly craven universe of self-serving carelessness triumphing over fragile wonders and mysteries actually signals civilization at its apex. Or could one individual’s capacity for belief and aching, however futile or ignoble the conduits, still become the faintly radiant light dissolving even the wealthiest souls’ imprisonment to ennui and despair? Fitzgerald makes no definitive proclamation, leaving this central existential choice still fluttering unanswered for us all to reckon with in our own lives’ twilights.