the great gatsby essay review

The Great Gatsby

By f. scott fitzgerald.

'The Great Gatsby' tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age, in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The Great Gatsby tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age , in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby. Through Nick’s narration, readers are exposed to the dangers of caring too much about the wrong thing and devoting themselves to the wrong ideal.

Gatsby’s pursuit of the past central to my understanding of this novel. Fitzgerald created Gatsby as a representative of the American dream , someone who, despite all of his hard work, did not achieve the one thing he wanted most in life.

Wealth and the American Dream

Another part of this novel I found to be integral to my understanding of the time period was the way that wealth and the American dream did not exist alongside one another. The American dream suggests that through hard work and determination, anyone can achieve the dream life they’re looking for.

On the outside, Gatsby does just that. He raises himself out of poverty and makes his fortune (albeit not through entirely legal means). He worked hard and remained focused. For those attending his parties or who have seen his mansion, he is living the best possible life–an embodiment of the American dream. But, he’s missing the one thing he really wanted to achieve–Daisy’s love and commitment. His pursuit of wealth was not for wealth alone. It was for something that, he realized, money can’t buy.

It was impossible for me not to feel moved by the bind Gatsby got himself into. He put Daisy on a pedestal, one that required she fulfill her end of the bargain if he fulfilled his. He got rich and acquired the means to give her the kind of life she wanted. But, Daisy was unwilling to separate herself from her husband, Tom Buchanan, and return to Gatsby. She ended up being more interested in maintaining her social status and staying in the safety of her marriage than living what might’ve been a happy life.

Daisy Buchanan and the Treatment of Women

Her character is often deeply romanticized, with her actions painted as those of a woman torn between what she knows is right and her inability to guide her own life. However, I always return to the strange conversation she shares with Nick, revealing her concerns about raising a daughter. The quote from The Great Gatsby reads:

I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

This quote proved to me that Daisy is well aware of her position in the world, and she turns to the safety of being “a beautiful little fool” when she needs to be. It’s the only way she feels she can survive.

There’s something to be said for the depiction of Daisy as a victim. Still, her callous treatment of Gatsby at the end of the novel, seen through her refusal to attend his funeral and dismissal of the destruction she caused, is hard to empathize with. Daisy may be at Tom’s mercy for a great deal, her livelihood, and her social status, but when she walks away from the death of a man she supposedly loved, it feels as though her true nature is revealed. She’s a survivor more than anything else and didn’t deserve the pedestal that Gatsby put her on. This is part of what makes Gatsby’s story so tragic. He was pure in a way that no other character in the novel was. He had one thing he wanted, and he was determined to do anything to get it. That one thing, Daisy’s love, was what let him down.

I also found it interesting to consider the differences between Jordan’s character and Daisy’s and how they were both treated. Jordan, while certainly no saint, is regarded as a dangerous personality. She sleeps with different men, appears to hold no one’s opinion above her own, and has made an independent career for herself as a golfer (a surely male-dominated world). I continue to ask myself how much of Nick’s depiction of Jordan is based on her pushing the envelope of what a woman “should” do in the 1920s ?

The Great Gatsby and Greatness

One of the novel’s defining moments is when Nick realizes who was truly “great” and why. Gatsby wasn’t “Great” because of his wealth, home, parties, or any other physical item he owned. He was great because of the single-minded pursuit of his dream. His incredible personality and determination made him a one-of-a-kind man in Nick’s world. This realization about who Gatsby was and what he represented was driven home by his death and the lack of attendees at his funeral. No one, aside from Nick, realizes the kind of man he was. Those he might’ve called friends were using him for the money, possession, or social status they might have attained. But, Nick realizes that none of these things made the man “great.”

The Great Gatsby as a Historical Document

Finally, I find myself considering what the novel can tell us about the United States post-World War I and during the financial boom of the roaring twenties. Without didactically detailing historical information, the novel does provide readers with an interesting insight into what the world was like then.

The characters, particularly those who attend Gatsby’s parties, appear to have nothing to lose. They’ve made it through the war, are financially better off than they were before, and are more than willing to throw caution to the wind. Fitzgerald taps into a particular culture, fueled by a new love for jazz music, financial stability, prohibition and speakeasies, and new freedoms for women. The novel evokes this culture throughout each page, transporting readers into a very different time and place.

The novel conveys a feeling of change to me, a realization that the American dream may not be all it’s cut out to be and that the world was never going to be the same again after World War I. It appears that this is part of what was fueling Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby and his plot choices.

What did early reviewers think of The Great Gatsby ?

Early reviews of The Great Gatsby were not positive. Reviewers generally dismissed the novel, suggesting that it was not as good as Fitzgerald’s prior novels. It was not until after this death that it was elevated to the status it holds today.

What is the message of The Great Gatsby ?

The message is that the American dream is not real and that wealth does not equal happiness. Plus, optimism might feel and seem noble but when it’s misplaced it can be destructive.

Is Jay Gatsby a good or bad character?

Gatsby is generally considered to be a good character. He did illegal things to gain his fortune but it was with the best intentions–regaining the love of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth.

Did Daisy actually love Gatsy?

It’s unclear whether or not she loved Gatsby. But, considering her actions, it seems unlikely she loved him during the novel.

What does Nick learn from Gatsby?

Nick learns that the wealth of East and West Egg are a cover for emptiness and moral bankruptcy. The men and women he met are devoid of empathy or love for one another.

The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Enduring Classic of the Jazz Age

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Great Gatsby Review

The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age. It follows Nick Carraway as he uncovers the truth behind his mysterious neighbor’s wealth and dreams. The novel explores the consequences of wealth and suggests that the American dream is an unrealistic expectation.

• Realistic setting. 
• Interesting and provoking dialogue.
• Memorable characters.
• Limited action and emotions. 
• Several unlikeable characters. 
• Leaves readers with questions.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

Cite This Page

Baldwin, Emma " The Great Gatsby Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/f-scott-fitzgerald/the-great-gatsby/review/ . Accessed 12 April 2024.

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The Great Gatsby: Book Review

“ The Great Gatsby” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the bestseller published in 1925. This book is a masterpiece in the writings of Fitzgerald. It’s a classic for the readers and most prominent in the American fiction. It occurred as the milestone as it has been reread by many readers. It is a benchmark for the all readers, authors and contemporary writer.

The Great Gatsby involves the story of Jay Gatsby. In this book the character being played, namely Jay, is a character that is in the conquest of win back his only and first love. This character plays the role of an American (University of Adelaide). This book involves the psychology of American people. How they are tempted for the wealth and how they are busy in living their lives. It’s about Americans and their social nature as well as the love and lust with the work (Fitzgerald and Prigozy).

In this book the author has given the goal to think rich and be rich psyche. The author himself is thinking the same. Here the author has personalized his personality aspect in the form of a character in his novel (University of South California).

The author has described the love between a man and woman in a depressed outlook of thwarted love. The author has taken the era out of time which was basically the ear of Jazz and the declined social prosperity of America. America right after the war, experience the raise of wealth when the stock market reached the highest of the height (Fitzgerald and Prigozy).

This book was accepted as the biography of the American state in which all of the problems America have faced in that very time of the war and how American got out of the period. This book was greatly accepted by many of the readers and was entitled as the touchstone for the American society (Fitzgerald and Prigozy).

America right after receiving the raise in wealth became the victim of the deadly phenomenon “materialism”. In this way the families with any social background became able to make fortune. One more important aspect of this novel deals the amendment of 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol. This gave rise in the need and demand for alcohol in almost all the social classes. Because of this demand there was a clear observation of rise in crime ration (Fitzgerald and Prigozy).

The author or the novel moreover badges the characters and especially Jay, with the all these social changes and the followers of these social trends. Jay is even ready to gain the wealth by any means whether it’s the right way or the wrong way. He is just doing so to impress Daisy, the girl who is his beloved (Fitzgerald and Prigozy).

This book widely possess all the main features of the Americans run for the wealth and keeping themselves highly renowned in the society, not with the aid of the noble actions but by increasing the wealth and the power to get what they desire for. The comforts they deserve I life was the name they used instead of calling the root cause, materialism (94).

This novel is a touchstone for all, which is being reread by many. This novel tells the story of Americans, how they started to get to the place where they are standing. This novel compasses and works as the alarm clock for the American people and their influence on the next generations. This novel is still the best seller in America.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, S and R Prigozy. The great Gatsby. Oxford University Press, 1998.

University of Adelaide. “The Great Gatsby.” 2007. Web.

University of South California. 2003. A brief life of Fitzerland . Web.

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Why do we keep reading the great gatsby , arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we keep reading The Great Gatsby ? Why do some of us keep taking our time reading it? F. Scott Fitzgerald kept it short. A week is unwarranted. It should be consumed in the course of a day. Two at most. Otherwise, all the mystery seeps away, leaving Jay Gatsby lingering, ethereal but elusive, like cologne somebody else is wearing.

I have read The Great Gatsby four times. Only in this most recent time did I choose to attack it in a single sitting. I’m an authority now. In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book—booooo, Jordan; just boo. And Mr. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir; Gatsby was your friend . In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again. I know of someone—a well-heeled white woman in her midsixties—who reads this book every year. What I don’t know is how long it takes her. What is she hoping to find? Whether Gatsby strikes her as more cynical, naive, romantic, or pitiful? After decades with this book, who emerges more surprised by Nick’s friendship with Gatsby? The reader or Nick?

In this way, The Great Gatsby achieves hypnotic mystery. Who are any of these people—Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. But mostly it’s a premonition.

Each time, its fineness announces itself on two fronts. First, as writing. Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. “The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses”? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life.

The second front entails the book’s heartlessness. It cuts deeper every time I sit down with it. No one cares about anyone else. Not really. Nick’s affection for Gatsby is entirely posthumous. Tragedy tends to need some buildup; Fitzgerald dunks you in it. The tragedy is not that usual stuff about love not being enough or arriving too late to save the day. It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas.

Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion. We might not have been ready to hear that in 1925, even though the literature of industrialization demanded us to notice. The difference between Fitzgerald and, say, Upton Sinclair, who wrote, among other tracts, The Jungle , is that Sinclair was, among many other things, tagged a muckraker and Fitzgerald was a gothic romantic, of sorts. Nonetheless, everybody’s got coins in their eyes.

This is to say that the novel may not make such an indelible first impression. It’s quite a book. But nothing rippled upon its release in 1925. The critics called it a dud! I know what they meant. This was never my novel. It’s too smooth for tragedy, under wrought. Yet I, too, returned, seduced, eager to detect. What— who? —have I missed? Fitzgerald was writing ahead of his time. Makes sense. He’s made time both a character in the novel and an ingredient in the book’s recipe for eternity. And it had other plans. The dazzle of his prose didn’t do for people in 1925 what it’s done for everybody afterward. The gleam seemed flimsy at a time when a reader was still in search of writing that seeped subcutaneously.

The twenties were a drunken, giddy glade between mountainous wars and financial collapse. By 1925, they were midroar. Americans were innovating and exploring. They messed around with personae. Nothing new there. American popular entertainment erupted from that kind of messy disruption of the self the very first time a white guy painted his face black. By the twenties, Black Americans were messing around, too. They were as aware as ever of what it meant to perform versions of oneself—there once were Black people who, in painting their faces black, performed as white people performing them. So this would’ve been an age of high self-regard. It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity evident to all as distinctly, keenly, robustly, hilariously, terrifyingly, alluringly American. Or the inverse: the identity is a conjurer of fortune.

This is the sort of classic book that you didn’t have to be there for. Certain people were living it. And Fitzgerald had captured that change in the American character: merely being oneself wouldn’t suffice. Americans, some of them, were getting accustomed to the performance of oneself. As Gatsby suffers at Nick’s place during his grand reunion with Daisy, he’s propped himself against the mantle “in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.” (He’s actually a nervous wreck.) “His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock.” Yes, even the clock is in on the act, giving a performance as a timepiece.

So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over? Well, the premonition about performance is another part of it, and to grasp that, you probably did have to be there in 1925. Live performance had to compete with the mechanical reproduction of the moving image. You no longer had to pay for one-night-only theater when a couple times a day you could see people on giant screens, acting like people . They expressed, gestured, pantomimed, implied, felt. Because they couldn’t yet use words—nobody talked until 1927 and, really, that was in order to sing—the body spoke instead. Fingers, arms, eyes. The human gist rendered as bioluminescence. Often by people from the middle of nowhere transformed, with surgery, elocution classes, a contract, and a plainer, Waspier name, into someone new. So if you weren’t reinventing yourself, you were likely watching someone who had been reinvented.

The motion picture actually makes scant appearances in this book but it doesn’t have to. Fitzgerald was evidently aware of fame. By the time The Great Gatsby arrived, he himself was famous. And in its way, this novel (his third) knows the trap of celebrity and invents one limb after the next to flirt with its jaws. If you’ve seen enough movies from the silent era or what the scholars call the classical Hollywood of the thirties (the very place where Fitzgerald himself would do a stint), it’s possible to overlook the glamorous phoniness of it all. It didn’t seem phony at all. It was mesmerizing. Daisy mesmerized Gatsby. Gatsby mesmerized strangers. Well, the trappings of his Long Island mansion in East Egg, and the free booze, probably had more to do with that. He had an aura of affluence. And incurs some logical wonder about this fortune: How? Bootlegger would seem to make one only so rich.

A third of the way into the book, Nick admits to keeping track of the party people stuffed into and spread throughout Gatsby’s mansion. And the names themselves constitute a performance: “Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull,” Nick tells us. “Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys.” There’s even poor “Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.” This is a tenth of the acrobatic naming that occurs across a mere two pages, and once Fitzgerald wraps things up, you aren’t at a party so much as a movie-premiere after-party.

Daisy’s not at Gatsby’s this particular night, but she positions herself like a starlet. There’s a hazard to her approximation of brightness and lilt. We know the problem with this particular star: She’s actually a black hole. Her thick, strapping, racist husband, Tom, enjoys playing his role as a boorish cuckold-philanderer. Jordan is the savvy, possibly kooky, best friend, and Nick is the omniscient chum. There’s something about the four and sometimes five of them sitting around in sweltering rooms, bickering and languishing, that predicts hours of the manufactured lassitude we call reality TV. Everybody here is just as concocted, manifested. And Gatsby is more than real—and less. He’s symbolic. Not in quite the mode of one of reality’s most towering edifices, the one who became the country’s forty-fifth president. But another monument, nonetheless, to the peculiar tackiness of certain wealth dreams. I believe it was Fran Lebowitz who called it. Forty-five, she once said, is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” And Gatsby is the former James Gatz’s idea of the same.

Maybe we keep reading this book to double-check the mythos, to make sure the chintzy goose on its pages is really the golden god of our memories. It wasn’t until reading it for the third time that I finally was able to replace Robert Redford with the blinkered neurotic that Leonardo DiCaprio made of Gatsby in the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of the book. Nick labels Gatsby’s manner punctilious. Otherwise, he’s on edge, this fusion of suavity, shiftiness, and shadiness. Gatsby wavers between decisiveness and its opposite. On a drive with Nick where Gatsby starts tapping himself “indecisively” on the knee. A tic? A tell? Well, there he is about to lie, first about having been “educated at Oxford.” Then a confession of all the rest: nothing but whoppers, and a tease about “the sad thing that happened to me”—self-gossip. Listening to Gatsby’s life story is, for Nick, “like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.”

This is a world where “anything can happen”—like the fancy car full of Black people that Nick spies on the road (“two bucks and a girl,” in his parlance) being driven by a white chauffeur. Anything can happen, “even Gatsby.” (Especially, I’d say.) Except there’s so much nothing. Here is a book whose magnificence culminates in an exposé of waste—of time, of money, of space, of devotion, of life. There is death among the ash heaps in the book’s poor part of town. Jordan Baker is introduced flat out on a sofa “with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.” It’s as likely to be an actual object as it is the idea of something else: the precarious purity of their monotonous little empire.

We don’t know who James Gatz from North Dakota is before he becomes Jay Gatsby from Nowhere. “Becomes”—ha. Too passive. Gatsby tosses Gatz overboard. For what, though? A girl, he thinks. Daisy. A daisy. A woman to whom most of Fitzgerald’s many uses of the word murmur are applied. But we come back to this book to conclude her intentions, to rediscover whether Gatsby’s standing watch outside her house after a terrible night portends true love and not paranoid obsession. And okay, if it is obsession, is it at least mutual? That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America .

Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large at the New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine , where he writes about popular culture and cohosts, with Jenna Wortham, the podcast Still Processing . For three years, he was a staff writer at Grantland , where he wrote about movies, television, and the role of style in professional sports, and cohosted the podcast Do You Like Prince Movies? , with Alex Pappademas. Before that, he spent eleven years as a film critic at the Boston Globe , where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Introduction by Wesley Morris to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Wesley Morris. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Movie Reviews

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Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" isn't a disaster. Every frame is sincere. Its miscalculations come from a wish to avoid embalming a classic novel in "respectfulness" — a worthy goal, in theory. It boasts the third most imaginative use of 3D I've seen recently, after "U2 3D" and " Hugo ." It's a technological and aesthetic lab that has four or five experiments cooking in each scene. Even when the movie's not working, its style fascinates. 

That "not working" part is a deal breaker, though — and it has little to do with Luhrmann's stylistic gambits, and everything to do with his inability to reconcile them with an urge to play things straight.

If you've seen Lurhmann's " Strictly Ballroom ," " Romeo + Juliet " or " Moulin Rouge ," or watched "Gatsby" trailers, you know what you're in for: an epic melodrama that fuses old-movie theatrics and subjective filmmaking, period music and modern pop, real sets and unreal landscapes, psychological drama and speeded-up slapstick.

We see the book's Prohibition-era settings (East Egg and West Egg, New York City, and the sooty wasteland in between) through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway ( Tobey Maguire ), who's writing a memoir-confession from an asylum. This framing device is inferred from statements Fitzgerald made in "The Crack-Up," and "Gatsby" often refers to itself as a book, so even though it isn't officially part of the source, it's hardly a blasphemous indulgence; still, it's one more buffer between viewer and story in a movie that already has more than its share.

All this busywork might astonish if Lurhmann's heart were in it—but is it? The guests at Gatsby's party are too obviously directed, and there's no sense of escalation in the gatherings. From frame one, they're Dionysian whirls of booze, lust and hero worship, minus the sense that that things are ebbing and flowing as they would at a real party. The CGI-assisted camera acrobatics feel obligatory. So do the anachronistic soundtrack mash-ups (modern hip-hop layered over ragtime piano and the like).

But in the film's dark second half, "The Great Gatsby" half-forgets its mandate to wow us and zeroes in on actors in rooms. Once that happens, the Luhrmannerisms distract from the film's true heart: the actions and feelings of its characters. Luhrmann didn't set out to make a PBS-style, bare-bones adaptation, but there are times when it feels as though he secretly wants to. 

Once you get past the movie's opening eruptions of visual excess — hundreds of party guests boozing and hollering and doing the Charleston; CGI cityscapes that visualize 1920s New York by way of Warren Beatty's candy-colored " Dick Tracy "; a long expository talk between Gatsby and Nick in a careening computer-buffed roadster that moves as believably as the talking cab in " Who Framed Roger Rabbit " — "The Great Gatsby" settles into a traditional groove: scene, scene, montage, scene, burst of violence, moment of reflection. The movie wants to be a "kaleidoscopic carnival," to quote a phrase from the book's description of a Jay Gatsby party, but Luhrmann's instincts seem more traditional, even square, and the two impulses cancel each out. Once you've spent time with his cast, you understand why he was torn.

DiCaprio's Gatsby is the movie's greatest and simplest special effect: an illusion conjured mainly through body language and voice. On the page, the character is so mysterious, so much a projection of the book's narrator, that you'd think he'd be as unplayable onscreen as Kurtz or John Galt; he eluded Alan Ladd and Robert Redford , the role's previous inhabitants. And yet DiCaprio makes him comprehensible and achingly real. The actor's choices drive home the idea that Gatsby is playing the man he wishes he were, and that others need him to be. We see the calculations behind his eyes, but we also believe that he could hide them from the other characters — most of them, anyway.

DiCaprio's acting evokes Nick's description of the human personality as "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Luhrmann cuts some scenes to make it seem as if the character really is omniscient — as if he can see and hear for miles and read people's thoughts and feelings — and DiCaprio plays these moments with a mix of inscrutability and delight, as if Gatsby knows something we don't, but is too clever to say precisely what. (He could play Superman.) When Gatsby's deceptions are revealed and his illusions shattered, DiCaprio becomes at once terrifying and pathetic, a false idol toppling himself from his pedestal. In his final moment of realization, DiCaprio's blue eyes match the blue of Gatsby's pool, and his anguished face, framed in tight close-up, has a ghastly beauty. This is an iconic performance — maybe his career best.

The rest of the cast is nearly as impressive. Nick Carraway is almost as much of an abstraction as Gatsby — an audience surrogate, with touches of The Nice Guy Betrayed — but Maguire humanizes him, just as DiCaprio does Gatsby. It helps that he's played so many wry blank-slate types, but there's something else going on in his performance besides familiar notes — something deeper and sadder. 

Carey Mulligan is physically and vocally right for Daisy Buchanan — when she flirts, the famous description of the character having "a voice like money" nearly makes sense — but the film doesn't idealize her, as Gatsby and Nick often seem to. There's a contradictory, complicated person there. She's matched — appropriately overmatched, really — by Joel Edgerton's Tom. The actor suits the book's description of the character as "hulking" and projects the jovial arrogance of a thug impersonating a cultured man with money; he's scary but life-sized, and always comprehensible. The small roles are well cast, too, with Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker as a standout. The director is genuinely interested in his actors' performances, and in the characters' psyches. When the tale's simmering resentments detonate (notably in a scene near the end that takes pretty big liberties with the book) the result is a more powerful experience than crowd scenes and CGI panoramas can deliver. 

There were times when I wished Luhrmann had made a smaller, squarer adaptation, because he seems to have the talent for it; I never would have imagined saying such a thing after seeing his other films, which have their merits but are hardly standard-bearers for subtlety. Alas, this "Gatsby" is so immense and overwrought — lumbering across the screen like the biggest, trashiest, loudest parade float of all time — that its intimacies feel like shared secrets between the director and the viewer. The movie's like a guest at a wild gathering who finds the frenzy tiresome and would rather be at home reading, but can't let on because he's supposed to be the life of the party.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Rated PG-13 for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language.

143 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby

Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan

Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson

Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway

Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan

• Baz Luhrmann

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The Great Gatsby

F. scott fitzgerald, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Great Gatsby: Introduction

The great gatsby: plot summary, the great gatsby: detailed summary & analysis, the great gatsby: themes, the great gatsby: quotes, the great gatsby: characters, the great gatsby: symbols, the great gatsby: literary devices, the great gatsby: quizzes, the great gatsby: theme wheel, brief biography of f. scott fitzgerald.

Historical Context of The Great Gatsby

Other books related to the great gatsby.

• Full Title: The Great Gatsby
• Where Written: Paris and the US, in 1924
• When Published: 1925
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Novel
• Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922
• Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy
• Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for The Great Gatsby

Puttin' on the Fitz. Fitzgerald spent most of his adult life in debt, often relying on loans from his publisher, and even his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in order to pay the bills. The money he made from his novels could not support the high-flying cosmopolitan life his wife desired, so Fitzgerald turned to more lucrative short story writing for magazines like Esquire. Fitzgerald spent his final three years writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Another Failed Screenwriter. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and his wife Zelda suffered from serious mental illness. In the final years of their marriage as their debts piled up, Zelda stayed in a series of mental institutions on the East coast while Fitzgerald tried, and largely failed, to make money writing movie scripts in Hollywood.

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Literature review of 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Related Papers

Sharjeel Ashraf

The paper explores the corrupted idea of the American Dream in one of the greatest novels written on the topic, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even though the pursuance of the American Dream stems from the idea of hard work and success that is pure, truthful, and just, Jay Gatsby's approach in achieving it leads to his demise. His relationships with other characters, particularly Tom Buchanan and Daisy Buchanan, were tainted because of the morally corrupted notion of the American Dream. This paper textually analyzes The Great Gatsby and explores that how Gatsby runs after a dream (Daisy) that he cannot achieve even after becoming financially wealthy, and how the corrupt ideals of the American Dream become the reason that he cannot fulfill his own dreams.

Adriana Mancaş

Ahmed Maklad

The thesis explores how the literary status of Fitzgerald’s novel published in 1925 evolved from being dismissed to becoming a canonical work of American Literature after the death of its author. The role of criticism and adaptations and how they intertwined to popularize the novel among the academic elite and the general public is examined. Four critical studies in different decades of recent history are analyzed to show the different approaches to the novel as well as its relation to the American Dream. The thesis suggests that the four critical studies discussed reflect viewpoints impacted by the cultural and socio-economic factors that marked the decade of their appearance: Kermit Moyer (1973), Ross Posnock (1984), Ray Canterbery (1999), and Benjamin Shreier (2007). Their approaches demonstrate the many ways The Great Gatsby can be viewed and thus its richness as a text. The three film adaptations of the novel in turn depict directors’ take on the novel as well as exhibiting the limitations, predilections, and technical possibilities of the time of their production: Nugent’s (1949), Clayton’s (1974), and Luhrmann’s (2013). The controversial aspects of these adaptations as indicated by reviews and articles, which evaluate them as to how they present Gatsby and the American Dream, have increased the debate and the interest in the novel. Though the novel is located in the U.S. in the Roaring Twenties associated with the Jazz Age, it continues to speak to present audience by evoking issues related to class, mobility, ethics, and romance.

Ani Khachatryan

Azhin Namiq

Intro The lexical deviation and word connotations are mainly used for characterization and theme revelation. In terms of the syntactical aspects, narrative sentence type and the contrast of registers are employed, and the author's sentence endings with elaborate appositions and prepositional phrases provide an effective way to describe the surroundings and evoke moods, serving to generate suspense as well as to create interest and expectation on the part of the reader. Abstract —The thesis tries to adopt the method used by Leech and Short in their book Style in Fiction to make a relatively overall and objective analysis of the novel's language from the context category. From the context perspective, point of view and modes of speech presentation are used to produce special stylistic effects. In the category of point of view, the author makes use of both limited first-person witness perspective and shifts of narrative perspective-the adoption of these narrative techniques is closely related to the theme of the novel. Modes of speech presentation in the novel, which involve

Joseph Vogel

ELITE Journal

Dewi Christa Kobis

This study discusses both Fitzgerald's works entitled The Great Gatsby as a novel (1926) and Winter Dreams (1922) as a short story. These works talk about a man who is originally from low social status but try to pursue his dream to be rich in purpose to get the women that he loves. ABSTRAK Penelitian ini membahas dua karya sastra karya Fitzgerald yang berjudul The Great Gatsby yang merupakan sebuah novel (1926) dan Winter Dreams (1922) yang merupakan cerita pendek. Kedua karya ini menceritakan tentang seorang pria yang sebelumnya berasal dari kalangan kelas ekonomi rendah tapi mencoba untuk menggapai mimpinya untuk menjadi kaya dengan tujuan untuk mendapatkan wanita yang dicintainya. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui alasan mengapa Gatsby dan Dexter ingin sekali untuk menjadi kaya dan mapan secara ekonomi, dan apakah alasan mereka untuk menjadi kaya berhubungan dengan kekuasaan ekonomi dan perjuangan kasta dalam konteks kritik Marxist dari Karl Marx atau tidak. Penelitian ini juga bertujuan untuk mengetahui apakah masyarakat Amerika pada periode tersebut memberikan konstribusi terhadap perlakuan dari Gatsby dan Dexter dalam menggapai mimpi mereka untuk menjadi kaya seperti apa yang digambarkan oleh Fitzgerald. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian kualitatif deskriptif dan menggunakan penelitian pustaka dan analisis dokumen. Akhirnya, penelitian ini mendapati bahwa The Great Gatsby dan Winter Dreams yang ditulis oleh Fitzgerald mempunyai tema yang sama terkait status sosial dan kuasa ekonomi. Dua karya ini punya sebuah perbedaan dimana Gatsby percaya bahwa dia akan mendapatkan Daisy jika dia menjadi kaya dan Dexter mengethaui bahwa dia tidak akan pernah mampu untuk bersama Judy dikarenakan status sosialnya. Secara spesifik, kedua karya dari Fitzgerald ini sama-sama membawa banyak permasalahan dan isu sosial terkait pengaruh kuasa ekonomi yang banyak diperbincangkan pada tahun 1920an.

María Bullón

The aim of this dissertation is to compare T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925). The study is based on the intertextual references and common themes found in both works, i.e.; the loss of a transcendental vision in modern civilization; materialism in the society; the feeling of isolation and boredom of modern man; the notion of destiny seen as ruled by the Wheel of Fortune, or fate, and finally, the conception of death as a necessary step towards regeneration.

Shreya Sachan

Karunakaran Thirunavukkarasu

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The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples

Welcome to The Great Gatsby Essay Samples page prepared by our editorial team! Here you’ll find a heap of wonderful ideas for your Great Gatsby essay. Absolutely free research paper and essay samples on The Great Gatsby are collected here, on one page.

📝 The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples List

Below you’ll find a large collection of The Great Gatsby essay and research paper samples. Feel free to use any of them to inspire your own writing!

• Gatsby & Nick in The Great Gatsby Essay Genre : Essay Words : 1763 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby
• Gatsby & Jean Valjean: Compare & Contrast Essay Genre : Essay Words : 1259 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan
• The Ethicality of an Action Jay Gatsby Genre : Assessment paper Words : 833 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson
• The American Dream in The Great Gatsby: Essay Genre : Essay Words : 619 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson
• Babylon Revisited & The Great Gatsby: Motifs & Themes Genre : Essay Words : 1216 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan
• Time as a Theme in The Great Gatsby: Essay Genre : Essay Words : 896 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson
• Daisy Buchanan: Quotes Analysis Essay Genre : Essay Words : 1077 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker
• Female Characters in The Streetcar Named Desire & The Great Gatsby: Comparative Essay Genre : Essay Words : 1639 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• Why Is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby a Satire? Genre : Essay Words : 680 Focused on : The Great Gatsby genre Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Mr. McKee
• Jay Gatsby & Tom Buchanan: Compare & Contrast Genre : Essay Words : 812 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald & His American Dream Genre : Essay Words : 1815 Focused on : F.S. Fitzgerald’s biography Characters mentioned : Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• Jay Gatsby & Eponine from Les Miserables: Compare & Contrast Essay Genre : Essay Words : 812 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• Jay Gatsby and Valjean in ‘Les Miserables’: Comparative Essay Genre : Essay Words : 769 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway
• Love in The Great Gatsby & The Catcher in The Rye: Comparative Essay Genre : Analytical essay Words : 1059 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan
• The Great Gatsby: Analysis and Feminist Critique Genre : Essay Words : 1365 Focused on : The Great Gatsby analysis Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson
• Fairy Tale Traits in The Great Gatsby Genre : Essay Words : 1146 Focused on : The Great Gatsby analysis & context Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• The Great Gatsby: Book Review Genre : Book review Words : 701 Focused on : The Great Gatsby context Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan
• The Great Gatsby: Book Review & Reflection Genre : Essay Words : 587 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson, Jordan Baker
• Fitzgerald’s American Dream in The Great Gatsby & Winter Dreams Genre : Argumentative essay Words : 1119 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan
• Silver & Gold: Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby Genre : Essay Words : 889 Focused on : The Great Gatsby color symbolism Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker
• Nick as the Narrator in The Great Gatsby Genre : Essay Words : 2473 Focused on : The Great Gatsby characters Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway
• The Dilemmas of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby Genre : Essay Words : 687 Focused on : The Great Gatsby themes Characters mentioned : Jay Gatsby
• Political Satire in American Literature Genre : Essay Words : 788 Focused on : The Great Gatsby genre Characters mentioned : Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby
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Study Guide Menu

• Short Summary
• Summary (Chapter 1)
• Summary (Chapter 2)
• Summary (Chapter 3)
• Summary (Chapter 4)
• Summary (Chapter 5)
• Summary (Chapter 6)
• Summary (Chapter 7)
• Summary (Chapter 8)
• Summary (Chapter 9)
• Symbolism & Style
• Quotes Explained
• Essay Topics
• Essay Samples
• Questions & Answers
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Biography
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, August 13). The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples. https://ivypanda.com/lit/the-great-gatsby-study-guide/essay-samples/

"The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples." IvyPanda , 13 Aug. 2023, ivypanda.com/lit/the-great-gatsby-study-guide/essay-samples/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples'. 13 August.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples." August 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/the-great-gatsby-study-guide/essay-samples/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples." August 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/the-great-gatsby-study-guide/essay-samples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Great Gatsby: Essay Samples." August 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/lit/the-great-gatsby-study-guide/essay-samples/.

Jordan Baker: a Study of Independence and Integrity in “The Great Gatsby”

This essay about Jordan Baker in “The Great Gatsby” explores her significance as a representation of modern womanhood in the 1920s. Highlighting her independence through her career as a professional golfer and her distinct personality, the essay examines Jordan’s role in questioning the era’s integrity and moral ambiguity. It discusses her candidness, self-assurance, and the implications of her admitted dishonesty, framing her as a critique of the social elite’s moral flexibility. Additionally, Jordan’s interactions with key characters like Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are analyzed, showcasing her influence on the novel’s central conflicts and themes of love, loyalty, and disillusionment. Through Jordan Baker, the essay delves into the complexities of seeking independence and integrity in a changing society, making her a pivotal figure in understanding the novel’s exploration of the Jazz Age’s values and contradictions.

How it works

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” a narrative teeming with themes of adoration, treachery, and the opulence of the Jazz Age, Jordan Baker emerges as a character symbolizing contemporary womanhood. As a proficient golfer and a prominent figure in New York’s upper echelons, Jordan epitomizes the freedoms and intricacies encountered by women during the 1920s. Through her persona, Fitzgerald scrutinizes notions of self-reliance, probity, and the intricate social milieu of the period. This exposition delves into Jordan Baker’s significance within the narrative, dissecting her as an emblem of the evolving attitudes towards women’s self-governance and the ethical ambiguities that permeate the lives of the novel’s personas.

Jordan Baker is distinguished by her self-assured demeanor and professional triumphs, characteristics that distinguish her from conventional female archetypes of the era. Her vocation as a golfer, affording her financial autonomy and public acclaim, sets her apart in a society still entrenched in patriarchal conventions. Jordan’s autonomy is further accentuated by her forthright and somewhat skeptical outlook on life, which mirrors a broader disenchantment within post-war American society. Her rapport with the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, offers glimpses into her intricate psyche, unveiling a fusion of vulnerability and detachment.

Fitzgerald employs Jordan’s character to scrutinize the integrity of those inhabiting Gatsby’s realm. Jordan’s own acknowledgment of being “incurably dishonest” functions as a critique of the era’s moral adaptability and the facile manner in which its upper crust navigate a terrain riddled with deceit. Her implication in a cheating scandal during a golf tournament epitomizes the novel’s exploration of deceit as a coping mechanism within a morally bankrupt society. Despite this, Jordan’s deeds and motivations are depicted with a certain ambivalence, prompting readers to contemplate the pressures and anticipations faced by women striving for autonomy in a world not entirely receptive to their aspirations.

Furthermore, Jordan’s interactions with other personas, notably Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, shed light on her role as an observer and participant in the novel’s pivotal conflicts. Her cognizance of Daisy’s history with Gatsby and her involvement in reigniting their liaison underscore her as a pivotal figure in the unfolding drama, assuming roles both as a confidante and a catalyst for the tragic sequences that follow. Through Jordan, Fitzgerald navigates themes of affection, fidelity, and the inevitable disillusionment accompanying the pursuit of unattainable ideals.

In summation, Jordan Baker emerges as a multifaceted presence within “The Great Gatsby,” encapsulating the tensions between modern and traditional conceptions of femininity, integrity, and self-reliance. Her character proffers insights into the social fabric of the 1920s, serving as a lens through which to scrutinize the values and paradoxes of the Jazz Age. Jordan’s narrative trajectory, punctuated by instances of lucidity and ambiguity, challenges readers to contemplate the sacrifices of personal liberty and the realities of existence in a realm where truth often assumes myriad guises. Consequently, Jordan Baker endures as a captivating exploration of a woman navigating the evolving currents of a society in flux, rendering her an indispensable element of Fitzgerald’s enduring opus.

Cite this page

Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby". (2024, Mar 25). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/

"Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby"." PapersOwl.com , 25 Mar 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby" . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/ [Accessed: 13 Apr. 2024]

"Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby"." PapersOwl.com, Mar 25, 2024. Accessed April 13, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/

"Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby"," PapersOwl.com , 25-Mar-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/. [Accessed: 13-Apr-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Jordan Baker: A Study of Independence and Integrity in "The Great Gatsby" . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/jordan-baker-a-study-of-independence-and-integrity-in-the-great-gatsby/ [Accessed: 13-Apr-2024]

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BY BETH WOJCIECHOWSKI Associate Arts and Culture Editor

After numerous show closings occurring in the months prior, Broadway’s spring season has begun, with many shows starting previews and officially opening in March and April, “The Great Gatsby” included.

“The Great Gatsby” began Broadway previews March 29 and will have an official opening date of April 25 at the Broadway Theatre, which is one of the only Broadway theaters actually located on the street of its namesake. 

The musical stars Tony nominees Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada and is based on the book of the same title by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Prior to its Broadway opening, the show premiered at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey in fall 2023.

As a huge theater fan and also a huge fan of Jeremy Jordan (I absolutely adore that man), I knew as soon as it was announced that I had to see it. Luckily, as a birthday present for both my sister and me, we were able to get tickets for April 6, which was coincidentally the first matinee showing of “Gatsby.” 

I went into this show knowing very little about the source material, as I’d never read “The Great Gatsby” before. I also hardly knew any of the music from the show, as there has not been a cast recording released yet. However, due to my prior knowledge of just how freaking amazing Noblezada and Jordan are, I went into the show with high expectations. 

My expectations were definitely exceeded. Not only were the leads absolutely amazing, but they sounded so technically perfect that it was like listening to a recording. That being said, the entire cast was great.

The standout for me was Noblezada as Daisy Buchanan. I’ve been a fan of hers for awhile due to her work in the “Miss Saigon” revival and “Hadestown,” but I had never gotten the opportunity to see her live. She was absolutely incredible, and I will seriously be surprised if she does not win the Best Actress Tony this year for her performance.

The music in the show was also incredibly well executed. It was very catchy and spanned genres from 1920s jazz to classic Broadway ballads. My personal favorite song from the show was “ My Green Light ,” which is the last song of Act 1 and is the first full duet that Jordan and Noblezada have in the show. “My Green Light” felt very reminiscent of beloved modern Broadway duets such as “All I’ve Ever Known” from “Hadestown” and “Only Us” from “Dear Evan Hansen.” It consists of two of the best vocal performances I’ve ever seen on Broadway.

I also really liked the 1920s opulence of the costumes and the set, and the level of detail in that aspect only made the show even more extraordinary. The set of “The Great Gatsby” is the most elaborate set that I have ever seen on Broadway, and it was very reminiscent of Golden Age Broadway theater in that respect. 

Another aspect that I enjoyed was the layout of the theater itself. Some theaters on Broadway are designed in a way in which you can’t see the entire stage from some seats (which I’ve definitely experienced), but the Broadway Theatre was laid out so that, even from the rear mezzanine, I could see everything that was occurring on stage.

The element that truly made my experience seeing “The Great Gatsby” memorable was my experience at the stage door. Despite always racing to the stage door after every single show I’ve seen with the intention of meeting the actors and getting their autographs, I’ve never had much success.

However, this time, I was lucky enough to meet the entire cast and get their autographs, which is truly rare for a matinee performance considering the fact that the actors still have another whole show to perform. My sister and I are still emotionally recovering from the experience of meeting Noblezada and Jordan as it was truly an unforgettable experience.

Overall, “The Great Gatsby” on Broadway is not to be missed. It is a phenomenal show, and I now consider it to be one of the best productions I’ve ever gotten the chance to see. It is a timeless musical, and I truly believe it has the makings to become the next big Broadway classic.

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