This Side Of Paradise Great Gatsby Analysis

Scott Fitzgerald was one of the most famous annalists of 1920s America, an era that was dubbed “the Jazz Age.” In 1913 he enrolled in Princeton but apathy and difficulties in academics plagued him and he never graduated. He instead enlisted in the army in 1917 as World War I drew to an end. While in the army, he met and fell in love with a beautiful, wild seventeen-year-old named Zelda Sayre and she finally agreed to marry him; but her overarching desire for fun, wealth, and leisure led her to delay the wedding until he could provide her lavish lifestyle. With the publication of ‘This Side of Paradise’ in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him. Many of the events from Fitzgerald’s

J. Eckleburg. To begin, the green light is situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and is barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg balcony. It represents Gatsby’s desire for Daisy and the potency of hope; as well as inevitable disappointment to come. Gatsby famously reaches out towards the light in the darkness; as he longs to achieve his goal which is ultimately Daisy; who according to Gatsby represented the paragon of perfection and was part of the aristocracy that he longed for as a child. However, Daisy falls short of Gatsby’s ideals as she is beautiful and charming, but also fickle, shallow, bored, and sardonic. The narrator characterizes her as careless and a person who destroys things and then retreats behind her wealth. The fact that Gatsby would amass such a great deal of wealth just to win Daisy shows how much he wanted to ditch his poor status to win her love. Because Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy is associated with the American dream as the narrator states; the green light may have also been how America may have looked to early settlers of the new nation as it rose out of the ocean. Furthermore, the novel’s final statement, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter— tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” finds that narrator returning to the theme of the significance of the past to dreams of the future, represented by the green light. He focuses on the struggle to achieve ones goals by both transcending and re-creating the past. Yet humans prove themselves unable to move beyond the past as the current draws them backward as they row forward toward the