Thunderstorms And Rainbows In The Great Gatsby

It is no secret that life is a constant cycle of thunderstorms and rainbows. Undoubtedly so, both precipitate inspiration. Author Francis Scott Fitzgerald took the thunderstorms and rainbows of his life and splashed them onto paper. While he does this in many of his famous works, it is especially obvious in his 1925 work, The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the reason it has escaped the notice of the masses for so long is because it is not concentrated solely into a single character. Fitzgerald takes aspects of his life and splits them up among his three main male characters in The Great Gatsby: Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and Tom Buchanan.

Through Nick, Fitzgerald shares his upbringing and views of society. Like Nick, Fitzgerald came from a wealthy Minnesota family. Fitzgerald 's mother, Mary McQuillan, was subject to a small inheritance, and his father, Edward Fitzgerald had a failing wicker business. His father got a new job that moved the family to New York. This is no coincidence with

Gatsby never engaged in the insouciant drinking at his prodigal parties, whereas Fitzgerald was a bit of an alcoholic. Fitzgerald was known to do asinine things like spewing insults and throwing punches in public when he was drunk. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald pulls from those experiences and mocks drunkenness with comical situations at Gatsby’s parties. At one point, Jordan Baker says “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care” (Fitzgerald 77). This may allude to a specific experience in Fitzgerald’s life that occurred just before he wrote The Great Gatsby. In a drunken and abusive rage, he began throwing things, such as a wine cooler and a lighted candelabra , at Zelda and her friend followed by threats to kill