The Solitude Among Beings: Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland & Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby In Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, a small girl named Alice falls asleep, has a strange dream where she finds herself wandering after a rabbit and falls into a hole which leads to a foreign world called Wonderland, she seeks a way out of there and encounters peculiar creatures but yet she feels very isolated and distant. Whilst in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a man named Jay Gatsby lives in an enormous mansion by himself and the narrator, Nick Caraway, portrays him and others as lonely. Throughout the novel, Jay Gatsby attempts to win over the love of Daisy Buchanan but in the end, ends up all alone, just as he started. The isolation that Alice and Jay Gatsby feel throughout the novels show that even accompanied by others shows a hard truth: isolation can affect anyone, anywhere. Throughout both stories, characters experience internal conflict, one of which is loneliness. Foster says that the “afflicted character can have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness, cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things” (Foster 29). …show more content…
Loneliness can accompany anyone; it even finds it’s way to the narrator from The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. Nick says “‘I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others’” (Fitzgerald 56). He feels an emotion and relates to other humans with that feeling. He can feel the loneliness in others, he is aware of it. When Nick is driving with Jay Gatsby, Gatsby says to Nick “I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me’” (Fitzgerald 67). Gatsby remains in solitude due to the “sad thing that happened to” him. Many characters experience this feeling and it is
, his house returns to this melancholy and dreary state, reflecting the emptiness in his “ghostly heart” (96). When Nick walks in he notices a change and sudden void. The house “never seemed so enormous” with “curtains like pavilions”,“innumerable feet of dark wall”, and “an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere” (147). All Gatsby really craved was to be loved, much like his house, he was devoid of energy and joy on the inside . Gatsby’s house seems even larger, musty and stale because he is groping around in the dark for companionship he lost long ago.
Shortly before Gatsby’s death, Nick Carraway realized that the crowd he hangs out with are discontent and self-obsessed. Dissatisfaction is a recurring theme in The Great Gatsby, as we are introduced to characters that live carelessly and
Gatsby’s lurking emotional emptiness contributes to his shadowy dissatisfaction with life. His mansion represents this dissatisfaction perfectly by displaying how Gatsby can have all the treasures in the world, but he is still unable to reach and build relationships the people he
The American dream has been an ideal for many generations. Yet this “dream” Is quite deceptive. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby to portray the American dream as empty, materialistic, and unattainable. Emptiness is obvious in The Great Gatsby, everyone “living the dream” is extremely unhappy. For example Gatsby throws extravagant and lavish parties that everyone attends will everyone except the one person he wants there.
The Great Gatsby is an American novel written by Scott Fitzgerald. On the surface, the book revolves around the concept of romance, the love between two individuals. However, the novel incorporates less of a romantic scope and rather focuses on the theme of the American Dream in the 1920s. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as an era of decline in moral values. The strong desire for luxurious pleasure and money ultimately corrupts the American dream which was originally about individualism.
Gatsby Analytical Essay Author F. Scott Fitzgerald has deftly woven dozens of themes and motifs throughout his relatively short novel The Great Gatsby. One theme that resonates in particular is that of isolation. This theme pervades the entire book, and without it, nothing in Gatsby’s world would be the same. Every character must realize that he or she isn’t capable of truly connecting with any other character in the book, or else the carelessness and selfishness that leads to so many of the book’s vital events would not exist. Fitzgerald develops the feeling of isolation and aloneness by his use of the motif of careless self-absorption, a behavior we see many characters exhibiting.
Towards the end of chapter three in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway recalls his daily routine, which not only consists of going to work early in the morning and late aimless walks alone down the avenues, but also tells of Nick’s internal clash between wanting friends and the lack of effort he puts into establishing and sustaining a relationship. Fitzgerald describes Nick as a confused man, who’s delusional about how close he is to people he considers friends, which causes him to be restless and sad; often left to wander the streets for something to do Nick defaults to inaction, only observing and imagining what he desires. In this section, Fitzgerald portrays Nick as excited about having friends at work, although the
“Concerned exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage in disregard of others-” this is the definition of selfishness (Merriam-Webster 's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., Merriam-Webster, 2003, p. 1128 .Dec 8, 2017). Self Centeredness can often cause people to be blind to those around them and causes them to neglect others in pursuit of their own desires and wishes because he only thinks of himself and views himself to be the center of his own reality he lacks the ability to think about how he affects others. They only view themselves to be important and that everyone around them should do things to benefit them. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s ego and self-centered personality stifles any consideration he may have for others. Gatsby’s actions are used to support his own amusement and pleasure, and if someone served no
The desire for love and companionship has the ability to help shape one’s sense of self, but Gatsby’s drive to fulfill that longing in Daisy became his sole focus in life and distracted him from reality. Instead of enhancing his true character, he completely lost his identity in an attempt to pursue Daisy, changing his entire life when he left “James Gatz” behind and put on the persona of Jay Gatsby. Refusing to accept his past, he lost his identity, and his sense of self was reduced to a “career” trying to be someone else (Fitzgerald 98). He spent his whole life trying to acquire money simply to fulfill the desire for Daisy’s love, since he knew “he had no real right to touch her hand” as a “penniless young man without a past” (Fitzgerald 149). Gatsby’s aspiration for love took over everything he did, as the text notes he “took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously” to try to become wealthy and satisfy his desire for love (Fitzgerald 149).
The book The Great Gatsby written by Scott Fitzgerald is a fascinating tale of isolation and friendship. There’s a proverb that says “loneliness breaks the spirit” (unknown). This proverb really connects to the story about how social interaction is something that the human soul needs. In the book Gatsby's isolation eventually lead to his demise. Everyone that lived in west egg and in east egg new of a gentleman called Gatsby but no one really knew who he was.
Significant quotes from “The Great Gatsby” “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, P. 35), this quote is effective, as being placed in the beginning of the book, it demonstrates that the narrator is not attached to either of the worlds that he is speaking about, thus, the reader knows that the narrator will stay objective throughout the book. This technique stands true for the fist chapters of “The Great Gatsby”, where Fitzgerald, by multiple lines, shows that the narrator is trustworthy. This particular quote shows that Nick likes to observe different lives and reserve his judgments, as if he wanted to collect “the inexhaustible variety of lives” in his mind and then process them later.
Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway are two of the most important characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Throughout the novel many comparisons and contrasts can be made, however, this may be arguably the most important due to the magnitude of importance of these two characters and the roles they play in progressing the story. Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy young man living in a Gothic Mansion in West Egg and the protagonist, throws constant parties every Saturday night, but nobody has much insight about him. Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota who lives in New York City to learn the bond business, is typically an honest and tolerant man. Although they do share some similarities, they also share a plethora of differences in their
“But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic” (Fitzgerald, 23). In this short segment from the beginning of the second chapter of The Great Gatsby, we can find some of the recurrent symbols of the book.
Recounting heartbreak, betrayal, and deception, F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a bleak picture in the 1920’s novel The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, witnesses the many lies others weave in order to achieve their dreams. However, the greatest deception he encounters is the one he lives. Not having a true dream, Nick instead finds purpose by living vicariously through others, and he loses that purpose when they are erased from his life.
Ever since Gatsby had left Daisy, he has felt content with his life because he knows something is missing. Gatsby feels lonely and will continue to feel lonely without Daisy. Gatsby’s diminishing life is full of loneliness because it is “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair” (129). Gatsby never does have Daisy all to himself, and dies knowing he never achieved anything more than great wealth. Gatsby is a perfect example of an