Free Great Gatsby Essays: Sensational, Blatant, Ugly and Pointless :: Great Gatsby Essays

The Many Flaws of The Great Gatsby There are a few, very rare, moments where Fitzgerald allows some insights in the characters of his novel, The Great Gatsby. These occasions should be marked red. Most of the time, the story annoys the reader with imaginary pictures of the Golden 20’s, which really were never that golden, or images of our hero, Gatsby. All the wonderful things that critics see in the story: the novel of manners, love, American Dream, and romance have been interpreted into the story long after the fact. There are some slight hints towards these topics, but they are not really developed by Fitzgerald (e.g. the love between J. Gatz and Daisy Fay). The missing relationship between Gatsby and Daisy is but one of the flaws of the novel. Fitzgerald shows a lack of care in developing Gatsby as a person of the "New Money", dreaming all the day, having and being tasteless in everything he has and is, in addition to being a criminal (though there ´s no real evidence for that), and developing Daisy as a character, coming from a well-known family "Old Money" and being not guilty ("white", to use Fitzgerald ´s riduculas color symbolism). It was just impossible for a mediocre writer like Fitzgerald was, to develop a relationship between such different persons (though they have one thing in common: their lack of taste). The Great Gatsby is an absurd story. One cannot consider this â€Å"masterpiece† as a love story - the only love is one by a shy daydreamer, admiring a lady from the upperclass and doing every possible stupid thing to get her, but who, after not having succeeded, becomes a "tragic hero". Just blindly applying ancient and worn storylines doesn’t make a good book. One cannot consider it as a plain record of lifestyle in the 20 ´s because it simply is not. To suppose that it is a symbol for the American Dream (which isn ´t dreamt by Americans only) it is just ridiculous. These things are not definable by some characters written on a virgin white (color symbolism !!!) sheet of paper. The same goes for those who consider The Great Gatsby as a romantic novel: Ripping off people who buy alcohol, accumulating that dark (color symbolism !!!) money and then filling a pool with it, just to impress a teen love is not very romantic in the opinion of most people.