The Great Gatsby is considered by most to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, and by some to be America's finest novel. Fitzgerald is an absolute artist with the English language, writing in a style that has the beauty of poetry, yet the accessibility of good prose. Fitzgerald’s writing often deals with the decadence and subsequent emptiness in the lives of the 1920’s wealthy Americans. The Great Gatsby is ostensibly about the relationship between a wealthy man (Gatsby) and a married woman (Daisy). They knew each other and were briefly in love in youth, but
time and experience separated them, both physically and emotionally. Gatsby dedicated his
life to re-entering her life, something not easily done, as she married into high society. He ruthlessly
chases after money in order to build a life that he thinks could re-attract the woman who he wrongly assumes to be the same person as the
young girl he once knew. The story's narrator, a somewhat lost young man, looking at his new friend Gatsby with a need to understand more than anything else, relates the events that transpire during the time when Gatsby comes back into Daisy's life, trying to regain what he once had. The Great Gatsby is essentially a study of loss, the inevitability of it, and the lengths that people will go to avoid it. The eventual point is not one of concession though. The
narrator comes to see the desperate Gatsby as something of a hero, someone who knows that the past is behind him, knows happiness has left, but chases after it anyway. The Greek myth of Sisyphus tells of a man forced in Hell to roll a large
boulder repeatedly up a hill, and have the boulder roll down the other side each time. But he works at it anyway, unperturbed. Gatsby is Fitzgerald's Sisyphus.
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