Preview of Gatsby Essay!
Prompt: How does Fitzgerald's characterization create a tone around the theme of happiness? What is Fitzgerald's attitude toward happiness? Does it depend on love, on external marks such as wealth, on repairing or atoning for the past, or on something that is unattainable?
Fitzgerald makes it seem as if happiness is something that people don't deserve, but have to gain.
It appears that Fitzgerald is almost foreign to the feeling of happiness. He portrays it as something that people easily fake to show that it's such a hard feeling to obtain. The book desperately associates money, status, and love to happiness, but that's not always the case. According to the character, Gatsby, happiness comes from love. He doesn't go out of his way to meet new people and have a completely different life, he does almost everything for Daisy, his lost lover. To Tom Buchanan, happiness is having things. Having new things and flaunting his prized possessions. When Tom first meets Nick he shows off his home, desperately looking for approval and jealousy, it's like he thrives off of knowing that he's above everyone else, that's why when Gatsby appeared - he never really seemed anything but angry and unhappy. Tom shows off his mistress, Myrtle, and he had no shaming in displaying his new secret lover to Nick, but once Myrtle dies, then Tom experiences a sense of sadness and heavy unhappiness. Happiness is almost nonexistent throughout the whole book, everyone either fakes it or doesn't really seem to experience it, and that just sort of proves that happiness in the book is much harder to find then people think it is.
Fitzgerald makes it seem as if happiness is something that people don't deserve, but have to gain.
It appears that Fitzgerald is almost foreign to the feeling of happiness. He portrays it as something that people easily fake to show that it's such a hard feeling to obtain. The book desperately associates money, status, and love to happiness, but that's not always the case. According to the character, Gatsby, happiness comes from love. He doesn't go out of his way to meet new people and have a completely different life, he does almost everything for Daisy, his lost lover. To Tom Buchanan, happiness is having things. Having new things and flaunting his prized possessions. When Tom first meets Nick he shows off his home, desperately looking for approval and jealousy, it's like he thrives off of knowing that he's above everyone else, that's why when Gatsby appeared - he never really seemed anything but angry and unhappy. Tom shows off his mistress, Myrtle, and he had no shaming in displaying his new secret lover to Nick, but once Myrtle dies, then Tom experiences a sense of sadness and heavy unhappiness. Happiness is almost nonexistent throughout the whole book, everyone either fakes it or doesn't really seem to experience it, and that just sort of proves that happiness in the book is much harder to find then people think it is.
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