Comment on the Great Gatsby
Ostensibly it is a novel of love. However, the Great Gatsby levels a satire and a critic at the social situation. For example, the novel truthfully displayed the prodigality of Gatsby’s parties, empty and boring life of the guests as well as the background that Gatsby collected property through illegal buying and selling, which reflected vividly that age in which people pursued pleasure and lost their virtues. On the other hand, since the beginning of the migration age, Americans always dreamed for being rich and happiness in this democratic, equal, free and abundant land through personal struggling. The fact was that richness of material brought the degeneration of spirit and the breakup of ideals. Besides, the increase of property helped not to eliminate social poverty and narrow prejudice among various of social classes. It can be seen clearly Gatsby possessed American ideals and pursuit of spirits. His “great” lay in exactly his persistence to his ideals. It is pitiful that his ideals appeared to be na?ve and hollow when compared to the reality of that time. Gatsby just based the meaning of his fighting and life on idealized Daisy and the property Daisy represented. When the reality ruthlessly broke into pieces this dream, his fighting and life lost the meaning of existence. All in all, Gatsby was killed by his dream.
The structure and the theme of the novel mixed naturally with each other. the Great Gatsby focused on comparing the different values of Gatsby and the couple-—Tom and Daisy, as well as the social classes they represented respectively. The novel is narrated by Nick in a manner of first-person angle of view. In the first chapter, the novel presents two sets of people in front of the readers and arranges their debuts in the first four chapters through the story structure. By doing this, readers can more objectively see through the differences between them. From the fifth chapter, those two sets of people met and had conflicts with each other, which developed the story and further clarified their differences. It was till the conflicts pushed the story to the summit that the contradiction was resolved and the novel ended tragically. Simultaneously, the narrative angle played a role to strengthen the theme. As a spectator, Nick made his appearance both in their circles. However, Nick kept a distinct lifestyle like neither of two parts. Thus it had effect in separating readers from the novel and helped the readers observe characters’ different life attitudes as a whole and kept them from being disturbed by details. When Nick made his girlfriend and Gatsby tell the story between Gatsby and Daisy respectively in chapter 4 and 8, the effect of separation was further strengthened, which helped the readers to observe love Gatsby believed in as well as the ideal and social components of the love from different angles.
