[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Great Gatsby
One can read The Great Gatsby easily and enjoyably without careful analysis. The essential story seems simple enough. Yet readers who stop to ask themselves exactly why they enjoyed the novel, what makes it work, will find themselves looking at a very complex book that means much more than it seems to at first glance. The novel has nearly perfect unity of effect. Every image, every character, every symbol, every turn of the plot contributes to the theme and to the feeling one carries away from reading it, even though one may not always be consciously aware of their influence. Let us begin with an overly simplified statement of the theme: the dangerously misguided nature of Gatsby's worship of the monied world of Daisy Buchanan. As we come to see how Fitzgerald develops this theme, we will also come to see how much depth and richness it actually has.
Taken by itself, the plot is simple and bears out what has just been said about the theme of the novel in a flat, anecdotal way. Gatsby, a poor young man, falls in love with a rich girl while he is serving as an officer in the army during World War I. She loves him but marries someone else when she has given up on his coming back to her. She does not realize that he is poor. He becomes rich through bootlegging and other crimes, finds her, and tries to persuade her to leave her husband for him. She nearly does, but instead stays with her husband. She kills her husband's mistress in an automobile accident, and the dead woman's husband, deceived into thinking Gatsby is responsible, kills Gatsby and then himself. The reader is left uncertain as to what extent Gatsby's former love is involved in the deception.......
