It is sometimes said that a work of great fiction can take the reader away and deposit him or her in a foreign land or a different time. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a work of fiction that certainly takes the reader far away. The author used various of writing techniques to portray every single character very carefully and gave them unique personalities, by reading this we see not only what happened in the book but also the reflection of American society of the time. People see both their fabulous American Dreams and also their flaws. This is a book that represented America during 1920s and is also one of the most amazing American novels of the time.
Fitzgerald does more than just write prose, he writes poetry that tells a story. His sentence structure is varied and he uses different sentence lengths to write words that sound more like music than just text. For instance, Fitzgerald writes: “He smiled understandingly-- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor” (57) We can see that it is a very detailed describing sentences, vivid language that wrote about his smile and gradually extended to talk about how the person is like from the smile. There are also short, snippy phrases that catch the reader’s attention; the sentence length varies based on the need that the author sees. He writes, “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead”（303). This sounds almost like a short piece of advice that one would give a child, but in reality, it is spoken by a cold-blooded businessman.
Fitzgerald also uses this text to criticize many aspects of American culture during this time. When Daisy is faced with a pregnancy, she says: “ I hope she'll be a fool -- that the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (45). She herself is a beautiful little fool, and this is her only defense against her husband’s terrible brutality. However, she had higher hopes for her children/ They wanted the new generation to be thoughtless and it become a common thought among upper class women due to the sad truth. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” Gatsby represents many people’s desire to move into a new and different social class, and the desire of many to expand into a new realm of wealth. His search for the green light is similar to others’ search for wealth.
During the final scene of the text, the author examines many of the themes of the text in a nostalgic manner. The narrator, Nick, says: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Gatsby’s whole life had been a relentless pursuit of something he could never really grasp because of the way he was born. Even Nick, the narrator, feels the difference between being born into privilege and obtaining money later; he feels separate from the world that Gatsby lives in. “I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity” Nick writes of Jordon, the young woman he was seeing. It is as though everyone in this world is a kind of separate curiosity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is a very articulate author. He has the ability to bring characters alive on the page; the vivid language that he uses is reflective of the glamor of the time that he is writing about, but it is also reflective of the difficulty and the depth of the topics that he is investigating.
Works Cited
Scott, Francis. The Great Gatsby. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS., 1986.
