A Mysterious Millionaire
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
When in doubt, go to the classics of literature!
“The Great Gatsby” is a story about Jay Gatsby, who falls in love with Daisy Buchanan. Despite the fact that Jay has everything (including an awesome car) he can’t quite completely achieve his dream and get Daisy and she breaks his heart. But not before she manages to make him think of her constantly and can’t help but feel special when she’s around him.
It is hard to pinpoint one central theme in the novel, with so many being explored — ambition, love, sex, guilt, and poverty. One of Fitzgerald’s main points is that fortune does not always favor the good. Gatsby has huge amounts of money but he still can’t have one true love because Daisy eventually marries Tom Buchanan for his money after she was left penniless by her father’s death.
This theme is explored in “East Egg” and “West Egg”, the two towns in which the novel takes place. The East Egg village is poor, with an innocent narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick meets people who have real ambitions, but these people are all destroyed by the end of the novel after getting their hopes up so high that they could never be satisfied. The West Egg people represent a different set of characters: Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker…
