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The Great Gatsby-The theme of carelessness in the book In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminates the theme of carelessness through the use of conflict, imagery, and character. Failing to realize the destructiveness of time, Gatsby tries to live in a world where past, present and future are all one (Stavola 131). Surprisingly, Gatsby spends most of his adult life trying to recapture the past. Imprisoned in his present, Gatsby belongs even more to the past than to the future (Bailey 22). He cant accept that the past is gone and done with: Cant repeat the past? ...
Why of course you can (Fitzgerald 116). So strong is this belief that Gatsby demands Daisy to... help him to do the impossible; obliterate time and repeat the past (Stavola 140). Gatsby isnt the only one torn between the past and the future. Daisy likewise longs to return to her past with Gatsby but is blocked by her struggles toward the future and in the present. Nick too believes that the past can be recreated.
But soon he learns as many of the others so painfully come to understand, You cant repeat the past (Fitzgerald 116). Unhappy with their lives, the characters dwell between a dead past and an inconceivable future. Another conflict in the novel is the one between the American East and West. Tom and Daisy Buchanan live in East Egg, a socially prominent and modern society in which people behave carelessly.
People of East Egg maintain... snobbery of those who have arrived at least one generation earlier (Rowe 93). Fitzgerald describes Buchanan's spacious home as an... elaborate... Georgian Colonial Mansion overlooking the bay (11). Across the water in West Egg, ...
the less fashionable of the two (Fitzgerald 9), ... whose wealth is fluid income that might cease to flow (Cowley 71) is where Nick and Gatsby live. Both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are westerners... uncomfortable in the East (Eble 96) and are situated here to represent their closeness to western values idealism and romanticism. Nick comes East to West Egg because he is restless (Fitzgerald 7), seeks adventure, and wants to try his fortune (Lehan 13). In The Great Gatsby, the story is told through the eyes of an active, biased, character, Nick, thought of as a very honest and harmless person by the other characters.
For this reason he is confided in and trusted by everyone. He thinks of himself higher then everyone else. He says on the first page how he is... inclined to reserve all judgements... (Fitzgerald 5), but goes on and says that... tolerance...
has a limit (Fitzgerald 6). Nick... not only judges all characters throughout the book but with holds judgement (Eble 97). He becomes corrupt because of the corrupt people around him.
Nick is very partial in his way of telling the story about several characters. With the ability to... look at life through a variety of windows, from more than one point of view (Parker 151), Nick is drawn imaginatively to a figure who repudiates both time and an identity defined by the American Dream (Lynn 158). He admits that he makes an exception of judging Gatsby, for whom he is prepared to suspend both the moral code of his upbringing and the limit of narrow-mindedness, because Gatsby has an...
extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness (Fitzgerald 6). This suspended judgement inspires him to a level of friendship and loyalty that Nick seems unprepared to extend towards others in the novel. Richard Lehan, one critic writes: ... Nick is a character in his own right, and he is a spokesman for Fitzgerald (98).
Through Nick, Fitzgerald revives the dream and... sets it in juxtaposition to a modern society... (Lynn 161). Nick overlooks the moral implications of Gatsby's bootlegging, his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, the man rumored to have fixed the World series in 1919. Yet, he is scornful of Jordan Baker for cheating in a measly game of golf. And while he says that he is prepared to forgive this sort of behavior in a woman: It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame too deeply I was casually sorry, and then forgot, (Fitzgerald 63). It seems that he cannot accept her for being incurably dishonest and then reflects that his one cardinal virtue is that he is one of the few honest people (Fitzgerald 64) he has ever known. In the end West Egg is not what he wanted it to be, and he decides to move back home, to a place with perhaps enough room for a dreamy idealism. Peoples lingering dissatisfaction's tend to make them believe even more heavily in the American Dream then those who realize that it is called a dream for a reason.
Bibliography: Fitzgerald, Scott, The Great Gatsby. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. , 1977 Bender, David, ed.
Readings on The Great Gatsby. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press Inc. , 1998.
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Research essay sample on The Great Gatsby Theme Of Carelessness In Book
