The Great Gatsby: Doubleness
All of this doubleness Fitzgerald puts into the novel you are about to read: The Great Gatsby. As you begin reading think about Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, and Jay Gatsby, the hero of the novel, as the two sides of Fitzgerald. Think of Fitzgerald as putting into his two main characters both of the people that he knew he had within him. As you read, ask yourself whether or not you have these two people within you: Nick, the intelligent and disciplined observer; and Gatsby, the passionate and idealistic dreamer who wants his dream so much that he will sacrifice everything for it.
Fitzgerald himself seemed genetically destined for doubleness. His mother's father, P. F. ...
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Banner." And Edward Fitzgerald, Scott's father, was a handsome, charming man, but one who seemed more interested in the family name than in hard work.
The McQuillan and the Fitzgerald in Scott vied for control throughout his childhood. He was a precocious child, full of energy and imagination, but he liked to take short cuts, substituting flights of fantasy for hard work. On his seventh birthday in 1903 he told a number of the older guests that he was the owner of a yacht (perhaps the seeds of Gatsby's admiration for Dan Cody's yacht in the novel). As an adolescent he loved to play theatrical games--pretending to be drunk on a streetcar or telephoning an artificial limb company to discuss being fitted for a false limb. He was an excellent writer and a vivid satirist of his classmates, but his marks were not good; so, like so many Midwestern boys, he was shipped East to boarding school, where he would be taught discipline and hard work.
In September of 1911, with the words and ...
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worked very, very hard at the third by trying out for freshman football. His problem was that he was only 5' 6" and weighed only 130 pounds, which doesn't get one very far in football. So he scrapped the football pads and found another outlet for his energy and his ambition: writing musical comedies. One of the most prestigious organizations at Princeton was and still is the Triangle Club, a group that writes and produces a musical comedy every year. (Among its graduates are the actors Jimmy Stewart and Jose Ferrer.)
Fitzgerald devoted most of his energies at Princeton to the Triangle Show, writing the book and lyrics in his freshman year and the lyrics in his sophomore year. He was ...
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The Great Gatsby: Doubleness. (2006, September 26). Retrieved December 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Great-Gatsby-Doubleness/52977
"The Great Gatsby: Doubleness." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 26 Sep. 2006. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Great-Gatsby-Doubleness/52977>
"The Great Gatsby: Doubleness." Essayworld.com. September 26, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Great-Gatsby-Doubleness/52977.
"The Great Gatsby: Doubleness." Essayworld.com. September 26, 2006. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Great-Gatsby-Doubleness/52977.
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