Subconscious Persuasion
The roaring twenties was a time of radical social change and the frivolous spending of money. It marked the beginning of the jazz age and the rise of bootlegging. But like many time periods, it is heavily romanticized, and people of the world look back on this time while wearing rose colored glasses. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the exception. He grew up during WWI and experienced the roaring twenties firsthand. He saw and recognized the sorry state of the world. He saw the excess, the adultery, the bootlegging, the superficial relationships, the endless search for money and power, and the overall immoral state of society. In his book, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses characters and imagery to lay bare and critique …show more content…
Much of the novel is concerned with the useless and disproportionate spending by both the Old Money and the Nouveau Riche. One of the bigger focuses in the novel is the way Gatsby is constantly throwing huge parties for only one reason, Daisy. Gatsby quite literally gets nothing out of them. He interacts little with the guests, wastes time and money, and the person he is trying to impress never even notices, let alone shows up. Fitzgerald saw this superfluous spending in his own life, and although he partook slightly, he looked down upon it enough to show the dark side of Gatsby’s parties. The parties cause husbands to flirt with other women, causing pain to their spouses, “Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands” (51). There’s a car wreck as an outcome to one of Gatsby’s parties. All in all, one of the focal points of The Great Gatsby is the exorbitant …show more content…
As Gatsby is incredibly rich, it stands to reason that those less fortunate than him would take advantage of him. Reading between the lines, there are many people who do this: Daisy, Nick, the partygoers, Owl-Eyes, and Klipspringer. Although there are not many explicit characters that “prey upon” Gatsby, Ewing Klipspringer certainly springs to mind when one thinks of the word “freeloader.” “A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as ‘the boarder’ - I doubt if he had any other home” (62). Klipspringer doesn’t pay any rent or do anything really, he just sleeps under Gatsby’s roof and eats his food for free, and occasionally plays piano. At first, Klipspringer doesn’t seem so bad, but after Gatsby’s death, he calls the house because he left a pair of shoes and wants them back. “‘What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there…’” Worst of all, even after hearing about Gatsby, he makes a half-hearted attempt at an excuse and makes absolutely no effort to attend Gatsby’s funeral, even if it meant getting his shoes back. This action is absolutely despicable. Fitzgerald turns a relatively harmless character into an immoral son of a bitch in the eyes
The roaring twenties was a time of radical social change and the frivolous spending of money. It marked the beginning of the jazz age and the rise of bootlegging. But like many time periods, it is heavily romanticized, and people of the world look back on this time while wearing rose colored glasses. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the exception. He grew up during WWI and experienced the roaring twenties firsthand. He saw and recognized the sorry state of the world. He saw the excess, the adultery, the bootlegging, the superficial relationships, the endless search for money and power, and the overall immoral state of society. In his book, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses characters and imagery to lay bare and critique …show more content…
Much of the novel is concerned with the useless and disproportionate spending by both the Old Money and the Nouveau Riche. One of the bigger focuses in the novel is the way Gatsby is constantly throwing huge parties for only one reason, Daisy. Gatsby quite literally gets nothing out of them. He interacts little with the guests, wastes time and money, and the person he is trying to impress never even notices, let alone shows up. Fitzgerald saw this superfluous spending in his own life, and although he partook slightly, he looked down upon it enough to show the dark side of Gatsby’s parties. The parties cause husbands to flirt with other women, causing pain to their spouses, “Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands” (51). There’s a car wreck as an outcome to one of Gatsby’s parties. All in all, one of the focal points of The Great Gatsby is the exorbitant …show more content…
As Gatsby is incredibly rich, it stands to reason that those less fortunate than him would take advantage of him. Reading between the lines, there are many people who do this: Daisy, Nick, the partygoers, Owl-Eyes, and Klipspringer. Although there are not many explicit characters that “prey upon” Gatsby, Ewing Klipspringer certainly springs to mind when one thinks of the word “freeloader.” “A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as ‘the boarder’ - I doubt if he had any other home” (62). Klipspringer doesn’t pay any rent or do anything really, he just sleeps under Gatsby’s roof and eats his food for free, and occasionally plays piano. At first, Klipspringer doesn’t seem so bad, but after Gatsby’s death, he calls the house because he left a pair of shoes and wants them back. “‘What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there…’” Worst of all, even after hearing about Gatsby, he makes a half-hearted attempt at an excuse and makes absolutely no effort to attend Gatsby’s funeral, even if it meant getting his shoes back. This action is absolutely despicable. Fitzgerald turns a relatively harmless character into an immoral son of a bitch in the eyes