What Is The Theme Of The Great Gatsby's Life

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most well known books in American history. It is a story of the struggles of high society in the 1920s, forbidden love, and how selfishness can ruin lives. However, many people do not realize that this novel parallels Fitzgerald’s own life in many ways. One can see this comparison through the characters, the setting, and the society depicted in the novel. Fitzgerald pulled many experiences from his own life in many ways to create this great American novel, and has provided today’s America a clearer view of what life was like in the 1920s. The first glimpse into Fitzgerald’s life is through the characters. Many characters in the book are either directly or indirectly based on someone from Fitzgerald’s life. For example, Jordan Baker is based on the golfer Edith Cunningham according to Smithsonian Magazine. Daisy Buchanan is based on Zelda Sayer and Ginevra King. Ginevra, the first love of Fitzgerald, seems to have almost an identical backstory to Daisy. She would flirt with men of a lower, less wealthy class, but ultimately married into money and class instead of marrying for love. Zelda on the other hand, …show more content…
He wrote the novel in a sense that the characters were a part of the same society as he was. During the 1920s people were extremely careless and were only worried about having fun, no matter the consequences. This is shown through the carelessness of the characters in the book, especially Tom and Daisy. Nick Carraway states in Chapter 9,“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”(179). Fitzgerald was able to write the carelessness of his life and the lives of those around him into his