Paper Summary:

This paper describes how Jay Gatsby, from the novel "The Great Gatsby," and Jake Barnes, from the novel "The Sun Also Rises," are both influenced by societal messages about success, manhood, and love. The paper demonstrates how both men witness the American Dream falling apart and are profoundly affected by their experiences.

From the Paper:

"Jay Gatsby is a man that is influenced by the lavish lifestyle of the 1920s. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is a man that loses his way despite his good intentions. Gatsby is mesmerized and completely taken with the era of the 1920s. He is surrounded by the lush living that Tom and Daisy Buchanon live and he wants to live that kind of life, too. Robert Spiller notes that Jay's "deft and delicate tale" (Spiller 1299) story captures the illusion of an entire age. In many ways, we can admire Gatsby because he is driven to succeed. Gatsby was so driven to success that he would earn money any way possible. We know that the influence of wealth hit Gatsby at an early when Nick writes, that Gatsby beheld an image of himself that sprang forth from a Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God . . . and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a "vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" (Fitzgerald 100). Gatsby even changed his name and reinvented himself as a "Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year-old boy would likely invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (100). These statements illustrate how Gatsby's obsession with money began very early in his life and was a major source of his inspiration."

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