movie life like the great gatsby

Movie: Life, Like The Great Gatsby
Brian Olson
OLSON 1
Professor John Hughes
ENC 1102
December 3, 1996
Imagine that you live in the nineteen twenties, and that
you are a very
wealthy man that lives by himself in a manchine, on a lake and
who throws
parties every weekend. This is just the beginning of how to
explain the way
Jay Gatsby lived his life. This novel, by F. Scott, Fitzgerald
is one that is
very deep in thought. Fitzgerald releases little clues along the
way of the
novel that will be crusual to understand the ending. For
instance, he makes
the blue coupe a very important clue, as well as the Dr. T. J.
Eckleburg eyes on
the billboard that Mr. Wilson (the gas station attendant ) refers
to as the eyes
of god. There are also other little things that relate to the
reason of
gatsby's death. The main character's of this novel each have
their part to do
with the ending, Nick Caraway is probably the main character of
this novel, as
he comes down from New Jersey to new York to visit his cousin
Daisy, who is
married to Tom Buchannan. These are some of the incidents that

are included in
the novel as you will read further I will relate some issues of
the novel, as
well as other critics have included their views on The Great
Gatsby.
F. Scott, Fitsgerald was an American short story writer
and novelist
famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age(the 1920's), his most
brilliant novel
work being The Great Gatsby(1925). He was born in St. Paul,
Minnesota on sept.
24, 1896 and died in Hollywood, California on December 21, 1940.
His private
life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became
almost as
celebrated as his novels. Fitsgerald was the only son of an
aristocrat father,
who was the author of the star spangle banner. Fitzgerald spent
most of time
with his wife, latter in their relationship they moved to france
where he began
to write his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby. All of his
divided nature
is in this novel, the native midwestener afir with the
possibilities of every
Americans dream in it's hero, Jay Gatsby, and the compassionate
princeton
gentlemen in it's narrator, Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby is
the most
profoundly American novel of it's time (Houghton).

Fitzgerald had an intensely romantic imagination, what he
once called “a
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and he rushed
into experience
determined to realize those promises. Latter on in Fitzgeralds
life, he started
to drink very heavily and became very unhappy. In 1930 his wife
had a mental
breakdown and in 1932 another, from which she never recovered.
With it's
failure and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was close to
becoming an
incurable alcoholic. He surpassed becoming an alcoholic though,
and moved out
west to become a Hollywood screenwriter were he met his new wife
Sheilah Graham,
but he never forgot about Zelda and his daughter Scotti.
(Johnson, 384).
The Great Gatsby is an excellent review on how fitzgerald
preceived his
life to be, in the same sense that he also was very wealthy.
Gatsby, in this
novel is the mistiries wealthy man that lives in the big house
across the lake
from Tom and Daisy Buchanann. There would always be some type of
party going on
at his house, but for some reason he never attended to them, he
would always
watch from his window. Nick Caraway is Daisy's cousin who comes
to visit, Nick

needs a place to stay, so he finds an ad for a guest cottage that
Mr. Jay
Gatsby owns. After Nick has moved in Jay and Nick become pretty
close friends.
Jordan has always wondered who The Great Gatsby was, so she uses
Nick to find
out more about him. As the story goes on, there are some odd
things that
Fitsgerald relates to the story as important things. These
important things
make you really think about what it means to the story. The
Automobile in The
Great Gatsby is a very big topic for the conclution of the story.
What we have
in The Great Gatsby is a creative manipulation of the automobile
as symbol and
image to accomplish a variety of ends (O'Meara, 74). O'Meara
goes on to say
that when Fitzgerald accentuates mechanism and minimizes
aesthetics, he
depersonalizes vehicles and underscores the behavior of their
drivers. The
existing criticism on automobiles in The Great Gatsby usually
centers on one or
the other of these two functions.(O'Meara, 75). The result of
the car is that
it ends up killing Myrtle. Kenneth and Irving Saposnik discuss
the automobile
imagery from a technological standpoint. Knodt asserts that all
of the novel

symbol's of technology - automobiles, trains, and telephones are
connected with
destruction and evil (Saposnik, 131). I believe in this theory,
that vehicles
are a result evil in almost every movie. In this case the evil
is the Blue
Coupe sedan that ends up killing Myrtle. The other thing that
sticks out to me
is the billboard that has the two eyes on it with glasses. This
board is
referred to Mr. Wilson as the eyes of god, he believes that they
can see
everything and when the car ends up killing his wife Myrtle, he
tells people
that god saw what happened. A footnote for the line in Andrew
Turnnbull's
edition of The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald(1963)describes the
dust jacket as
showing “two huge eyes, intended to be those of Daisy Fay,
brooding over New
York City, and this had been Fitsgerald ‘s inspiration for the
eyes of Dr. T. J.
Eckleburg”(Turnbull, 166).
The brief exegesis examines the imagery of cats and dogs
in Scott
Fitzgerald's jazz age novel, The Great Gatsby. Toward the end of
the novel,
Nick Caraway refers to the hot summer days on Long Island as
“dog-days”(Kehul,
118). John Kehul goes on to mention that many of the characters

in the novel
are portrayed in canine terms. They cynically, in the sense of
the Greek root
kynikos, meaning “dog-like.” Their ‘bites,” particularly in
relationship to the
main character, Gatsby, become worse then their “barks.” In
contrast to this
canine element, Gatsby has a “heightened sensitivity”(120). In
The Great
Gatsby I did notice a lot of the characters mentioning dogs or
phrasing one
another as “you old dog you,”. Myrtle mentions to Tom (the man
she is having an
affair with) that she would like a dog. I believe that
Fitzgerald resembles
these dogs as a symbol of affection. Canine imagery first
appears in chapter
one, when Nick casually tells the reader that he once owned a
dog. He lists his
possessions: an old dodge, a finish woman who cooks and cleans
for him, and his
dog. “I had a dog at least I had him a few days until he ran
away(124).
Almost forty years after the book was written, Ernest Hemmingway
recalls
Fitzgerald giving him a copy of The Great Gatsby: It had a garish
dust jacket
and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and
slippery look of
it. It looked like the book jacket for a book of bad science

fiction. Scott
told me not to be put of by it, that it had to with a billboard
along the
highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said
that he liked
the jacket, but now how didn't like it. I took it offto read the
book (feast
176). According to Hemmingway, the cover of the book only “had
to do with” the
billboard and had already fallen out of favor with the
author(179). I believe
that the cover of The Great Gatsby is a unique one, in a way that
people really
would believe things like that if they never had any type of
religion
background or were just messed up in the head.
As I was explaining earlier in the paper about all the
characters, I was
mentioning things about Nick Carraway. Nick Carraway is also the
narrator of
the novel, he is probably they most sufficient character in the
novel, meaning
that he is always relaying information to others rather than
getting involved in
the mischief. What I mean is, that, the affairs between Tom and
Myrtle, and
Daisy and Gatsby. Nick knows just about everything about
everyone and he is the
newest person in town. I think that Fitzgerald put like this
because, Nick had

no other meaning to the story if he didn't get involved with the
secrets that
were going on. Near the end though, Nick is clueless as to what
is going on
with Myrtle and Tom until the night of the accident when Myrtle
runs out in
front of the speeding yellow cadilac. Myrtle had thought that
Tom was driving
the car, and so she dashed in front of it because she wanted to
leave with
Tom and get away from her husband that was not to rich or smart
like Tom was.
In The Great Gatsby, the fact that the billboard is only
mentioned once or twice
in the film, but it so crucial to how the result of the ending
is. Fitzgerald
is trying to point out that this billboard is the point were
everything takes
place, like, the eyes looking down on the two cars going to party
and that they
are always looking at Mr. Wilson. When Mr. Wilson's wife
(Myrtle) dies he is
shock and is looking for answers to what happened. As O'Meara
points out
earlier, cars are a means of destruction and evil. In two cases
this is true.
One, being that big yellow cadilac killed Myrtle and two, the
fact Tom is using
his car as a medium of exchange for Mr. Wilson's wife and free
gas. Mr. Wilson

does not relize the fact that his wife is cheating on him with
Tom, the man he
wants the car from.
In all conclusion to The Great Gatsby, many little things
in the novel
were substantial to how the ending was to be. Fitzgerald had
really related the
billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that looked like owl eyes and
referred to a
the eyes of god by Mr. Wilson when he talking to Tom. The other
thing that sets
the tone of this novel is the car. this was the murder weapon
that killed
Myrtle and was recognized by Mr. Wilson as the car that Jay
Gatsby was driving
that night, which was result of the death of Mr. Jay Gatsby by no
other than the
man that looked at the “owl eyes “ all day outside his gas
station. Well the
fact of living in the nineteen twenties and being a millionaire
and throwing
parties every weekend doesn't sound that bad, I just wouldn't
want to be The
Great Gatsby.