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The Great Gatsby creates a full picture of the Jazz Age. The popularity of the story to a great extent lies in its rich themes, as previous critics has discussed, which include immoral self-indulgence, belief in perfection and an excess amount of money. The feeling of disillusion permeates through the story set on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. Sustained economic prosperity is most visible, and there are people measuring their success in high expenditure and materialistic lifestyle, which has very serious implications for the way the young decided on their partner.
The life experience of Jay Gatsby reveals almost identical to that of George Wilson. So the thesis will introduce a topic about the similarities between Wilson and Gatsby in terms of three dimensions, namely economic struggles fought by Gatsby and Wilson, a romantic love triangle and finally their deaths from caused by Tom. Jay Gatsby, an eligible millionaire, is deeply in love with his once-loved girl Daisy Buchanan- a beautiful debutante who has already married Tom. Gatsby throws extravagant parties seemingly to show off his great wealth but virtually to draw the attention of ex-girlfriend Daisy and to win her back. And he resists accepting the changes to his past romantic relationship. Wilson, in charge of an isolated garage, struggles on the margin of poverty, in spite of hard labor, and suddenly plans to hurry to move somewhere else, just to mend the marriage with Myrtle. Unfortunately their efforts are useless and they pay at the price of their lives. Nick Carraway, Gatsby's next-door neighbor, functioning as the tale’s narrator and witnessing all events, finds the upper class heartless and merciless, and becomes disillusioned with the Eastern lifestyle, then moving back to his traditional and old Midwest.
2. Literature Review
Since its popularity, The Great Gatsby has led to an outburst of comments, with the general consensus that the book was an enduring work of fiction in many studying fields.
Today there exists a number of theories studied as to which mansion was the inspiration for the book. One possibility is Land's End, a notable Gold Coast Mansion where Fitzgerald may have attended a party.
Arthur Mizener published The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of Fitzgerald. He emphasized The Great Gatsby’s positive reception by literary critics, which may have influenced public opinions and renewed interest in it. By 1960, The Great Gatsby was steadily selling 50,000 copies per year, and The New York Times editorialist Arthur Mizener proclaimed the novel "a classic of twentieth-century American fiction”.
In 2013, cultural historian, Bob Batchelor, authored Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, in which he explored the enduring influence of the book by tracing it "from the book's publication in 1925 through today's headlines filled with celebrity intrigue, corporate greed, and a roller-coaster economy."来~自^751论+文.网www.751com.cn/
As to the ending of the tale, Sarah Churchwell reaches a conclusion that the Hall-Mills Case are somehow similar to that ending of the novel in her book Careless People：Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of “The Great Gatsby”. Judging from her forensic search for clues, she asserts that the two victims in the Halls-Mills murder case inspired the characters who were murdered in The Great Gatsby.
Others value it for the significance of 1920s as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald describes the main stream of that period by the characters’ fates. As Bruccoli comments that “they become a supplementary or even substitute form of history.” (Bruccoli, 2007: 6)