It is Vonnegut's own parody of himself and his works. "The various themes and mannerisms that have animated the earlier novels are seen here in a grotesque, cartoon version of themselves," (Todd). It is a confrontation of tragedy of America brought forth by Vonnegut's sensitivity to tragedy (Uphaus), where Vonnegut "seems to rub middle America's nose in the sheer ugliness of life." (Merill) The story Breakfast of Champions is a story of "two lonesome, skinny old men on a planet which was dying fast,"(p.???). One of these two men is Dwayne Hoover, a "fabulously well-to-do" Pontiac Dealer, and the other is Kilgore Trout, an "unknown" and unsuccessful science fiction writer.
We are left to believe that Fitzgerald was highly discontented with this new lifestyle- being part of the “lost generation” himself – and we get the sense that he thought that the boom wouldn’t last, which he may have accurately predicted as the stock market inevitably crashed in 1929. In fact, he often tries so clearly to highlight the darker side and harsh reality of this era, that the reader is often left considering the possibility that Fitzgerald has much stronger motives for this novel than we initially expect. Was Fitzgerald’s main reason for writing this novel to convey the immorality and corruption in society at that time? The first suggestion we get of this is through the way Fitzgerald conveys the women at that time, and through the features of the female characters. He often makes negative references to the typical “flapper” style that was present in New York at this time, and focused on the growing independence of women.
gatsby "Wealth is a bottomless pit which will only be achieved through questioning the fibre of a person’s moral principles.” In light of this view, Compare and Contrast the treatment of wealth and moral principles in The Great Gatsby and A handful of Dust In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald offers commentary on a variety of themes justice, power, greed, betrayal and the American Dream. Of all the themes, perhaps none is better developed than that of the treatment of wealth. Offering a vivid peek into American life in the 1920s, Fitzgerald carefully creates distinct social classes’ old money, new money, and no money. Often considered her finest work, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust focuses the majority of the novel’s tension on Tony Last’s mostly humorous endeavours to keep his anachronistic values in an increasingly volatile society. A handful of Dust was written by Evelyn Waugh; and was published in the year 1934.
Furthermore, the small act of Nick wiping the ‘spot of lather’ from Mckee’s cheek, his reserve broken down by alcohol, also achieves a portrayal of his drunken state. Throughout the chapter, Fitzgerald uses juxtaposition of contrasting settings of The Valley of Ashes and New York. The ‘desolate’ imagery of The Valley of Ashes is intensified with Fitzgerald’s presentation of images of nature alongside images of decay. This can be seen in the ‘wheat’ alongside the ‘rising smoke’ and ‘ashes’. The setting’s bleak nature stands in stark contrast to the ‘sunshine’ and the ‘almost pastoral’ nature of the setting of New York.
East to west is represented as a continuous journey, like that of life to death, forever taking Gatsby away from the past and his dream. The preposterous amount of corruption in society and the end of dreams and life is symbolised by dust. This corruption is what eventually brings Gatsby to his tragic death. Although East Egg and West Egg are separated “only by a courtesy bay” they have “dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size (p.10).” The west is home to Gatsby and the nouveau rich. The West Eggers seek to tastelessly imitate the East.
In sharp contrast ‘T’ is the brooding, malevolent personification of a post World War II generation that has never witnessed peace and calm, wanting nothing but to inflict more of the devastation that he is used to. ‘T’ has a revolutionary idealism that gradually gains momentum as the plot unfolds with striking similarities to the great revolutionaries of the time. Both protagonists have completely different settings into which they are able to influence the plot. The calm and tranquil backdrop in ‘The Country of the Blind (TCotB, 1904)’ is in direct contrast to the apocalyptic post blitz scene in ‘The Destructors (TD, 1954)’. These differences force ‘T’ and Nunez to impact on plot development and structure in very different ways.
The Importance of Color F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, the great Gatsby, takes place in the fictional peninsulas of East Egg and West Egg just after World War I during the prohibition era. The book is about the dreams of one man who is stuck in the past, embodying the American dream and his eventual destruction because of the corruption of the American dream. From both the side of this story, there is an underlying theme of power gained from wealth and artificial social status. All throughout the book, the Great Gatsby, there are many types of color symbolism, mainly referring to the colors gold and white for money and emptiness respectively; the more prominent of these symbols are the character Daisy, the clothing and major items, and the “Valley of Ashes.” Fitzgerald puts a lot of emphasis on a major character, Daisy, in his novel, The Great Gatsby. It begins with her name, Daisy, and use of the colors of a daisy with its golden center surrounded by white petals.
At the time Brave new world was authored there were substantial issues worldwide. The economic depression in capitalist societies, fascism emerging in Europe and the high rate of unemployment meant people longed for the kind of security that Huxley provided the citizens of his fictional world. This affected Huxley, his writing and ultimately his vision of the future which inevitably seeped into Brave new world. He exaggerates all the present worrying trends of his time so that they produce awful consequences. The movement towards socialism in the 1920’s for example becomes the totalitarian state, the growth in materialism transforms into a form of religion- where humans are mass produced and henry ford is god- and depicts the end of the traditional and familiar life which becomes a strange and sterile modern state.
The Upper Class Has No Class By Olivia Faulkner Taking a dive into The Great Gatsby, you sink headfirst into a massive abyss of a criticism of the American upper-class. To do this, F. Scott Fitzgerald takes his life and merely copy and pastes it into that of Nick Carraway’s, giving a sense of authenticity to the story. It is in this copy-and-paste-material that we can find true meaning behind The Great Gatsby, and why it’s exposure of the upper-class was so effective. He takes qualities from people in his own life, transfers them to a character, and creates someone “new” that pushes his view of society, showing through characterization the ways of a seemingly-superior upper-class. In The Great Gatsby, we see an abundance of shallow characters.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic twentieth-century story of Jay Gatsby's quest for Daisy Buchanan, examines and critiques Gatsby's particular vision of the 1920's American Dream. Written in 1925, the novel serves as a bridge between World War I and the Great Depression of the early 1930's. Although Fitzgerald was an avid participant in the stereotypical "Roaring Twenties" lifestyle of wild partying and bootleg liquor, he was also an astute critic of his time period. The Great Gatsby certainly serves more to detail society's failure to fulfill its potential than it does to glamorize Fitzgerald's "Jazz Age." Fitzgerald's social insight in The Great Gatsby focuses on a select group: priviliged young people between the ages of 20 and 30.