F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer during the Jazz A Essay Example For Students

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer during the Jazz A Essay ge that focused on the high life of the roaring twenties. Each novel tells a different story about life. One tells about the pleasures of life and the choices people make in their life. Another gives a penetrating criticism of the moral emptiness of wealthy society in the U.S. The last novel tells the story of the general decline of the Americans living in Europe. Fitzgerald novels have deeper moral themes than people seem to understand, they tell stories of moral decline. The main characters in Fitzgeralds novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night, appears to have an innate blindness to the truths of their lives, as well as to those that are around them. Fitzgeralds heroes in his novels always have a battle with moral judgment, in which Fitzgerald makes them feel godly or immortal to do works men arent supposed to do. This causes them to walk and live a blind life. In Fitzgeralds earliest novel, This Side of Paradise, the moral framework is not fully developed, and the romantic heros sin never reaches proportions sufficient to earn inevitable domination. A young man named Amory Blaine is the main focus of blindness in this novel. In Amorys earlier years of life he lives with his rich, lavish mother. First of all, her own blindness to her influence on her son is her relationship with him. He is an equal to her rather than her son.1 Amory spends most of his time with his mother. She is more his friend/companion than a mother.2, says Fitzgerald. There is also Mrs. Blaines problem with alcohol. She is an alcoholic that suffers from chronic manic depression. Each time she loses control, she leaves Amory somewhere for him to be raised by s omeone else. On the most lasting breakdown, Amory spends the rest of his childhood and his teenage years growing up in Minnesota. Fitzgerald portrays Amory as his young romantic egotist. He shows how a boy, raised on the knowledge taught by his mother, survives. Fitzgerald uses her blindness as an excuse for Amorys future conditions. As an effect of this alcoholism, Amory becomes a drunkard. In most of Fitzgeralds works, they seem to read like autobiographies of his life. In This Side of Paradise, alcoholism plays an important role. Fitzgerald went on an epic three-weeks drunk, which provided him with on of the best scenes in This Side of Paradise. As he says about Amorys drunk, done its business; he was over the first flush of pain.3 Fitzgerald then goes on to finish writing the novel with s better insight on making life better. As Amory gets older, he begins to get involved with women. This is an area where Fitzgerald, as well as critics, explain Amorys problem. Most of the time with Amory, he knows he loves the women all, but there is a point where his feelings are uncertain of his heart.4 Amory doesnt know what his heart is truly saying. Arthur Mizener ascribes to the book being immaturely imagined5 when it comes to Fitzgerald depiction of Amorys lovers.He goes on to say that Fitzgeralds characters as lovers they show all the hypnotized egocentricity and intellectua l immaturity of college freshmen.6 Rosalind was the main woman that was there for Amory most of his life. She was for him, but he kept her out of his life. Many times did they argue about the way Amory treated Rosalind. Rosalind says:I cant to Amory be shut up away from the tress and flowers, cooped up in a littlest flat, waiting for you. Youd hate me in a narrow atmosphere. Id make you hate meI wouldnt be the Rosalind you love I like the summer and pretty things7Amory knows that this is how Rosalind feels. He also knows that she is corrected on how she knows how he would react. Here he is blind to the true love for Rosalind. Early on Amory has blindness to the consequences of his lifestyle. Amory starts off as a young man that knows what to say, how to apply them, but doesnt use them for goodness. He uses them only for the advantage of getting over others. He tries his best to manipulate his way to the top.A gift of organization and command had always been a characteristic of his heroes though they had used the gift for trivial purposes.8 His life in college was no better, but as R.V.A.S. says, the book if fundamentally honest9, in explaining how honest Fitzgerald gives a reflection of American undergraduate life. Amory lives his life without thinking what could happen to him or those people that it could effect. Fitzgeralds novel, The Great Gatsby, is the next book that clearly shows the blindness of the characters. It is filled with falsehoods of Jay Gatsby. Nick Carraway is the central image of the novel, even though Gatsby is the hero. He is a character whom the reader instinctively trusts. Nick serves as the voice of the novel and the voice of the novelist. Sometimes information in the novel is filtered through several peopleNick Carraway and Jordan Baker. 10 As a result of this technique, the reader does not know what is true and what isnt in the novels tale of love and murder. Nicks slowness in learningthe truth gives an added touch of plausibility to his narration, and makes it very much more dramatic for the reader, who sees him, in the course of the novel, gradually coming to realization of what his experiences may teach him.11 Nicks curiosity for Gatsby leads to a world of false realities, but is only the beginning of the revelation of truth. He begins to get curious about who Gatsby really is. He hears lots of things about Jay Gatsby, but wants to know the truth. After many parties, Fitzgeralds storyteller becomes Gatsby closet friend. The bootlegging gangster and his blind friend transpire through understanding friendships to rekindling love. Exam 1 questions EssayDick Divers third period of melancholy is to make the world better for everyone, especially Nicole. He is a psychiatrist and Nicole is the patient. He knows that she has a mental problem. This reveals the defect of uncontrollable generosity in Dicks character. He wanted, Fitzgerald says, to be good, he wanted to kind, he wanted to be brave and wise; and he wanted to be loved, too..25 He had an extraordinary virtuosity with people the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love.26 This was a power of unselfishness, a power that he could use to give Nicole back her self. He felt as if he could do such an act, and was therefore blinded by his godly attitude. In this novel, again, there is a mirror image of the authors life. Fitzgeralds wife, Zelda, was the same as Dicks Nicole; both women were mentally handicapped. His concern for Zelda was matched by his fears for himself. Dick Diver is what Fitzgerald was afraid of becoming. Dicks response to Nicoles pre dicament, the very heart of the novel, derives from Fitzgeralds feelings about his own wife. Indeed, the psychoanalytic branch of criticism would make the relationship between the Divers and the Fitzgeralds still more intimate by reading the novel as a wish of fulfillment. On this interpretation, Mrs. Fitzgeralds impossible recovery is achieved through Nicole; Fitzgerald is seen to be punishing himself for his complicity in his wifes breakdown by means of Dicks ignoble end.so he based Tender Is the Night on his wifes breakdown and his fears for himself.27 Fitzgerald uses this novel to give an alternate truth to the future for Zelda and himself. F. Scott Fitzgeralds heroes and the subordinate characters have an innate blindness to the truths to their lives, as well as to those that are around them. This proves to be true in his three novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. In This Side of Paradise, he shows how Amory Blaine, the mirror image of himself, goes through his life surrounded in darkness. Fitzgerald explains how the nonchalant ways of a mother trickle down to create a son who becomes blind to women in his life and is ignorant to the possible results of his lifestyle. In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald echoes the paradox implicit in the doctrine of original sin, the concept of man inevitably trapped by the difference between what he would desperately like to be and what he is. He expresses the true meaning of how happiness cant be bought. Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night tells of the blindness of three people, Rosemary Hoyt, Dick and Nicole Diver. He shows the moral decline of a man who falls in love with a young girl, Rosemary, while trying to heal and make the world a better place for his wife, Nicole. F. Scott Fitzgerald affirms in his novels that his characters always have blinders on to the real world, the realities. ENDNOTES1F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1920), p. 212Ibid., p. 213Ibid., p. 1154Ibid., p. 1175Alfred Kazin, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1951), p. 296Ibid., p. 297Arthur Mizenger, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1951), p. 888Ibid., p. 729Kazin, p. 48-4910Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 4111Ibid., p. 3512Ibid., p. 3713Ibid., p. 3814Matthew Bruccoli, New Essays on The Great Gatsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 4115Ibid., p. 4916F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925), p. 8917Bloom, p. 1318Ibid., p. 519F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933), p. 4720Bloom, p.10021Matthew Bruccoli, The Composite of Tender Is the Night (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), p.20122Ibid., p. 20123Bloom, p. 10324Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p.2325Ibid., p. 190 26Ibid., p. 19127Bruccoli, p.163 BIBLIOGRAPHYBloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations: F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986Modern Critical Views: Fitzgerald. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985Bruccoli, Matthew J. The Composite of Tender Is the Night. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963New Essays on the Great Gatsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985Coale, Samuel Chase. F. Scott Fitzgerald. World Book Encyclopedia. 1995. vol. 7, p. 190Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Publishers, 1925Tender Is the Night. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933This Side of Paradise. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1920Kazin, Alfred. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1951Mayfield, Sara. Exiles From Paradise: Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: DelacortePress, 1971Mizenger, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1951Ryan, Bryan, ed. F. Sc ott Fitzgerald. Major 20th-Century Writers. Detroit: Gale ResearchInc., 1994. vol. 2: E-K, pp. 1012-1018