Irony

F. Scott Fitzgerald employs irony in much of his writing. What should have been the making of a character often ends up causing their demise. This irony helps to show the meaninglessness behind much of what the Jazz Age idolized.

Winning Daisy is the reason Jay Gatsby makes gaining money his sole objective. It's not the money that will bring him happiness, but having Daisy. Yet it is Daisy who murders a woman and allows Gatsby to be murdered by the woman's husband for the crime. In Tender is the Night parties and alcohol are elements of the rich and elite. When Dick Diver's relationship with his wife begin spiraling downward, Dick begins drinking more and more, until the effects of alcoholism on his life force him to stop practicing psychiatry, and he drifts into oblivion. The things that Gatsby and Dick viewed as giving them success, brought them far from it. The irony of their situations reveals the purposelessness of their ideals.

In Perspective

One of the things I loved about F. Scott Fitzgerald was the point of view he uses. As I researched it, I found that his point of view and narrative techniques were some of the most defining parts of his style. The Great Gatsby is viewed as his best literary work in part because the point of view was so effective. Fitzgerald used different points of view to help show his themes. The points of view convey the emotion of the times, but also show the reality of the times.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise, is told by a third-person narrator, who is very much aware of what he is doing, and as much of an egotist as the main character Amory Blaine. "She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again." The narrator appears very self-conscious of what he is doing. Throughout the novel, the choice to include all of Amory's poems is as much the narrator showing off as it is Amory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." And that is exactly the way he wrote the point of view in The Great Gatsby - with this kind of double vision. The story is told from the first-person point of view of Nick Carraway, who both participates in the Jazz Age lifestyle, and observes and judges it. "Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" Daisy asks him, to which he responds; "That's why I came over to-night." Nick is involved in the lavish, meaningless lifestyles of so many, but he can also evaluate it critically. "I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart." The double vision he possesses allows us, the readers, to feel the emotion and excitement of living at that time, but to also see the truth.

In his writing, and especially in This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses point of view techniques to their fullest potential. Through the different points of view - even in the same novel- Fitzgerald portrays his characters and the world he lived in.

Illusion & Disillusion

One of the themes often present in Fitzgerald's work is a sense of living in illusion or becoming disillusioned. Pleasure was the goal of the Jazz Age, pursuing fame, wealth, and love through selfish means. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of characters who are often under an illusion about the reality of what they are pursuing and the effects of their subsequent disillusionment.

Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned desires to live "the good life". Anthony and his wife live lavishly, with the expectation of an inheritance from his grandfather. In the course of the novel, Anthony is disinherited, and they realize their potential to make something of themselves is dwindling. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver seeks happiness in spite of his troubled marriage. He pursues an affair, but even the love of another women cannot bring him happiness, and Dick descends into alcoholism. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby wants to turn back time, to be the only man Daisy loves. "'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'" But Gatsby finds what he never saw before; that there was no reality behind his vision. When confronted with reality, what Fitzgerald's characters believe about themselves becomes an illusion.

The American Dream and Pursuit of Happiness

World War I - the war to end all wars - had ended, taking with it a large part of a generation. The massive destruction of the War helped to fuel the Modernist movement - a movement that viewed everything as essentially meaningless. So now, after all this, was the American Dream worthwhile or even possible? Was happiness possible, or was it always to be the "pursuit of happiness"? F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, "Here was a new generation, a new generation dedicated more than the last one to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths to man shaken." Fitzgerald's writings explore the themes of wealth and social status and their roles in the pursuit of happiness.

In The Great Gatsby, the characters pursue the American Dream with fervor. The Buchanans, Tom and Daisy, seem to hold riches as the epitome of success. Daisy refused Gatsby's offer of marriage for Tom's, for the first was poor and the other prosperous. Tom and Daisy are driven by money. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or what ever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made." They even went so far as murder to achieve their ends. Gatsby seeks success and happiness elsewhere - in Daisy. He spends his life gaining wealth - sometimes legally and sometimes otherwise - in order to gain her love, only to be rejected by her once more. Both the Buchanans and Gatsby were willing to pay any price for the American Dream, but neither were successful. He wrote of the American Dream gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Through his writings on the American Dream, Fitzgerald showed the emptiness behind wealth and success. He would later write "that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not `happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." It was not just fortune Fitzgerald was writing on, but the essence of a country.