Ridge Scholarship Essay
The Ridge Scholarship Essay
For this essay, I chose as my influence the classic American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many people know The Great Gatsby as a book they were forced to read in high school. If truth be told, I count myself among that group. I believed, like many of my fellow classmates, that our seemingly fruitless efforts at dissecting the meaning of this book could have been better utilized toward more “important” things. However, once I started college last year, I developed a renewed interest in this uniquely “American” tale. I suspect my interest stems from the fascination I have always had with the “roaring twenties” or “jazz age” as Fitzgerald himself described this decadent period of living in our nation’s history. Something about this era seemed to me so glamorous yet vaguely familiar to our current standard of living in America.
Upon rereading Fitzgerald’s novel I was intrigued by the themes and motifs that kept cropping up throughout the story—the decline of the American dream and the spirit of the 1920’s, the role of symbols in the human conception of meaning, and the role of the past in dreams of the future. Strangely, many of these themes related to me and made me analyze and view myself, and the world, in ways I never imagined. On the surface, The Great Gatsby reads as a story of thwarted love between a man and a woman. The real theme of the novel, however, encompasses a highly symbolic meditation on 1920’s America as a whole, and, in particular, the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920’s as an era of decaying social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby himself hosts every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the
For this essay, I chose as my influence the classic American novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many people know The Great Gatsby as a book they were forced to read in high school. If truth be told, I count myself among that group. I believed, like many of my fellow classmates, that our seemingly fruitless efforts at dissecting the meaning of this book could have been better utilized toward more “important” things. However, once I started college last year, I developed a renewed interest in this uniquely “American” tale. I suspect my interest stems from the fascination I have always had with the “roaring twenties” or “jazz age” as Fitzgerald himself described this decadent period of living in our nation’s history. Something about this era seemed to me so glamorous yet vaguely familiar to our current standard of living in America.
Upon rereading Fitzgerald’s novel I was intrigued by the themes and motifs that kept cropping up throughout the story—the decline of the American dream and the spirit of the 1920’s, the role of symbols in the human conception of meaning, and the role of the past in dreams of the future. Strangely, many of these themes related to me and made me analyze and view myself, and the world, in ways I never imagined. On the surface, The Great Gatsby reads as a story of thwarted love between a man and a woman. The real theme of the novel, however, encompasses a highly symbolic meditation on 1920’s America as a whole, and, in particular, the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920’s as an era of decaying social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby himself hosts every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the