Great Gatsby

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How does Fitzgerald present identity in ‘The Great Gatsby’ Use ‘The Bluest Eye’ to illuminate your answer.

‘The Great Gatsby’ by F.Scott Fitzgerald is set in America before the Great Depression, and focuses on the aristocrats of “West and East Egg”; Fitzgerald explores identity through the characters and their greed for money, the search of love and the unachievable American dream. The novel is named after a young man who in by pursuing the love of his life loses his identity. ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison is a novel set in America in the era of the Great Depression. ‘The Bluest Eye’ focuses on an African American family and their struggle, in particular the struggle of their daughter Pecola and her abuse. Both novels capture the failure of the American dream and how the failure of the dream can affect people’s identity.

Fitzgerald presents characters that aspire to change their identity and social class. In ‘the Great Gatsby’ Gatsby is kept from joining high-class society at first because he is born into a poor family; He changes this and becomes the millionaire that we are introduced to as the ‘gorgeous’ Gatsby, Nicks description of Gatsby being gorgeous before he even meets him portrays the naivety of Nick. Nicks sexuality is questioned many times throughout the novel, for example when we are told of how he follows Mr. McKee into the elevator the sentence after “I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear,” leaves the cliffhanger lingering in our minds as to whether Nick was actually there or if it was just his imagination. Gatsby, Instead of accepting his social class, devotes his time into making money through organized crime such as bootlegging illegal alcohol and securities theft. His identity is left as a mystery through the fact that none of his extravagant guests know where he acquired his wealth. All they know is that he was in the war, which causes a wide variety of rumors to begin to...
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