Contextual Study: The Great Gatsby And American Beauty
Contextual Study: The Great Gatsby & American Beauty
1. Comparison provides insight into the evolution that American culture has undergone throughout the 20th century
2. Jazz Age: era of great hope for the future, as end of WW1 set up expectations in people's minds that the future would be bright for everyone
3. decade of economic prosperity, with wealth a desired goal, as money thought to bring happiness and social & financial success
4. underlying the hope was a sense of shallowness and superficiality
5. period of excess when money was spent extravagantly on having a good time
6. rising popularity of Jazz: music form particularly associated with notion of freedom, with new dance crazes, The Charleston, …show more content…
Technology: from Gatsby's juice machine to Ricky's video camera
8. Music: from jazz to rock (Lester's Pink Floyd)
9. Conservatism: from no mention of sexual intimacy to sex underscoring the entire tale, including homosexuality being acceptable by the majority, which would have been unthinkable back then; irony of the fact that the homosexuals are seemingly the only normal, happy people in the story
10. Drugs: drug of choice shifting from alcohol to marijuana
11. Social class: 'new money' was frowned upon, now, being wealthy entails class and social grace; background very important back then, 'old money' (East Egg) and British products (Rolls Royce, imported shirts) considered classy, now patriotism, 'Buy American' promoted
12. Wealth: Gatsby illegally acquires wealth to win back Daisy, but Lester gives it all up to live a more satisfying and wholesome life
13. American Dream: represents path to happiness thru material success: seen in the idolising of successful industrialists, Carnegie, Rockefeller
14. Twenties: originally revolved around discovery & individualism, but easy money and relaxed social values corrupted this dream
15. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before …show more content…
His dull and monotonous voice introduces the audience to his daily routine, when he declares, plain and simple, This is my neighbourhood, this is my street, this is my life; hopeless tone he has set continues when he cynically comments jerking off in the shower will be the high point of my day; shows his disheartenment with his life
24. More wealth he has, more 'sedated' he feels, more dead inside
25. Seeing Angela helps him realises there is no happiness in wealth, the hollowness of the American Dream
26. He experiences a paradigm shift: he wakes up and smells the roses and realises that the Dream is simply a mirage, a hollow shell of what it might have represented
27. Lester abandons everything he has struggled for in search of something more solid and wholesome; striving for some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvement, a sense of his own identity
28. He undergoes a transition from a life in which he was 'locked up', to a new life in which he is now free to control his
1. Comparison provides insight into the evolution that American culture has undergone throughout the 20th century
2. Jazz Age: era of great hope for the future, as end of WW1 set up expectations in people's minds that the future would be bright for everyone
3. decade of economic prosperity, with wealth a desired goal, as money thought to bring happiness and social & financial success
4. underlying the hope was a sense of shallowness and superficiality
5. period of excess when money was spent extravagantly on having a good time
6. rising popularity of Jazz: music form particularly associated with notion of freedom, with new dance crazes, The Charleston, …show more content…
Technology: from Gatsby's juice machine to Ricky's video camera
8. Music: from jazz to rock (Lester's Pink Floyd)
9. Conservatism: from no mention of sexual intimacy to sex underscoring the entire tale, including homosexuality being acceptable by the majority, which would have been unthinkable back then; irony of the fact that the homosexuals are seemingly the only normal, happy people in the story
10. Drugs: drug of choice shifting from alcohol to marijuana
11. Social class: 'new money' was frowned upon, now, being wealthy entails class and social grace; background very important back then, 'old money' (East Egg) and British products (Rolls Royce, imported shirts) considered classy, now patriotism, 'Buy American' promoted
12. Wealth: Gatsby illegally acquires wealth to win back Daisy, but Lester gives it all up to live a more satisfying and wholesome life
13. American Dream: represents path to happiness thru material success: seen in the idolising of successful industrialists, Carnegie, Rockefeller
14. Twenties: originally revolved around discovery & individualism, but easy money and relaxed social values corrupted this dream
15. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before …show more content…
His dull and monotonous voice introduces the audience to his daily routine, when he declares, plain and simple, This is my neighbourhood, this is my street, this is my life; hopeless tone he has set continues when he cynically comments jerking off in the shower will be the high point of my day; shows his disheartenment with his life
24. More wealth he has, more 'sedated' he feels, more dead inside
25. Seeing Angela helps him realises there is no happiness in wealth, the hollowness of the American Dream
26. He experiences a paradigm shift: he wakes up and smells the roses and realises that the Dream is simply a mirage, a hollow shell of what it might have represented
27. Lester abandons everything he has struggled for in search of something more solid and wholesome; striving for some ideal is the way by which man can feel a sense of involvement, a sense of his own identity
28. He undergoes a transition from a life in which he was 'locked up', to a new life in which he is now free to control his