Blog post 23

Francesco Argentina

Ms. Harrison

ELA

5/1/17

Blog post 23

            Choose one of the themes in the book that we identified and discussed in class (this should be in your notes) and decide which one you believe is the primary theme of The Great Gatsby. Explain why you think this is the primary theme and provide three pieces of textual evidence to support your position.

        In the Great Gatsby we discussed in class what possible themes could be for the book. We also studied what exactly differentiates a theme from a topic because there is some confusion there, for example, some people would say the theme of the Great Gatsby would be “The American Dream”. This would be incorrect because the American Dream is a topic of the Great Gatsby, but a theme would need to be a complete sentence. For instance, I would say the theme of the Great Gatsby is related to the topic of the American Dream, but it would need to be said like this; The American Dream is an unrealistic goal that will ultimately disillusion anyone who strives for it. A piece of textual evidence to support my claim would be on the last page of the book where Nick says “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close… Into the past” pg.180. What I took away from this small passage in the book was that Nick is saying Gatsby ended up spending all this time on reaching his goal of the American Dream and it was wasted in a sense because he ended up wishing his life away instead of enjoying it. On page 161 Nick says “If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream”. I think what Nick is saying that a person should have a variety of goals and interests and that if there is just one single motivation behind every decision you make than you can miss out on incredible opportunities and experiences. Overall, there are many themes to be identified inside of the great Gatsby, but the one I previously stated is the most important because examples of it can be found all throughout the book and it seems to be what drives the plot of the story.