Examine the contradictions in The Great Gatsby, including its narrative

Examine the contradictions in The Great Gatsby, including its narrative styles. The novel moves on two levels: Fitzgerald makes you see the magic and romance of Gatsby's vision of ideal love, dazzling the eye with wealth; yet, at the same time, the narrator pulls us down to earth revealing the immorality, waste and corruption of those who surround Gatsby and cause his death. Examine the contradictions in The Great Gatsby, including its narrative styles. One of Fitzgerald's main aims is to show the reader that the world he illustrates in The Great Gatsby includes both dazzling wealth and corruption, both of which are evident in American society of the 1920s. These work in parallel and come together as part of the same society: the wealthy upper class. Straight away we see this as being a contradiction, as the glittering surface impression of these wealthy people conceals their true nature as an immoral, careless and unsympathetic society. This novel clearly does move on two levels. The author enables us to look into the different worlds of money and romance (and whether or not they can exist together), as it is not only a story of superficial richness, but also of lost love and the use of wealth to regain it. These themes alone are a contrast, as money is a matter of the mind and love a matter of the heart. Although Fitzgerald glamorises the lifestyles of the rich minority, he also asks us to question how attractive money really is, by conveying to us the destruction and unhappiness that huge wealth can cause underneath its dazzling exterior. We are led through the various events of the novel by our narrator, Nick Carraway, who is also Gatsby's neighbour. Nick, despite being surrounded by e... ...atsby's eventual death. Daisy, by killing a woman in Gatsby's car, represents the fact that unmaterialistic people are often downtrodden by the wealthy. The rich themselves believe that money can buy them everything, including, as in Daisy's case, a guilt-free conscience. An underlying contradiction of the novel is that Gatsby's rich guests all thought that happiness rested in money, but the truth was that it does not, and never will. For Gatsby, the source of his happiness rested in love, and whilst the rich minority took everything, including love, for granted, Gatsby never did, and it proved to be his demise. The novel's biggest contradiction shows that although love is the source of life, in this instance it has killed a man in his quest to find it. Kate Cockburn Bibliography: 'The Great Gatsby', F.Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin Modern Classics).