Essay, Pages 1 (1827 words)
Latest Update: October 12, 2021
Gatsby’s SacrificesJoin now to read essay Gatsby’s SacrificesGatsbys SacrificeSpring 1996The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God– a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that– and he must be about His Fathers business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end (99).
James Gatz was already “about his Fathers business” when he carefully sketched out a schedule for self improvement on the back of his “Hopalong Cassidy” book. He had already realized what his dream was and had created his own personal religion, which was one of romantic ideals: wealth, youth, and beauty. Gatsby, “a son of God,” strived to obtain the “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty,” and to incarnate these ideals with reality. Like Jesus Christ came here as an incarnation of man and the divine, “the perfect word entering the imperfect world– and yet remaining perfect”
(Christensen, 154-155), Gatsby is referred to as “a son of God” because through his invention of Jay Gatsby, James Gatz tried to incarnate his ideal dream with reality. Daisy becomes the embodiment of that dream because she is the personification of his romantic ideals. For him she represents his youth and is the epitomy of beauty. Gatsby, “with the religious conviction peculiar to saints, pursues an ideal, a mystical union, not with God, but with the life embodied in Daisy Fay” (Allen, 104). He becomes disillusioned into thinking the ideal is actually obtainable, and the realization that he will never be able to obtain his dream is what destroys him in the end. Gatsby realizes that Daisy isnt all he thought she was, and with this his dream collapses. The symbolic implications of this can be realized when studying Fitzgeralds religious beliefs and other religious imagery in the novel. Through Gatsbys disillusionment, Fitzgerald makes a profound statement about humanity.
Gatsby: How do you explain the impact of religious imagery and love on society?
Gatby: There are many ways of putting it. To begin with, religious imagery represents the most powerful expression of human desire. A person uses imagery of this sort to gain spiritual gain, or even a sense of security. The imagery that people find most fascinating about contemporary society is religious symbols, like the crosses, or the crosses-and-arrows, etc., that symbolize all of our emotions and our fears on one level or the other, but also provide for a life-affirming sense of satisfaction in the present state. Other forms of religious imagery can mean very different things depending on how you see it.
A large number of Gatsby’s work has been rooted in religious imagery, many of which, like Gatsby’s, have incorporated religious symbols into their work, and they even do so without compromising the spiritual value of the work. Many works, such as the Book of Mormon, represent a form of religious imagery that has been applied to society by the religious leaders who lead the Mormon church. However, to a extent the Gatsby of some work can come across as too simple. Gatsbys writing about his beliefs is so deeply complex that the scope is well defined in his work. It is very useful to a number of reasons.
First, even Gatsby’s most famous work has focused on a single facet of Mormon thought, the interpretation of the Book of Mormon (of which Gatsby is one of a kind) and its meaning to one who is a member of the Church. Thus, Gatsby’s work is an interpretive effort, not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of all the doctrines of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but to provide a brief history and perspective on certain aspects of what Gatsby considered to be Goresk’s “glorifying influence on the church.” Goresk (who is one of the most famous Latter-day Saints) wrote that “my father’s teachings of Mormon theology (especially those relating to our Savior Joseph Smith) have been the principal guide to the development of my belief.”
The interpretation of Goresk’s work has been so complex, it has been called a work of fiction or a historical fiction. This is in line with the fact that Goresk’s work only exists in the light of a great variety of perspectives. I would be surprised if we were asked to draw conclusions on this. However, there are a couple of things we can draw from Goresk’s thought. First, let’s look at the interpretation of Goresk’s work itself. Goresk’s work is essentially a historical tale, in which Mormon leaders and people seek to fulfill the prophetic promises of Joseph Smith to the rest of the world. Although Goresk’s story begins as a literal account of how an imaginary group of people were saved, it becomes the subject of our own study. In some ways Goresk’s vision comes from the time when Joseph Smith had taken place as a young man in Utah during the Great Migration Period (1644-1646). The idea of a group of people as a group with varying needs and perspectives is well laid out in the Book of Mormon. That being said, there was a definite focus on the Latter-day Saints throughout the 18th century, as opposed to the early Latter-day Saints who also had to take part in various religious activities, such as the Temple ceremonies. In Goresk’s vision a group of people was able to survive and thrive within a society that did not allow those things to be forced upon it either verbally or spiritually, so that the people were able to continue living peacefully and be satisfied. He writes: “The great and glorious cause of the Mormons is the
In order to understand the religious imagery in The Great Gatsby, one must first understand Fitzgeralds own ideas on religion. Fitzgerald was a troubled man much of his life, and was a victim of psychological and emotional turmoil. Fitzgeralds friend, John Peale Bishop once remarked he had “the rare faculty of being able to experience romantic and ingenuous emotions and a half hour later regard them with satiric detachment.” Fitzgerald had an “almost religious awe that he felt toward the idealization of great wealth and the romanticization of sexual love, by both of which he felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed, enchanted and offended” (McQuade, 1308). This ambivalence is shown in his religious beliefs. He had a love/ hate relationship with the Catholic Church. He was repulsed by the Church, but the Church had much influence over his moral decisions throughout his life. Fitzgerald once said, “Parties are a form of suicide, I love them, but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves. Fitzgeralds midwestern Puritanism or middle-class Catholicism was his salvation, as burdensome as it might have been at times. It was what kept him from denying his obligation to his family and his artistic integrity” (Allen, 88).
One night in 1921, a friend of Fitzgeralds heard him mutter a strange comment. “God damn the Catholic Church; God damn the Church; God damn God!” he said (Allen, 92). It was three years before he would write The Great Gatsby. In the years preceding this incident, he would often visit with a priest by the name of John Barron to talk about “Fitzgeralds writing as well as other literary and religious matters” (Allen, 91). Barron noticed his “spiritual instability,” and “his natural response to Fitzgeralds iconoclasms was a quiet “Scott, quit being a damn fool” (Allen, 92). Fitzgerald left the Catholic Church and became skeptical as to whether or not Jesus was the Son of God.
Fitzgerald is famous for many things: he is a great writer, he is a great writer that is often controversial. Fitzgerald’s main criticism is that many of America’s “Christian” writers (particularly early American Catholics) are too orthodox to really understand the Bible.
Fitzgerald’s greatest legacy, however, seems to be his own writing: his writing on American Catholics in Ireland. These Catholics, despite often being the best and brightest in the country, were not well-off. Fitzgerald published “A Life with Love” by the Irish for more than five hundred pages and also the work of Edward Blake, an Irish-British Catholic, who was a major force in Irish media and culture.
In his “American Catholic in Ireland” collection the National Catholic Reporter also named Fitzgerald a master of the Irish language, and reported that he wrote about the Irish language as well as about Spanish, and that his first wife, Teresa, was the first to get to know his son.
Although Fitzgerald was not a Protestant, he was a devoted Catholic, and he wrote some of Fitzgerald’s “best” essays for the Times and New Yorker. The only question is which religion he went to.
But that doesn’t mean the books he wrote were infallible, and there were plenty of questions he answered that could have led to his resignation. Some of Fitzgerald’s most notable works included the poem, “The Devil in the Garden”, in which Fitzgerald writes about his father’s religious and philosophical education. Fitzgerald is also quoted in “On Catholicism in Ireland” by Thomas J. Miller (who edited his own collection), and his “A Personal Story” book by Robert M. Raskin.
The book of which Fitzgerald wrote “How to Kill a Woman” which is based on the life of an alcoholic, was available in many newspapers since the 1970s. He was also quoted in “A Life of My Wife” but the book was not published until 1980.
Other than writing “A Life of My Wife” in which he discusses the struggles he had to overcome to obtain a marriage with his son, and his mother’s life after her husband.
One of Fitzgerald’s biggest strengths in his work is the sense we get of his devotion to the “American Christian Spirit,” which he defined by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s true that he was an anti-Catholic at school, but his passion for the Catholic Church is at the core of what he wrote over his 20 years with the Saints (“Fitzgerald’s love was more than religious. It was also love for the land and for the Spirit”) in his own
Fitzgeralds attitude toward Jesus Christ is reflected in his appreciation for Ernest Renans book, The Life of Jesus. He was very impressed with it, which is shown in his 1919 book, This Side of Paradise. Renan was included in “Amorys list of the sword-like pioneering personalities who were concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive value to life” (Christensen, 156). Renan had such
an impact on Fitzgerald that his appreciation for his work endured. Twenty years later he wrote a letter to his daughter Scottie asking her if she had read any good books lately, such as Renans Life of Jesus (Cristensen, 156).
Renan
