The Great Gatsby Film and Book Analysis

Throughout all the stories we have read in our Fiction into Film class, one word used to describe the main theme of all these stories has stuck in my mind. Deception was one of the key elements in The Last of the Mohicans, in some of the short stories we have read, and in The Great Gatsby as well. Many of the love affairs in The Great Gatsby are based on not telling each other about their true loves. Tom and Myrtle would have gone well together, and the pair of Gatsby and Daisy would have worked out excellently as well.

The Great Gatsby truly is a Romeo and Juliet story. It is a story in which two pairs of people are in love with each other, but it must be kept secret or their relationships they are currently engaged in will be ruined. Both the Gatsby-Daisy connection as well as the Tom-Myrtle connection are stronger than the connections between their current engagements. It would really make a lot of sense for the two mismatched pairs to break up, but no such thing happens because each person in this affair is scared to hurt his/her current partner to be able to separate.

Therefore the two couples unfit for each other will remain so until George kills Gatsby in the later half of the book.
If the two couples in The Great Gatsby had been flip flopped, there still would have been problems, because George would be left along with Myrtle gone with Tom. Gatsby would probably stop throwing parties quite so often because the only reason he threw them in the first place was to get Daisy's attention. Though Gatsby and Daisy would probably fair pretty well, there is a love triangle between Tom, Myrtle, and George. This triangle is unsolvable because no matter how someone is matched up a person will always be left single.

Overall there is a lot of focus on love affairs throughout the entire second half of The Great Gatsby. There really is quite a confusing about of relationships going on, weaving a tangled web around all the main characters in this book. Eventually, Gatsby, Myrtle, and George die, which leaves only Tom and Daisy. I thought this part was particularly funny because Tom and Daisy wished to split up, and by the end of the book they are left with no one but each other. The Great Gatsby was a fun read, and was definitely a great break from works with word usage like James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.