Are You Okay?

I am so incredibly sick of the topic of materialism. I do not want to discuss it any longer, but yet, we have one more blog that has to relate to Fitzgerald's stories before we can move on as a class. So, rather than writing a spin-off of one of my older, depressing blogs about how location is whack and my memories are haunting me, lets take a second to look at Fitzgerald's thoughts...

Let me just start off by saying this man was royally messed up. While refusing to write my essay on materialism, and instead using the theme of 'love', I just wanted to travel back in time to ask him..who hurt you!

Daisy and Tom constantly mentally abuse each other, as they are both obviously immensely jealous people, but continue to devote their lives to showy infidelity. They apparently still share some emotional connection, but weirdly love the pain that comes along with their relationship. Daisy only engages in an affair to regain her husbands interest, and her husband only "ends" his affair because his mistress is accidentally murdered by his wife. Gatsby comes along, being obsessively devoted to achieving Daisy's love, but is presented as to only be using her for her wealthy reputation. He views her more of an object or symbol of his past more than anything, and is really only "in love" with her because she is the cream of the crop. 

Keep in mind. Someone came up with this. But that's not all. 

While we have Daisy using Gatsby for attention, and Gatsby using Daisy to further his materialistic obsessions, Fitzgerald proceeds to write another story featuring two characters who also use each other under the pretense of love: John and Kismine. Kismine is possibly one of the most annoying characters ever written, as she is just so painfully oblivious to everyone around her. She literally only gets together with John because she has such an awful tendency to romanticize everyone and everything in efforts to further her own twisted fantasy of perfection. She's psychotic; Kismine tells John to his face that she'd rather him be murdered in his sleep than ever kiss another girl. John is a mess as well, as he pulls a "Gatsby" and treats his lover as a mere object of wealth more than an actual human being. 

Not even showing his relationship, Fitzgerald illustrates Washington in DABR as having high, unwarranted trust issues; he murders everyone that has the potential to snitch on his diamond mountain. Then, Fitzgerald proceeds to kill him off in a plane fight, but for some reason chooses to keep the psycho and the gold-digger together? 

All I'm saying here is that Zelda and Fitzgerald probably got drunk all the time because they couldn't stand to be around each other sober. Fitzgerald is so obviously romantically damaged, it just makes me wonder what Zelda/some past girlfriend (or boyfriend! I do believe in that queer lens...) did. All in all, we probably shouldn't judge Fitzgerald too harshly for being such a wild card in Europe. It sounds like he was going through a lot. 


Comments

  1. Izzy MeremNovember 18, 2018 at 1:42 PM

    Abby, I love this post! It is so unique as it gives a potential point of view of Fitzgerald and why he writes these novels the way he does! Thanks for opening my eyes!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jessica GeislerNovember 18, 2018 at 7:24 PM

    This was really good Abby! I really love the concept and I personally could not agree more! This was a very well put together spin off of materialism! Well done!

    ReplyDelete

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