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Maranatha Christian University
ABSTRACT
Dalam tugas akhir ini saya akan menganalisis tema melalui penggambaran tokoh utama dari novel The Great Gatsby karya F. Scott Fitzgerald. Novel ini menggambarkan bagaimana obsesi cinta dari seorang pria terhadap wanita yang berakhir pada kehancuran hidup pria tersebut.
Dalam novel The Great Gatsby sang tokoh utama, Jay Gatsby, seorang milyader yang telah jatuh cinta pada seorang wanita bernama Daisy selama bertahun-tahun. Walaupun Daisy telah menikah dengan Tom Buchanan, Gatsby selalu memikirkan wanita tersebut dan berharap bisa memilikinya kembali. Hal yang menarik dari novel ini adalah walaupun Gatsby telah memiliki banyak kekayaan, tetapi diakhir hidupnya dia kehilangan segalanya.
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CHAPTER TWO: ANALYSIS OF THEME THROUGH THE PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY ... 5
CHAPTER THREE: CONCLUSION ... BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 27
APPENDICES Synopsis of The Great Gatsby ... 29
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APPENDICES
Summary of The Great Gatsby
Jay Gatsby, a wealthy young man who lives in the West Egg district of Long Island, is deeply in love with a beautiful woman called Daisy. Unfortunately, she is already married to Tom Buchanan. In order to get her back, Gatsby holds glamorous parties to impress her. He also asks Nick Carraway, his new neighbor, who is also Daisy’s cousin, to arrange a meeting with her. Gatsby wants to reestablish their relationship and makes their love blossom again.
After a short time, Tom suspects his wife’s relationship with Gatsby. Tom is deeply outraged although he himself is involved in an affair with Myrtle Wilson. He does not want his wife, Daisy, to have a relationship with Gatsby anymore. He tells her that Gatsby’s wealth comes from bootlegging and other illegal businesses. She has already known this fact but does not really care about it.
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The next day, Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George Wilson, that Gatsby is the murderer of Wilson’s wife. Considering that the news from Tom is true, he thinks that Gatsby is his wife’s lover. Wilson immediately goes to Gatsby’s mansion, finding him in the pool, and then Wilson shoots him. After that, Wilson shoots himself. When Gatsby is buried, no one comes to his funeral, except Nick Carraway and Gatsby’s real father, Mr. Gatz.
Biography of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. The name of his father was Edward Fitzgerald. His mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant. Edward Fitzgerald failed as a wicker furniture business in St. Paul. Then he became a salesman for Procter and Gamble in Upstate New York but he was dismissed in 1908. Since that, Fitzgerald starts to work by selling his writing to the school newspaper.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald was thirteen, he attended the St. Paul Academy and he wrote a detective story in the school newspaper. Then he attended Newman School from 1911 to 1913. Later, he went to Princeton University (1917) but he neglected his studies in literary apprenticeship because of his bad health. He wrote scripts and lyrics for Princeton Triangle Club musicals; in addition, he was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and Nassau Literary Magazine.
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novels, including The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (his greatest novel in 1925), Tender is the Night (1934), and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1939). Besides writing novels, he wrote many short stories which were divided into collections. Some of them were Flappers and Philosophers (1920),
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). He had also written a play, The Vegetable (1923).
Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre in 1920, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Judge and his only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald was born in October 1921. He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940 in Hollywood, California. He rests in Rockville Union Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland, with his wife Zelda by his side.
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study
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Maranatha Christian University interesting, capable and insightful writers of the 20th century. Moreover he is also regarded as one of the truly great Americans storytellers (“F. Scott Fitzgerald. Biography Profile”).
In this thesis, I choose to analyze Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. The novel takes place in the West Egg district of Long Island, New York, in the 1920s. It tells a story of an enigmatic and lonely millionaire named Jay Gatsby. He has been in love with the same woman, named Daisy, for years, and tries to win her back. He works hard to gain wealth to attract her attention, despite the fact that she has married another man, named Tom Buchanan. Interestingly, although Gatsby manages to gain much wealth, at the end of the story he gets nothing in his life. This novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, who is Gatsby’s neighbor as well as the cousin of Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby is the perfect example of an American novel in the social history of the Jazz Age; this novel has become required reading for every American high school student (“F. Scott Fitzgerald. Biography Profile”).
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Statement of the Problems
The problems I am going to discuss are: 1. What is the theme of the novel The Great Gatsby?
2. How does the portrayal of the protagonist help in revealing the theme?
Purpose of the Study
The purposes of the study are:
1. To reveal what the theme of the novel The Great Gatsby is.
2. To show how the portrayal of the protagonist helps in revealing the theme.
Method of Research
In writing the thesis, I use library research. I began the study by reading the primary text, which is The Great Gatsby. Then I read several reference books and articles in the Internet which are relevant to the topic to support my analysis. I also read several books in the library to get some theories to complete the analysis. Finally, I draw conclusion from the research I have done.
Organization of the Thesis
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CHAPTER THREE
CONCLUSION
After analyzing the theme through the portrayal of the protagonist in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I would like to draw some conclusions in this chapter. Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of the novel, comes from a lower income family background in North Dakota. Because of his poor condition, Gatsby has to work at a young age to support his daily needs. This situation makes Gatsby dream about his future. He starts to have an ambition to become a wealthy person and tries to reach his dream. Unfortunately, because of his love toward a rich woman, he gets nothing at the end of his life.
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Maranatha Christian University a boy. All the indications above show that Gatsby is being ambitious to become a successful, rich and powerful person.
Gatsby is also portrayed as a hard-working person. His ambition drives him to work hard to gain wealth. His being a hard-working person can be seen when he tries to do many jobs to earn money so that he can become a wealthy person. Gatsby has worked as a clam-digger and a salmon fisher in the Lake Superior for over a year to get food and bed. Then Gatsby works for Dan Cody as his steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor for five years. Later, he starts to manage his drug and oil businesses. All the indications of his being hard-working show that Gatsby makes great effort in his jobs and has already been doing them well, so he becomes a successful person who has gained great wealth.
After Gatsby becomes a wealthy person, he focuses his attention on reuniting with Daisy Buchanan. In spite of the fact that now Daisy is already married to Tom Buchanan, Gatsby still loves her and is obssessed with her. Thus, Gatsby is portrayed as an obsessive person. Actually, his obsession towards Daisy is one of the reasons why he becomes ambitious and hard-working. At first, his motivation to become rich is because he wants to change his financially poor condition. However when he met Daisy and found out that she actually comes from a rich family, he becomes more motivated to be successful and rich so that he can be financially equal with her.
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Maranatha Christian University he can feel closer with her. Moreover, he spends a lot of money for holding glamorous parties and invites a lot people to the parties, only for the sake of meeting Daisy. He also starts to ask people questions in order to get information about Daisy. Furthermore, Gatsby is willing to sacrifice his own life by taking the blame for Daisy’s accidentally killing Mrs. Wilson. In the end, the consequence of his action causes his death by murder, and he therefore loses both his wealth and love. The fact that he is willing to do anything for Daisy shows that he always thinks about her. All the actions that he did, he did for Daisy’s sake, even though he has to sacrifice his own life.
Gatsby’s obsession towards Daisy also makes him continue to live in the moment when they fell in love with each other. He wants to get Daisy back in his life, which makes him become an unrealistic person. His being unrealistic can be seen when he wants to repeat his past moments with Daisy and he hopes that everything can return to the way it was five years earlier when they met in Louisville. Gatsby also hopes that Daisy will go back to him in spite of the fact she has married Tom Buchanan. All the indications show that Gatsby is being unrealistic because he cannot accept his present life without Daisy.
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Maranatha Christian University with love for Daisy makes him behave in an unrealistic way which ruins the result of his ambition and hard-work. He sacrifices his own life: in the end he loses his wealth, his love and everything he has by his death. Thus, the theme of the story is “Obsession about the past love may cause unrealistic behavior that ruins one’s present success and effort.”
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Text
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. England: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994. Print.
References
“Ambitious.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. 8th ed. 2010. Print.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald. Biography Profile.” Bio True Story. A&E Television Networks, LLC, 2014. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age.” Shmoop We Speak Student. Shmoop University, Inc. 2014. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.
“Hard Working.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. 8th ed. 2010. Print. Mangun, Bryant. “F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940).” Encyclopedia of the Novel.
ed. Paul Schellinger, London and Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1998, pp. 416-417. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.
“Obsessive.” Cambridge Dictionaries Online. 2014. Web. 09 Apr. 2014.
Perrine, Laurence. Story and Structure. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 4th ed. 1974. Print.
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Maranatha Christian University Topham, James. “The Great Gatsby Review.” Classic Literature. About.com.
2014. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
