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Jack Meredith

Mrs. Wold

English 10

17 May 2021

Great Gatsby Compare and Contrast Essay

Similarity between a movie and the book it’s based upon is vital, the movie must exert

the same feelings as well as the same messages the book exerts in order to appease fans as well

as honor the author of the book. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel about

human pettiness and the death of the American Dream inspired filmmakers to create a movie

based off of it which was released in 2013. The movie portrays the characters and setting

similarly and differently from its novel. First of all, the movie makes a good effort to keep what

it can the same. The “persistent stare” of the billboard depicting Dr. T.J Eckleberg’s eyes are still

overlooking the dark and ugly Valley of Ashes, Daisy still cries over Gatsby’s shirt collection

because according to her, she’s “never seen such—such beautiful shirts before,” and Gatsby still

reaches out to that one green light(Fitzgerald 24, 92). The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg in the story

and the movie are genuinely regarded as the eyes of God by characters in the story, looking over

the world and judging everyone. Daisy truly cries over the shirts because she is materialistic, she

cries over Gatsby’s possessions and does not bat an eye over how hard(or how lightly) Gatsby

worked in order to earn these possessions in order to win her love. Gatsby reaching out to the

light is an example of how the characters in the story clutch onto objects and attach meaning to

them, and how these actions inadvertently change character’s decision making. Due to the tragic

ending to the story, the eyes of Dr. Eckleberg and the green light represent the overall
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meaninglessness of the world and how we all tend to believe what we want, further pushing the

novel’s theme of how impossible it is to change our lives for the better. The importance of Daisy

crying over the shirts is that it was her immoral and selfish actions that ended up causing the

whole tragedy to play out in the first place, her goal throughout the story was to get Tom to feel

sorry for cheating on her with Myrtle, however she ended up being responsible for the deaths of

three people in the process. The movie does a good job of recreating some of what Fitzgerald

wanted to portray, however the movie did change some things for worse. In the movie, Tom

thoroughly convinced George to kill Gatsby, while in the novel, George didn’t need any

convincing, the only thing Tom told George is that it was Gatsby’s car that hit his wife, Myrtle,

and George believed that God wanted him to get revenge on Gatsby. The portrayal of Tom

deliberately trying to get Gatsby killed sends the message that he is evil, and that he knows the

evil he commits rather than being oblivious to his effect on others like himself in the book. Tom

in the book is just as ignorant as Daisy as he snatched her love from Gatsby while Gatsby was at

war, leading Gatsby to live his entire life chasing what was impossible, only to die a premature

death. This ties into the theme of how easy it is to let others suffer and how important it is to care

about your actions, however the movie does not leave in this detail. Also, one thing specific to

the movie is how it gives Gatsby a melancholic death scene with the lighting becoming darker

and the music becoming less energetic as the movie progresses, while in the book, everything,

specifically the green light and Dr. Eckleberg, stay right where they are. The novel even uses the

same beautiful language it provides throughout the story, describing Gatsby’s death scene as him

entering “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like

air, drifted fortuitously about,” the word ‘death’ is not written a single time when describing
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Gatsby’s assassination(Fitzgerald 161). The movie changing things as it progresses gives the

movie the feeling that things in the world had meaning after all, and that Gatsby’s death was a

mournable one and he was lovable for reasons other than his possessions. The book was meant to

stay lighthearted; The combination of the eyes of God, the green light which Gatsby visited

regularly, and the words themselves not being bothered by the gruesome ending which the story

has adds a morbid effect to the story as well as depicting the overall meaninglessness of the

world which the characters instilled with their own meaning. These details are small when

looked at compared to the length of the story, however these fine details should be appreciated,

and giving them love by preserving them in a new movie would have been a great tribute to the

author. Overall, The movie does exclude some nitty gritty details, however it does include the

larger aspects of the story, some of which are not necessary but exist to depict what the book

wanted depicted. After all, it is going to be impossible to make a movie just as good as the book;

and just as The Great Gatsby encourages, sometimes it is better to just party rather than to try

and change your reality.