Great Gatsby Last Names Essay

The Importance of Last Names Today, we have grown to take last names for granted. They’re just always there, no one really questions them. But how did we reach this point? What was the original significance of our surnames? This question of importance also branches between The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby, where we see the curious situations of two men, Roger Prynne and James Gatz, who changed their last names, causing us to question whether or not surnames could perhaps have some negative impact on an individual’s life. Altogether, there is a plethora of inquiries to mak about these curious surnames and their importance to our lives, including both positive and negative impacts to individuals over the centuries. At their core, surnames are crucial for society to properly function. In early times, mankind thought up last names and employed them to differentiate between people, a use we still have for them today. They could be descriptive, such as Miller for a person who worked in a mill, or patronymic. Patronymic surnames were created based on a person’s father or grandfather. For example, a man with a father named Richard may have a surname of Richardson (Richard’s son). If that man’s name was John, his son might get the last name Johnson (John’s son), and so on and so forth, changing between generations of a family.These new inventions greatly
At the beginning they were based off of details in people’s lives, and today society uses them to keep everybody honest, as well as for differentiating between individuals. As far as negative points go, there are people like James Gatz and Roger Prynne who choose to change their surnames to escape their pasts, a trend we also see in matrimony. All things considered, we utilize surnames much more for some parts of life today and much less in others than we once did, mainly due to the growth in size and evolution in how society as a whole