The Great Gatsby

THE GREAT GATSBY

Introduction

The Great Gatsby took place during the 1922, the “Roaring Twenties”, as it is fondly called, and the “Jazz Age” as    himself coined it.  It is considered a seminal work on the fallibility of the American dream. It centers on a young man,  Gatsby, who, after falling in love with a woman named  from the social elite class, makes a lot of money in an effort to win her love. She marries a man from her own social strata and he dies disillusioned with the concept of a self-made man.  seems to argue that the possibility of social mobility in America is just a deception, and that the social hierarchies of the “New World” or the “Modernist World” are just as rigid as those of most first world countries.

Underlying Themes

            Symbolisms reeked in every turn in the Great Gatsby. Honesty, class, violence, decay, gender role issues are some of the themes represented in surprising situations. Honesty can be seen in each character—the relationship between  and ,  and  and that of  and Gatsby. They hide the truth from each other, which creates chaos within themselves and to the people around them. Social class is the reason why  and Gatsby are bound to be separated because of their difference in social standing back then. However, later on when they found each other and Gatsby, already a self-made rich man, they still cannot be together and adds to the irony of life in general.  who uses his physical strength to intimidate and overpower someone mainly represents violence. The theme decay constantly comes up in The Great Gatsby, which is appropriate for the novel because it centers on the death of the American Dream.  described the New York landscape as a barren wasteland, which certainly is not about the land itself but serves to comment on the downfall of the American society. Gender roles are seen in the characters of the women and men in the novel—who he most portrays in quite traditional manner. Men provides for the maintenance of their women and the women being submissive to their men. The characters of  and  are quite androgynous and homoerotic and they blur the line of the notion of conventional sexuality.

Modernism and the Lost Generation

The Great Gatsby as a whole is considered a work focused on the American Dream, and  it has connections to other literary work of its period. The Great Gatsby’s publication in 1925 put it at the forefront of literary work by a group, which began to be called the Lost Generation. The group was so-called because of the existential questioning that began to occur in American literature for the first time after the war (2004).

Specifically, the Lost Generation was a group of writers and artists who lived and worked in Paris or in other parts of Europe during World War I and the Depression. This group included authors such as , , and . This group often had social connections with one another, and would even meet to critique one another’s work. Aside from the loss of innocence caused by the First World War, the group shared the stylistic bond of literary modernism. Influenced by turn-of-the-century decadent poets and aestheticism (which proclaims the doctrine of “art for art’s sake”), the modernist movement was a move away from realism. Instead, characters’ subjective experiences were portrayed through stream-of-consciousness techniques, symbolism, or disjointed time frames. The Great Gatsby is an early exemplar of the modernist techniques of the Lost Generation, illustrating a type of jumbled symbolism in the first image of Gatsby and in the description of the “valley of ashes” (2002).

Conclusion

The shallow pursuit of wealth and social status results in tragedy in  The Great Gatsby. Each character has their own way of showing off their wealth and status. Whether it is by the type of car they drive or the location of their house and even the type of person they are married to are all symbolisms of moral decay of each character. It also depicts the primal instinct of human beings to be regarded as someone desirable and special even if this instinct leads self-destruction. The American dream was utterly lost in the Great Gatsby and in the unfolding events of a doomed romance,  simultaneously reveal the tragic fate of American values.  portrays his characters as the ultimate failure of the American Dream in that individuals tend to believe wealth can get you anything—even love. Gatsby and the other characters in story act as vessels for the author’s true message. That the American Dream, once a pure and mighty ideal has been buried and replaced by mindless acts of power-grabbing, in the form of material wealth.

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