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Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' / Gatsby's Desire for Daisy
exploring why Gatsby had such an obsessive desire for Daisy. ...
Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' / Gatsby's Desire for Daisy
exploring why Gatsby had such an obsessive desire for Daisy. ...
The Great Gatsby: Realism. ... One of The Great Gatsby\s best qualities
is Fitzgerald\s incredible use of realism. ...
Title Of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby’s Greatness There is much controversy on why F.
Scott Fitzgerald chose his masterpiece to be title The Great Gatsby. ...
The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby was a novel written by
an American author named F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1930s. ...
Submitted by groovey_dude on November 16, 2006
Category: English
Words: 1642 | Pages: 7
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Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in the national wealth and a newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American aristocracy—families with old wealth—scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators. Additionally, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, created a thriving...
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