Destruction and Failure of a Generation in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsb

The Great Gatsby and the Destruction of a contemporaries The beauty and splendor of Gatsbys parties masks the decay and depravation that lay at the bone marrow of the Roaring Twenties. The society of the Jazz Age, as observed by Fitzgerald, is chastely bankrupt, and thus continually plagued by a crisis of character. Jay Gatsby, though he struggles to be a part of this world, remains unalterably an outsider. His life is a reverend irony, in that it is a caricature of Twenties-style ostentation his closet overflows with custom-made shirts his lawn teems with the office people, all engaged in the serious work of absolute littleness his mannerisms (his false British accent, his old-boy friendliness) are laughably affected. Despite all this, he can never be truly a part of the corruption that surrounds him he remains intrinsically great. Nick Carrway reflects that Gatsbys determination, his lofty goals, and most significantly the grand character of his dreams sets him above his vu lgar contemporaries. F. Scott Fitzgerald constructs Gatsby as a authoritative American dreamer, set against the decay of American society during the 1920s. By eulogizing the sad fate of dreamers, Fitzgerald thereby denounces 1920s America as an age of cecity and greed an age hostile to the work of dreaming. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald heralds the razing of his own generation. Since America has always held its entrepreneurs in the highest regard, one might convey Fitzgerald to glorify this heroic version of the American Dreamer in the pages of his novel. Instead, Fitzgerald suggests that the social corruption which prevailed in the 1920s was uniquely inhospitable to dreamers in fact, it was these men who led the most unfortunate lives of all... ...ible Honesty Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. clean York Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Fielder, Leslie. Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mizener 70-76. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. rising York Scribner Classic, 1986. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes. New York Pantheon, 1994. Posnock, Ross. A New World, Material Without Being Real Fitzgeralds Critique of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby. tiny Essays on Scott Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston Hall, 1984. 201-13. Raleigh, John Henry. F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby. Mizener 99-103. Spindler, Michael. American literary productions and Social Change. Bloomington Indiana UP, 1983. Trilling, Lionel. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Critical Essays on Scott Fitzgeralds Great Gatsby. Ed. Scott Donaldson. Boston Hall, 1984. 13-20.