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Examples Of Modernism In The Great Gatsby

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Right after the First World War, in the world, and particularly in the USA, the values, lifestyles, norms and culture on the whole, started to undergo a dramatic change. The new trends gave birth to some new aspects of life and shattered the existing classical values in turn. They expressed a sharp break from the past and its rigid conventions. Admittedly, this remarkable change was an unspoken declaration ushering the beginning of the modern era and the time for dominance of “Modernism.”
In its general definition, the concept of Modernism means a radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War I period. Therefore, in literature, modernism appears to break with Victorian bourgeois morality and rejects the optimism prevailing that era. Modernist writing is …show more content…

Seemingly, he explores this dream through two characters: Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby, the protagonist. Both young men were born in the heartland of the Midwest at the dawn of the twentieth century. Like Fitzgerald, they arrive in New York with some of the innocence characteristic of Middle America, lured to the great wicked city by its promise of glamour and success, vulnerable to its dangers and its corruptions. They bring with them some of the classic virtues like simplicity, determination, loyalty, and perhaps most of all an innate sense of honesty and decency. For Gatsby, beguiled and practically enslaved by the love of Daisy Buchanan, these virtues have been driven into the deeper recesses of his character. For Nick, the temptations of city life are also quite strong, but he is able to turn back before he is consumed. A sense of the American dream’s possibilities animates both men, but Gatsby has allowed the realities of the then-contemporary American life to distort the parameters of his romantic

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