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Effects Of Social Mobility In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

The Roaring Twenties was a time in which the Victorian Era was fading due to the birth of changing ideas in many things, from the concept of social mobility to women’s rights. While people expressed these changes, many disapproved of them. Authors from this era began to write about these changes and conflicts in articles, magazines, newspapers, and books. One of these authors from the twenties, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel The Great Gatsby, uses the characters Gatsby and Tom to depict the conflicts in social mobility. Gatsby was a poor farmer who built his own wealth and tried to associate with a higher class but Tom, a member of the upper class who lived on generations of inherited wealth, did not buy into the legality of Gatsby’s wealth. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates how the lower class in the 1920’s believed they had access to social mobility but in reality only a few gained success and were never accepted by the upper class which challenged the ability to achieve the flexibility in class expressed in the American Dream. Fitzgerald uses one of his main characters, Jay Gatsby, a poor farmer who builds his wealth solely on his vision of himself, to show how it was possible for low income citizens to become rich in the twenties. From a traditional standpoint, Gatsby would never be expected to be anything but a poor farmer, but new ideas were being expressed in America. Fitzgerald uses Nick Carraway, the narrator, to explain that “the truth

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