Examples of Modernism in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby Essay

Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Elliot’s The Wasteland are two stories that similarly express the modernist post-war disillusionment. Both stories comment pessimistically on the direction that our world is moving in from the post-war modernist perspective. Both men looked past the roaring twenties, and realized that this time period was actually a moral wasteland. The final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby sum up their mutual lack of faith in American culture to improve.

Modernism is described as an early twentieth century philosophical movement that disconnects from old traditional habits, resulting in a search for contemporary thought and expression. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1950s play A Raisin in the Sun is a story of the Youngers, an African-American family living on Chicago’s South Side. In the play, Lena Younger, the eldest of the family, decides to use a small portion of her husband’s insurance check to buy a house so that the family can comfortably live in the suburbs. Another important text is F. Scott. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The novel takes place in 1922 Long Island, New York. The novel is centered around Jay Gatsby, an extraordinarily wealthy man who holds a nostalgic love for Daisy Buchanan. Nick is identified as the narrator in the novel and from that, he is able to observe the extravagant parties, alcohol use, infidelity, and failure to individuality and isolation in the characters. F. Scott. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, is a good example of modernism for it centers around the characters and their sense of isolation. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1950s play A Raisin in the Sun also identifies characteristics of modernism through the everyday struggles of urban and industrial housing as well as segregation.

When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby the U.S. was in the middle of the 1920s. An age of consumerism, excess, and social revolution. Fitzgerald conveys these new ideas excellently. The 1920s was the precursor to the modern day and was foreshadowing of what was to come in the post-World War 2

Using Daisy and Gatsby as illustrations, he implies that the world of the Roaring Twenties was really corrupt, careless, and harmful and that the American Dream is unreachable and unrealistic. Fitzgerald, through Nick Carraway, depicts the wealthy as having a “quality of distortion…beyond [the] eyes’ power of correction” (176). Fitzgerald expends his full opinion of America’s elite through Nick’s disillusionment with Daisy and Tom Buchanan, calling them “careless people….[smashing] up things and creatures and then [retreating] back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together” (179). Basically, Fitzgerald accuses them of being destructive, selfish, and careless, assuming they have the right to be such things because of their wealth and social status. They’re just as destructive and corrupt as anyone else—if not more so—but they have the option to retreat and “let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald, 179) because of their financial and social status. With Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows the unreality of the American Dream. Gatsby “had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it”—but “it was already behind him” (Fitzgerald, 180). Though Gatsby planned his future around his dream of Daisy, he died still living in the past. Fitzgerald asserts that the same outcome is destined for all who chase the American Dream. Although it seems so close that they can hardly fail to grasp it, the dream eludes them, receding year by year. They convince themselves that tomorrow they’ll “run faster, stretch out [their] arms father…and one fine morning” they’ll finally seize it—but they really never do (Fitzgerald, 180). Fitzgerald says it’s like “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the popular novelists of twentieth century America. He is the representative novelist of the age because his novels deal with the American life in 20th century.

Fitzgerald expresses the corruption of the American dream through the use of characterization of different characters. Daisy is one of the few

The Great Gatsby has been around for ages; it is a story of a young man in the 1920’s who is thrown into a new world made up of the new and the old rich. He is confused by the way these people act and in the end cannot stay another minute in this strange, insensitive, materialistic world. The author, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses many techniques to help the reader understand how Nick Carraway (the narrator) is feeling throughout the story. In the book The Great Gatsby, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald uses effective language to make his writing successful. He uses the techniques of imagery and irony to display this message.

We look back in history in order to learn from our mistakes and to help society progress in the present and in the future. “The Great Gatsby” was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. Fitzgerald wrote this piece during the 1920s after WWI and it perfectly replicates the time period. The narrative captures the essence of the Jazz Age by depicting characters, showing power struggles and by defining the societal conflicts of the time. The novel tells us about different influences on the 20’s such as the Prohibition Act, the success of Wall Street, and aspects of the American Dream. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald possesses the social constructs and ideas of the Roaring Twenties.

In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, many of the characters live in an illusory world and only some can see past this. In the novel, West Egg and its residents represent the newly rich, while East Egg represents the old aristocracy. Gatsby seeking the past, Daisy is obsessed with material things, Myrtle wanting Tom to escape her poverty, George believing that T.J. Eckleburg is God, and Tom believing he is untouchable because of his power and wealth are all examples of the illusion v. reality struggle in the novel and Nick, the only character aware of reality, witnesses the fall of all the characters around him to their delusions.

1. We see all the action of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of one character whose

After a time of prosperity, the roaring 1920’s became a decade of social decay and declining moral values. The forces this erosion of ethics can be explained by a variety of theories. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a convincing portrait of waning social virtue in his novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald portrays the nefarious effects of materialism created by the wealth-driven culture of the time. This was an era where societal values made wealth and material possessions a defining element of one’s character. The implications of the wealthy mindset and its effects on humanity are at the source of the conflict in The Great Gatsby, offering a glimpse into the despair of the 20’s. During a time

One of the main idea’s that Fitzgerald showed was the innocence of a character and their lose of innocence. We start to see the innocence in the character’s at the begin of the book and as the book goes on

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a story that has many different themes. Fitzgerald shows the themes that he uses through his character’s desires and actions. This novel has themes in it that we deal with in our everyday life. It has themes that deal with our personal lives and themes that deal with what’s right and what’s wrong. There are also themes that have to do with materialistic items that we deal desire on a daily basis. Fitzgerald focuses on the themes of corrupted love, immorality, and the American Dream in order to tell a story that is entertaining to his readers.

On first glance, The Great Gatsby is about a romance between Gatsby and Daisy. The true theme behind this wonderful novel is not merely romance, but is also a very skeptical view of the extinction of the American dream in the prosperous 19s. This loss of the American dream is shown by Fitzgerald's display of this decade as a morally deficient one. He shows its incredible decadence in Gatsby's lavish and ostentatious parties. This materialistic attitude toward life came from the disillusionment of the younger generation of the old Victorian values. Also, with Prohibition in effect, illegal bootlegging practices made for yet another way for Americans to fall down the path of

Karl Marx wrote in his 1859 ‘Towards a Critique of Political Economy’ that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness”. By stating this, Marx sheds light into the workings of ‘The Great Gatsby’ thus showing that the social circumstances in which the characters find themselves define them, and that these circumstances consist of core Marxist principles a Capitalistic society. These principles being ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘reification’ are useful aids in interpreting and understanding the core themes that run throughout the text.