The Great Gatsby Modernism Essay

The Great Gatsby is a novel about the failed relationship of an idealist man. The Great Gatsby would be considered a modernist novel, because of its many elements that could be said to be modernist ideas. Modernism broke away from past romanticized ideas because of their disillusionment after World War 1, some of the ways broke away are: rejection of romanticized views, individual perception of situations, and fragmented story order (Martell 61). The characters themselves demonstrate most of these elements. Particularly Gatsby’s obsessive love for Daisy, his loss of connection with the reality of the situation, and Tom and Daisy’s destruction of his life. These matters display certain elements of modernism (Pidgeon). As well as the reader’s look through Nick’s perception of the world, seeing the story through his opinions instead of an all knowing narrator (Barrett). Not to mention modernism can also be found in the meaning of the book itself with its expression of how the culture cannot handle the outdated notion of romantic wonder (Martel 58).
Looking at the story through a single view is one of the elements of modernism this novel displays

Gatsby’s rise and fall is the breaking down of the thought of idealism in America, expressing how wrong and fabricated it is. Gatsby’s blind idealism led him to “never seeing through the sham of this world” and never realizing that Daisy, in reality, is not as great as he thinks she is. Gatsby’s life has all been for her and nothing more, making his life an empty shell of gestures to get close to her, this unawareness of that is what kills him. This ultimately kills off the delusional idealist man, which have no ability to live in this world (Pidgeon). He also loses sense of his own reality towards the end of the book when he still believes that he can somehow recapture the past and go back to the way it was before between the two of them