The Great Gatsby

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Recommended: the decade ofthe 1920s

The Great Gatsby as a Representative of the Jazz Age

The notorious portrayal of the 1920s is often characterized as an era of abundant prosperity, lavish lifestyles, and “new aged” philosophies. This image, however, was only the surface of a skewed decade filled with deep cultural discord. Underneath all the glitz and glamour of the racy flappers and the fiery jazz bands was a dueling battle of old school Victorian ways versus new aged America (Mintz). This glorious “jazz age,” as Mr. Fitzgerald put it himself, was “an age of miracles, and age of art, an age of excess, and it was an age of satire” (Sickles).

After WWI ended in 1918, The American society experienced an abrupt age of economic and cultural miracles (McDougal Littell Inc 425). What was once a country in great turmoil and despair had rapidly become a country rising into power, wealth, and prosperity. With this great change also came an enormous transformation of the American way of life (412). Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby captured this transformation exceptionally well with its representation of east egg and west egg, as symbols of societies ever-changing cultural views (Fitzgerald 101). Fitzgerald’s “eggs” were two land masses in New York’s Long Island Sound that were separated by a small bay of water. Although they were only a short distance away from each other, the two eggs served as social barriers which were not to be crossed (9). The east egg was reserved for New York’s aristocratic social class that had been brought up in the pre-war Victorian era. It represented the many wealthy family chains who wanted to keep their elite social status and way of life the same, like how it was before WWI (10). The west egg, however, was home to a new breed of Ame...

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...s. Tom and Daisy showed their true colors, by using their social status and the power of money to bail them out of the inevitable truth: their cowardice was to blame for Myrtle and Gatsby’s untimely deaths (Fitzgerald 187). Instead of showing Mr. Gatsby the decency of appearing at his funeral, they simply moved to another home to forget their shameful past (172). Every Saturday Jay Gatsby threw elaborate parties filled with crowds of people, yet at his funeral none of his “friends” were there (Richards). This coincided with the 1920s hedonistic way of life. None the less, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us… tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning- So we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Nick Carraway, qtd. in Fitzgerald 189).

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