1920

I n t r o d u c t i o n - 1 9 2 0 s a s r e f l e c t e d i n l i t e r a t u r e

I chose to write about the twenties because I was impressed about the way that people “thought” and “treated” life in that decade. This period is one with important ascensions and at the end an enormous fall that “destroyed” the American dream. Many people saw life in that period as somethingordinary and did not know what to appreciate about it. But there were still people that had a different opinion about what existence meant in that time; they were the writers that tried through their works to close themselves in a perfect world. In their works, they show that immoral world but they try through their characters to save it, the characters are not completely dominated of money and havesomething human in them that is love.
This what F.Scott Fitzgerald, a well-known author from the twenties portrayed in his book entitled “THE GREAT GATSBY”. He presents a world in which the society plays the role of destiny forcing man to worship it or be destroyed; the common man might be a true hero and their destiny truly tragic. Fitzgerald’s best books form a kind of spiritualhistory of the “Lost Generation”. Here’s one of Fitzgerald’s descriptions of this new generation who had “lost” their American ideals: ”They had grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken “. Two concerns now filled their lives: “the fear of poverty and the worship of success”. From the beginning, .the writer had a feeling that the twenties would end up badly, for bothhimself and America. Therefore, “All stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them”.
THE GREAT GATSBY published in 1925 is about an American dream, one dreamt by the romantic wealthy bootlegger who gives the book its name. He has become wealthy because, as a poor boy, he fell in love with a girl cocooned in wealth. The great levelling of the war, which turned him into a youngofficer, seemed to make her nearly accessible, but there are things he does not understand – that the past cannot be repeated, that the dream one has of oneself cannot be realized by the mere act of willing it. Further, the gradual revelation of Gatsby’s past – presented in a series of flashbacks that appear in non-chronological order, related through the consciousness of Nick Carraway, theobserver narrator –corresponds to the destruction of the dream which is Gatsby’s sole reason for being.
One of Fitzgerald’s main ideas is that American idealism has been corrupted by adopting materialism as its goal. Jay Gatsby is a personality and a name he created for himself: his background is invented, his fortune was made by dishonest means, and the Daisy he loves is a product of hisimagination. His whole existence is a sandcastle .His social status is emblematic of the age: to get rich at all costs and very quickly, whether one has the qualities to deserve it or not. Fitzgerald adds a romantic touch to all this: he tries to save Gatsby from being assimilated into the ruthless world of gangsters by his love for Daisy. The corrupting effect of wealth is demonstrated through theconflict between the established rich and the newly rich, represented by the East Eggers (e.g. the Buchanans ) and the West Eggers (e.g. Jay Gatsby). Hypocritical and morally careless, the East Eggers naturally regard any change in the social hierarchy as a threat to the entire structure of society .The West Eggers live in a world of ostentatious vulgarity, resulting the adoption of wealth as theirsole standard. While society is changing, as shown by the Negroes in their limousine, the nature of the change is that the lower orders are trying to adopt the values and standards of the privileged classes, which are false to begin with. This both classes are equally, and the East Eggers and West Eggers are virtually identical when seen from a distance.
The degradation of the “American...