How far do you agree that The Great Gatsby is a moral work? What do you think Fitzgerald is saying about American society in the period through the characters in the novel?

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Lorna McGoldrick

Explorations in Literature.

Assignment One, F.Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby


Q. How far do you agree that The Great Gatsby is a moral work?  What do you think Fitzgerald is saying about American society in the period through the characters in the novel?

The author of The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott key Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota. He grew up in an upper- middle class family. The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, which Fitzgerald himself considered a masterpiece. It attained excellent review, with T.S. Eliot being among the first to comment on the book, calling it, “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” (Web 1)  More recent Tony Tanner claimed it to be “the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to come out of America.” (Tanner, 2000).

The Great Gatsby is set in the 1920’s, a period when business was booming and a time of material demands, a period hailed as the “jazz age” by the author.  The Fitzgerald’s had belonged to the “jazz age”, and doubtless enjoyed the trappings of the era. It is my belief that the novel is a satirical view of American society in the 1920’s.  

One of the main themes within The Great Gatsby is the portrayal of the carelessness of the main characters towards their morals.  The work contains innumerous references to the fast-paced immoral lifestyles that the population were leading during the period the novel was set, the roaring 20’s.  The book also shows us a view on the American Society of the time.  It shows us the failure of the American dream.  The idea that American political idealisms strove to allow equality between everyone is crushed, the truth was actually a lot different.  Social and ethnic discrimination was widespread and divisions between the classes were evident.

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Fitzgerald comments on the morality of the period in the characters within the story.  He shows us characters from both sides of the social divide.  In Myrtle, he portrays a woman, trapped in the “valley of the ashes” (Pg 29), which is socially nowhere.  Although she is married to George, a hard-working man who desperately wants to be closer to his wife, she completely forgets her moral obligation to her him and enters into an affair with Tom Buchanan, in an attempt to break free from her social class.

In this futile attempt to better herself socially, she only ends ...

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