With the culmination of the Great War occurring in the autumn of 1918, it seemed that Woodrow Wilson and his battalion of Progressives would merely have to bide their time until the nation surged forward into a burgeoning new age, one teeming with the venerated philosophy of Manifest Destiny and idealistic social movements; yet the abrupt armistice and the absence of a climactic victory left Americans seething with both unfocused agression and contempt for the generation which initially drove the United States into international conflict.
The essence of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby lies in comprehending this malignant amalgam that led the generation of the "Jazz Age" to reject the formerly esteemed values of idealism, faith, and moral purposefulness in favor of materialism, iconoclasm, and irresponsibility. Fitzgerald's deified Gatsby reflects directly the societal transformation from wholesome, moral, and religious rigidity to licentious pleasure-seeking and polytheism with regard to material possessions and certain human beings--such as Gatsby himself. Yet Gatsby also personifies the omnipresence and might of that heavenly virtue that serves as his primary impetus in the novel: hope.
A supernatural aura surrounds the mysterious, unidentified Mr. Gatsby in the novel's introductory chapters, instilling in the reader even before his presence is formally and directly acknowledged the concept that Gatsby is comparable to a mythological deity. Like a disciple of Jesus Christ in the period subsequent the Ascension, the reader becomes much like a disciple of Gatsby, attaching to him respect and magnanimity--or at least the accompanying notoriety--through insinuations and secondary sources, never once having encountered the man in the process of formulating those grandiose assumptions. The attendants of Gatsby's magnificent social engagements also traverse his kingdom without a glimpse of their Almighty entertainer, maintaining a superficial appreciation for their earthly provider, and in the center of the circuitous quandary that guides even these disciples of material polytheism to a state of indifference to their human god, lies Jay Gatsby.
As the mortal sin of pride eternally befalls those bombarded by power, praise, and prosperity, it, in turn, mesmerizes the "Great" Gatsby himself. The range of evidence offered to the reader includes even the minutest intricacies of arrogance, as well as Gatsby's psychologically catastrophic perceptions of his own temporal omnipotence. Though comparable to the Lord in several distinct manners, the fundamental difference exists in this point: that Gatsby, no matter how seemingly majestic and infallible, was inevitably human and subject to the worst tendencies of the race. Driven by his fiscally contrived sense of power, Gatsby believed that his might would allow him to transcend time and to recreate for the better his past moments of defeat and anguish, transubstantiating them into realities of exuberant, celestial felicity.
It was in this defiance and rugged individualism, which would eventually come to characterize the American 1920s, that Gatsby the god thrived, for indeed, the qualities themselves represented the most revered and most widely accepted ideologies of the time. However, just as the microcosmic deity of Gatsby tumbled into the ashen abyss of excess, so the deteriorating American society would spiral chaotically into the depths of destituteness and crash inevitably with the full force of its ignorance.
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"The Loss and Gain of a Literary Generation"
(basically a revision of the abovewith sources and shit)
With the culmination of the Great War occurring in the autumn of 1918, it seemed that Woodrow Wilson and his battalion of Progressives would merely have to bide their time until the nation surged forward into a burgeoning new age, one teeming with the venerated philosophy of Manifest Destiny and idealistic social movements; yet the abrupt armistice and the absence of a climactic victory left Americans seething with both unfocused agression and contempt for the generation which initially drove the United States into international conflict.
Forged from the fires of moral controversy and indignation subsequent this First World War was a literary generation whose collective works would epitomize the malignant amalgam that led the generation of the "Jazz Age" to reject the formerly esteemed values of idealism, faith, and moral purposefulness in favor of materialism, iconoclasm, and irresponsibility. Though the government was apt to characterize the United States as an outstanding component of an economically and democratically beneficial victory over a tyrannous Germany, the writes of the Lost Generation (an appellation attributed to Gertrude Stein) harnessed the potency of elementary prose in an effort to rebel against the ideology that they believed had provoked American to belligerent status (Meade 26).
In novels of grim reality and psychologically twisted social lives, these master craftsmen placed disillusioned protagonists whose patterns of behavior had led them to a microcosmic depiction of the very dilemma faced by the entire nation (Dunmenil 191).
Rampant sexual overtness, as well as bewildering social crises, consumed the lives of the era's most legendary characters, seemingly content in the gloom and monotony of their daily lives, yet lashing out in unspeakable manners against the expectations of society. Perhaps the most profound example of moral decay exists in Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbit, in the character of Paul Riesling, whose misery and guilt intermingle, allowing an otherwise average, disgruntled man to perform the ultimate act of human indecency against his wife, securing him a three-year sentence in a state penitentiary (Lewis 292-301).
Though the abominable act performed by Riesling arguably escapes the consideration of other protagonists of the period, similar societal discontent and individual apathy and excess surround the fabricated lives of human beings whose very real situations seemed to epitomize the tortured American spirit of the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald's deified Jay Gatsby reflects directly the societal transformation from wholesome, moral, and religious rigidity to licentious pleasure-seeking and polytheism with regard to material possessions and certain human beings--such as Gatsby himself. Driven by a fiscally contrived sense of power, Gatsby believed that his might would allow him to transend time and to recreate for the better his past moments of defeat and anguish, transubstantiating them into realities of exuberant, celestial felicity. Even in the brevity of such a description, the magnitude of Gatsby's tale is apparent; for as Gatsby himself desperately yearned for this nostalgic yet illusory conception of life, the entire American nation, ranging from the disillusioned reactionary government to the jaded, frustrated general population, seemed to long for the same sense of security (Miller 194-196). Hoever, the ultimate tragedy befalls both the fictional members of society as well as their non-fictional counterparts, damning each to a fate rendered necessary by the collective actions of his respective society. Just as the microcosmic deity of Gatsby tumbled into the ashen abyss of excess, so the deteriorating American society would spiral chaotically into the depths of destituteness and crash inevitably with the full force of its ignorance.
It would be an immense undertaking to discover the primary motivations of the often indulgent yet pacifistic members of the Lost Generation if not for the magnificent fashion in which they have elucidated the context of their dismal narratives. Undoubtedly the spokesperson against the abominations of all things concerned with war, Ernest Hemingway not only made evident the agony and bitterness of which the atmosphere was comprised; he lived and breathed that torment through his own experience with the Italian army during the Great War--an experience (detailed almost factually in A Farewell to Arms) that provided him with ample details of the most horrid sort, whose blatant animosity brought home to the people of America the atrocities of war in a language that they could comprehend (Meade 173-199). Portraying quite accurately the contempt for belligerency shared by these contemporary authors is the following passage from one of Fitzgerald's disillusionment novels, Tender is the Night.
This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer...See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. (Fitzgerald 97)
Accompanying the monumental shift from moral and social propriety to indecency of the most profound sort was yet another transformation evoked by the presence of the writers of the Lost Generation, whose contempt for the antiquated Victorian style of prose as a symbol of the rigidity of thinking that led the American nation into the Great War, culminated in the rise of the modern style of writing (Meade 261). Much acclaim was awarded these manipulators of the vernacular, for in defyng the convention of the past, they accomplished a far more encompassing result in allowing all walks of human life to enjoy the pleasures of literature without having to decipher the hidden meanings of "outdated" and "irrelevant" works (Miller 341).
Perhaps the most sobering eccentricity regarding the descending society of the 1920s lies in the disheartening reality that also enveloped the fictional society created by the somewhat prophetic writers of the age. The ultimate conclusion is undeniably morbid: that once the course of events had been set in motion by the disillusioned, reactionary response to the culmination of World War I, both the individual prowess of the common literary figure and the national renown of the United States would spiral irrevocably into damnation (Dumenil 342). However, an iota of hope, shining as brilliantly as the comfort and security of the green beacon at the edge of Daisy's dock, presents itself. For though the literary beings are but dismal creatures in their lives of utter predestiny, doomed to be manipulated and sentence to whatever whims to which their creators have succumbed, the uplifting aspect of humanity is that of the power to resurrect itself, becoming more glorious and more powerful than even the most accurate of prognosticators could have imagined.
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I'm sure a bunch of those citations are bullshit.
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