Conflicts In The Great Gatsby

The 1920s were a time of mass culture that sent America into a dramatic political and social change. However, the economic growth of consumer society had brought more conflict than celebration on the American people. The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald gives the reader a real glance into American life in the 1920s. The novel takes place in 1922 in New York City and Long Island. Fitzgerald tells a story of young Nick Carraway, who has moved from the “East Egg” to “West Egg” to learn about bond business. Carraway moves in next to mysterious Jay Gatsby, who presents the story of his life. The story contains love circles with Gatsby and Carraway's’ cousin Daisy Buchanan, gossip, and murders. Gatsby has gathered many fortunes in order to regain …show more content…
The reader learns about Gatsby’s main motivation by observing the hollowness of his heart. For example, Gatsby participates in organized crime to gain fortune, but his yearning for love seems to grow extensively in order to acquire Daisy Buchanan again. At first Gatsby is shown as an ostentatious person who throws lavish parties in the hope of Daisy to appear, as shown especially when Carraway mentions that champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls(46). But rather than the pretentious parties, Gatsby feels a sense of emptiness and vulnerability:“I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness”(Fitzgerald 88). As the novel progresses, Gatsby’s present happiness turns into an empty heart as represented through,“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (Fitzgerald 96), according to Carraway. However, Fitzgerald gives Gatsby a silent characteristic of a hopeless romantic. Ordinarily, “No woman of flesh and bone could be worthy of such idealization, and both men turn out to be more in love with love than with their beloved. “In any case, it was just personal,” says Gatsby when he tries to take in the knowledge that Daisy never loved him the way he loved her”(Voegeli). More importantly, …show more content…
The reader discovers Gatsby’s level of sophistication as a newly rich by noticing the standards of lower and higher social classes. As an illustration, Daisy Buchanan is known to be in the social class of the “established rich”. Gatsby cannot achieve this because of the past, he refuses to look back upon. Rather he wants to believe in a fantasy that he dreams of. Therefore, the wealthiness of Gatsby deteriorates due to his inability to achieve higher class: “Decline of the wealthy, lazy, and ignorant brought to life by defining “convincingly the reasons of their defeat”(Mizener 1972, 61)(Green). At this point, Gatsby feels confined to being in the “newly rich” class: “Fitzgerald’s book mirrors the headiness, ambition, despair, and disillusionment of America in the 1920s: its ideals lost behind the trappings of class and material success”(Novels 72). By the end of the novel, Gatsby is not an individual success, but just another part of the society’s, as Scott states, “Suddenly Gatsby is not merely a likeable, romantic hero; he is a creature of myth in whom is incarnated the aspiration and the ordeal of his race” (38). In observing the social classes in The Great Gatsby, the reader learns of poor workers, white collar workers(Nick Carraway), the newly rich(Jay Gatsby), and the established rich(Daisy Buchanan). As a result, the variety of characters from different social