The rise of modernism between the first and second world war saw a radical shift in cultural sensibilities and was marked by a rejection of 19th-century tradition and realist attitudes. The horrors of the war and the collapse of established spiritual and social views contributed to the depiction of a meaningless world, in which the Jazz Age was merely a facade for loss and despair. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby reflects these modernist attitudes through a number of devices characteristic of modern literature. The unconventional symbolism of Gatsby’s car depicts the destructiveness of materialism and wealth while the motif of the green light portrays the unattainability of the American Dream. Additionally, the subjective first-person
