Great Gatsby Setting As a Prequel to the Great Depression
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be considered a prequel to the Great Depression. Its story of social mountaineering Midwesterners, illicit cash-making activities, lavish events, and financial class differences makes the unconventional appear vital to look at the wealth and extra that largely described the Twenties earlier than the infamous inventory marketplace crash. For the most element, Fitzgerald’s novel is taught to high schoolers in conjunction with or as an introduction to the Twenties and the eventual Great Depression, America’s biggest economic catastrophe and likely AP Macroeconomics subject matter of discussion.
The individual Jay Gatsby can be seen as a foreshadowed symbol of the excess that characterized pre-Depression times. Yet, by the point we meet the identified person, Gatsby, the bootlegging Gatz, who builds an unlawful bootlegging empire arguably in an attempt to win back his proper love, the excessive class, but married Daisy—he has already been lifeless for a while.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, ‘s motive in telling this tale is to admonish excessive society for its cold cruelty and ponder the downsides of the mythical American Dream-all advised through an autopsy of the final weeks main as much as Gatsby’s death. With his unbridled affluence and strive for social ascension, Gatsby is our tragic hero of the Nineteen Twenties boom and the eventual bust.
This concept is seen in Fitzgerald’s essential production of the Great Gatsby setting. Set inside the rich “West Egg” and “East Egg”, it is Long Island and New York City to you as readers emerge in a social setting characterized as wealthy, knowledgeable, socially extraordinary, and restrictive.
The characters do not dare to partner with others, considering they are socially under them, especially in geographical locations. Social fame is the entirety, and that fame is normally tied to 1’s monetary worth. But even then, one’s social popularity- such as in the case of Gatsby- isn’t always as high-regarded if it’s simply money and lavish parties you’ve got. Despite his large bucks, Gatsby lives in the less prestigious West Egg, implying he has no longer ascended to the level of his love Daisy.
A distance symbolically and geographically represented inside the span of water among their respective houses. The novel is obsessed with such rigid magnificence distinctions and the lack of ability for most people to achieve equality with better elegance, making Twenties America almost like feudal Europe. No, it depended on how many colored shirts, champagne-fueled parties, or fancy-schma, people-killing motors he had.
He could never be an equal worth of Daisy in her eyes, even with his extra. His death is also, in large part, symbolic. The wealthy Gatsby ends up murdered by a blue-collar auto mechanic simultaneously as kicking again at his private pool. This event was interpreted as up-depression and advised an equalization of classes.
In reality, the reputation quo represented in this novel turned up with the onslaught of the Great Depression. Reading The Great Gatsby nowadays with the hindsight and know-how that 4 years after its booklet, the world’s economies might implode, without doubt, colors readers’ interpretations. Yet, if Fitzgerald had been an economist, possibly The Great Depression may also have in no way taken place.
He seemed to recognize what type of smash the extravagance typified by using Gatsby changed into the heading. Therefore, the Great Gatsby turns into this ominous e-book with impeccable foresight that not only criticizes the stratified society pre-Depression but also argues for the sort of equality or equal repute that the Depression subsequently brings but destructively.
