Themes:
American Ideals:
American critics argued that in a sense, Gatsby is America. His character embodies key aspects of the nations dreams
and realities.
As well as telling the story of a glamorous individual, Fitzgerald is addressing the fate of American ideals during a
period where the hopes and aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence were being put under
pressure of distorted by the materialism, consumerism and violent rivalry of 20 th century life.
Jefferson envisaged America as an agrarian society, based on farming and living from the land. However, the census
of 1920 shows that America had become a predominantly urban nations for the first time. Most Americans now lived
in cities. Gatsby rejects the farming lifestyle of his parents, and after living on Dan Cody’s yacht, he heads for the city.
Peace-loving Nation
Thomas Jefferson also envisaged America as a peace-loving nations. He saw that European societies had been badly
damaged by wars and hoped America would avoid this. However, Fitzgerald stresses the significance to his
characters of the First World War. In 1917, America was drawn into this essentially European conflict. Both Nick and
Daisy served in France, in the American army.
The civil war in the 1960s also demonstrated how the American ideal of living peacefully was shattered.
Individualism
America has traditionally cherished the notion of individuals being able to live with minimal interference of
regulation from the government.
The Great Gatsby portrays an American society in which individuals have recently been drafted into the army to go
to war, and then subjected to Prohibition laws during peacetime. The novel also reflects the emergence of a mass
society in which the individual may be influenced, often without knowing it, by the persuasive power of advertising
and fashion, cinema, radio and magazines. Individuality becomes a complex issue in such a society.
In 1922, the year in which the action in the novel is set, Herbert Hoover the president, published a book called
American Individualism, in which he reflected on the war and recent revolution in Russian. Hoover asserted his faith
in a ‘progressive individualism’ that was specifically American and encouraged development. The schedule drawn up
by James Gat is a blueprint for such personal development. But Fitzgerald’s tragic tale casts such aspirations in a
tragic light.
The Frontier:
Heading West:
Near the end of the Great Gatsby there is a famous image of Dutch sailors, experiencing a sense of wonder as they
encountered for the first time ‘a fresh, green breast of the new world’. Earlier settlers from Europe spoke of America
as the New World in opposition to the Old World they had left behind.
As the East coat of America became settled, Americans continued to move further across the continent, heading
West. Despite the presence of native Americans, the West was regarded as an empty space where it was possible to
make a fresh start. The boundary between the settled land and the empty space was known as the frontier.
The West held the promise of freedom for everyone.
The Midwest in The Great Gatsby
‘I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all’, declares Nick in Chapter 9. On a literal level, he seems to
mean that all the main characters are from the Midwest, the geographical heart of America.
