Themes

• The Roaring Twenties

  The decade of decadance and prosperity that America enjoyed in the 1920s.

  Economic boom after WWI

  Easy money, hard drinking (despite prohibition) and lavish partying.
• The Roaring Twenties

  Fitzgerald portrays the much bleaker side of the frivalous 20s by focusing on its indulgence, hypocrisy, shallow recklessness and its fatal consequences.

  Unknowingly self-reflexive.
• The American Dream


  Core facet of American Identity.

  Settlers came west to America from Europe seeking wealth and freedom.
• The American Dream

  TGG shows the tide turning east, as people flock to NYC seeking stock market fortune. Portraying this shift as a symbol of the American Dreams corruption: its all about getting rich.
• The American Dream

  Gatsby symbolizes both the corrupted AD and the orginal uncorrupted dream.

  He sees wealth as the solution to his problems, reinventing himself so much that he becomes hollow.

  Yet his corrupt dream is motivated by his love for Daisy.
• American Dream

  The dream of love that remains at Gatsby's core condemns nearly every other character in the novel, all of whom are empty beyond just their lust for money.
• Class (old money, new money and no money)


  New money made their wealth in the boom and therefore have no social status, overcompensating for this lack with lavish displays of wealth.

  Whilst old money does not need to.
• Past and Future

  The past haunts.

  Gatsby has dedicated his entire life to recapturing the golden past with Daisy

  Gatsby believes money can recreate the past.
• Hopes and Aspirations
• appearance vs reality: 'endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host.
• 'endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host.' C3

  Lonliness

  'figure' not human, characature of a human, a projection, not real nor the truth.

  Reinforcing the lonliness and facade that makes JG who he is.
• '...possessed by intense life.' Nick on Gatsby and Daisy, Ch5
• 'the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world.' Ch6
• 'im going to fix everything just the way it was before... she'll see' Gatbsy ch6
• 'afterward he kept looking at the child with suprise' ch7
• 'her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.' ch7
• ‘I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight watching over nothing.’ (Nick on Gatsby)
• 'he took what he could get, ravenously and unscupulously, eventually he took Daisy.' ch8
• ‘Angry and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.’ ch9