Lost In The Jazz Age: Failure Of The American Dream-A Crihcal Analysis Of The Great Gatsby And Tender Is The Night

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is widely acknowledged to be a key novelist of the Jazz Age in the literary history of America. The present thesis studies his exploration of a whole generation's search of wealth and pleasure in the Jazz Age and his scrutiny of the consequences of false values of that generation's illusive American dream.In the Introduction, I try to show how the American dream, of both spiritual freedom and material success, exerts an important impact on the value-system of ordinary Americans and functions as a motivating force in their life. However, the American dream has ultimately become corrupt with gradual overemphasis laid on its material aspect. Fitzgerald keenly detects the tendency of corruption in the 1920's and gives somber reflection on it in his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night(1934).The second and third parts of the thesis are my tentative critical analyses of the protagonists of the two novels, Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, their pursuit of the American dream and ultimate failure.In the final part, I summarize my major arguments in the previous analyses to arrive at the conclusion that Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver's failure in pursuit of the American dream is due to their misshaped ideal of the dream and corrupt approaches to realize it. Fitzgerald successfully renders a pungent exposure of the corruption of the American dream against the social background of American society of the 1920's.