American Nightmare

The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest works of F.Scott Fitzgerald which paints a vivid picture of American society after WWI and provides the reader with a wider, panoramic vision of the American dream. F.Scott. Fitzgerald is one of the greatest novelists in contemporary American literature who ranks high in fame and popularity comparable to that of Hemingway and Faulkner. He is reputed as the truthful recorder and prolocutor of the Jazz Age.The Great Gatsby is his masterpiece written in the decade of 1920s which is the most boisterous period in American history. T.S. Eliot, the famous poet, literary critic and winner of the Nobel Prize once made the comment that the novel was "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Hence the novel established Fitzgerald's reputation as an outstanding novelist in the circles of literature. Credited as the most famous and elaborate work of Fitzgerald by critics, the novel keeps in step with the times and presents a penetrating dissection and criticism of contemporary American society with a tragic love story as its main thread. The novel is set against a background of prosperous and extravagant society where people regarded the pursuit of wealth and joyous life as their only goal in life. As a result, loneliness in the depth of the heart and spiritual poverty is one of the salient characteristics shared by people in Jazz Age America. This novel gives a thorough exposure of the contradiction between material prosperity and spiritual poverty which universally exists in American society.The American society after WWI and before the Great Depression was a typical consumer society. People in this era discarded their cherished traditional virtues and regarded the possession and squandering of material wealth as the only criterion to a person's success. Living in an age of unprecedented affluence and prosperity, people in the Jazz Age can't help leading an extravagant life with large amount of consumption. From their choices of various consumer commodities and the activities of consumption which are explicitly described in the novel, we can tell the symbolic...