The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Trouble emerges when the wrong people and the wrong time collide, but a tragedy is not always necessarily the solution of that collision. However, in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby got murdered in the end of the novel. Despite the cause of it, his death itself is tragic. This novel leads the way to the fateful end of such a collision between the wrong man and the wrong time. As what Marius Bewley argued, The Great Gatsby, written by American writer F. Scott. Fitzgerald in the1920's, demonstrates the corruption of the America dream and profoundly reveals the theme: the great and pitiful contrast between people's spiritual and material life during the Jazz Age. The American dream, which had been once looked up to and reached for, in the 1920s, became the nation's biggest irony. Bewley's argument was congruent to what Fitzgerald wrote in 1926, "The parties were bigger...the pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper." The American people during this time were unlike their ancestors. Actually, they looked down on them, and their traditional rules and faith, the original American dream. The Great Gatsby is a novel not only criticizing the corrupt American Dream, but also telling a calamitous life story of a wrong man for the 1920s. As a work a literature, The Great Gatsby can be seen as a tragedy because it fits the definition of it. ''A tragedy is a work of literature...The cause of the tragedy was a tragic flaw, or weakness, in his or her character...The main character can be an ordinary person, and the cause of the tragedy can be some evil in society itself. Tragedy not only arouses pity in the audience, but also conveys a sense of the grandeur and nobility of... ... middle of paper ... ...ars after." F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 112-24. Questia School. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2004. Print. Kinsella, Kate, Colleen Shea Stump, Kevin Feldman, Joyce Armstrong Carroll, and Edward E. Wilson. "Literary Terms Handbook." Prentice Hall Literature : Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes. Gold Level. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. R20. Print. Samuels, Charles Thomas. "The Greatness of "Gatsby"" The Massachusetts Review 7.4. The Massachusetts Review, Inc., 1966. 783-94. JSTOR. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. Scott, William B. In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1977. 197. Questia School. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

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