Great Gatsby Modernism

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Recommended: How social class is evident in the great gatsby

Lei-Aysia Brownlee
Mr.DeLisle
Honors American Literature
23 May 2014
What does it mean to be an American?
“Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Modernism was an artistic movement that grew World War I and World War II. Modernism, for the most part, represented the struggle that many had with the way that new ideas and discoveries challenged their previous lives during a time when tradition didn't seem so important anymore. During the both world wars authors experienced triumph and trouble as the Great Depression struck America. Experience is a characteristic unique of Americans. It allows a person to keep looking forward or to reminisce back.
After WWI a time in America called the Roaring Twenties was characterized as everyone as rich and wild parties and careless, though that was entirely true the stock market increasing popularity it made it easier to be rich quick. In The Great Gatsby that was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The narrator Nick Carraway is narrating his time in West Egg in Long island across from the most elite New Yorkers called East Egg. He visits his second cousin once removed Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom Buchanan in East Egg. Later Nick meets mysterious neighbor named Gatsby, who lives in a massive mansion and host parties every weekend that everyone attended uninvited. In Gatsby’s prewar years he fell in Daisy and wished to be with Daisy again after he came back from war; however she was married to Tom and he was having an affair with another woman named Myrtle who also had a husband named George. Gatsby asked Nick to arrange a meeting so that daisy can see him since it...

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...and that all the points of life happen simultaneously. “The most important thing I learn on Tralfamdore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future always have existed, always will exist.” (Slaughter house 26) The Tralfamdorians also taught Billy the saying “so it goes” it was the representation of death in the novel. It shows no emotion because the Tralfamdorians told Billy “the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of moments.” (Slaughter house 27) The Tralfamdorians changed Billy’s perception of life and after all he has been through and all of the things he experienced; he realizes that the moment was structured that way and he needed to move on.

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