Essay Database

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is considered a novel that embodies America in the 1920s. In it, the narrator, Nick Carroway, helps his neighbor Jay Gatsby reunite with Daisy Buchanan, with whom he has been in love with since 5 years before, during World War I. The affair between the two fails, however, and ends in Gatsby being shot and killed. The reason that this was inevitable is that Gatsby created a fantasy so thoroughly …

…still believed in her to the end; the knowledge that Daisy was leaving with Tom would have ha devastating effects perhaps equal to even his murder.         This hopefulness was the basis of what made Gatsby great and why the novel was so representative of the 1920s. The American attitude was one of hopes and dreams and the illusions created fromt hem. And oftentimes the meeting with reality had tragic consequences as it did with Gatsby.