Report over The Great Gatsby related to History - Book Report/Review Example

Book Report: The Great Gatsby related to History. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was written in the early 1920s, just after the First World War which happened in 1914-18, and just before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which happened in the 1930s. The narrator is Nick Carraway, who comes from a wealthy background and works as a financier in New York City. The story is told by Nick but it could be said that the main character is the man whose name provides the title of the book: Jay Gatsby.

He appears to be a wealthy man and a war hero, and the book is overshadowed by the legacy of the war. The world was shocked by the devastation and killing of this war, and the reaction of some people, especially the women, in the novel, is to pretend it never happened and make the most of the good things in life like clothes, tennis clubs and going out shopping or to social events. The Great Gatsby is therefore a depiction of the carefree “roaring twenties” but at the same time an exploration of the social and moral consequences of the First World War.

Jay Gatsby is a complex character, and although he is presented as wealthy and sociable, with all the material luxuries that America had to offer in the 1920s, he is not exactly happy, and he suspects that the foundations of his life are not as secure as they seem. He thinks about all the social and material benefits that his city life brings to him and is not reassured: “For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination: they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” (p. 95-96) The rock on which he has built his life is money and possessions, and one of the main messages of the novel is that these things are not reliable.

This shows that Fitzgerald looks back on the lessons of the war, in which lives were lost, and so many people suffered bereavement, but he also senses that there is going to be a crash coming soon, because people are concentrating too much on money and not enough on human relationships. It is quite clear that the human relationships in the novel are disturbed and broken. The American pioneer tradition of hard work was based on the founding fathers’ Christian values of modesty and family values.

Later immigrant traditions were also based on religious faiths which had similar values such as the Italian Roman Catholicism, Scandinavian or British Protestantism, and different varieties of Judaism. This meant that in the nineteenth century people worked hard to improve their chances, and they believed that America provided everyone with the chance to find their “American Dream.” In the 1920s, however, the upper classes had so much wealth that they forgot about these values and turned instead to a much more selfish pursuit of their own happiness in things like parties, drinking, and as Fitzgerald clearly shows, adulterous relationships.

A very important historical factor which influences the book is the Prohibition era, which refers to the government’s decision to ban the public drinking of alcohol. This did not stop people drinking too much, however, and only made the act of drinking into something shady and criminal. People involved in supplying liquor, and people who had wild parties were therefore part of an alternative culture which did not respect middle class morals and government rules. The Great Gatsby shows how this immorality leads to suicide and murder, because people have lost their moral bearings.

The title of the book is therefore ironic because Jay Gatsby is a great man on the surface, and in some ways he is good, because he takes responsibility for Myrtle’s death, but underneath there is a dark side which is his jealousy of people who belong to the older and more respected families, and his desire to possess people and things which make him more like them. The book shows a society, and especially upper class society, which is changing. The narrator Nick comes from Minnesota, and so the view of city life that is given is that of an outsider.

Part of the impact of the book is to reflect on the way that modern America has left behind its rural and agricultural roots, and has taken up a new an excessive capitalist style of life that is based in cities. Industrialization, and the great technical advances that allowed the building of a city like New York, have resulted in a new and materialist middle class which is heading for disaster because it has lost its moral compass. This is the historical moment that is captured in The Great Gatsby.

References Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London and New York: Penguin Modern Classics. 1926, reprinted 1990.