Casting Doubt Upon the American Dream in The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby' is set in the Jazz Age of America, the 1920s which have come to be seen as a bubble of extravagance and affluence which burst with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Fitzgerald wrote the book in 1925, and in it he explores the fundamental hollowness which characterized the Age as he saw it, and casts doubt upon the very core of American national identity - the American Dream.
The American Dream is a concept elegantly simple and yet peculiarly hard to define. At the root of it is the sense that America was created en…
