What Is The Disillusionary Tale Of The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby: A Cautionary Tale In the 1920’s, there was a nationwide belief that the American Dream was dead. However, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald believed wholeheartedly in the American Dream, just not the corrupted version of it which permeated the lifestyles of Americans in the 1920’s. In response he wrote a certifiable exposé on corruption in the form of his most popular work, The Great Gatsby. This 1925 masterpiece is a realistic fiction novel narrated from the point of view of Nick Carraway. Nick tells the story of the people who live in small and wealthy suburbs outside of New York City called West Egg and East Egg, in the years in which America was just resurfacing from World War One. He speaks of the great overindulgence,
The people had previously believed that being a good person and having faith in God would lead to happiness and a good life. However, these fundamental morals had not protected many of the innocent people who lost their lives in the war. And so, Americans abandoned those morals. Taking advantage of the economic boom that comes with war, Americans began to indulge -- to the point almost of gluttony -- in materials. They forsook honesty, fidelity, abstinence and chastity, and instead, fixated on wealth and materials as being the only path to the always coveted American Dream. The American Dream is an all encompassing term which refers to the life goal of any one American. It is different for every person, but it is the common ideal that we, as a human race, strive for, that we work towards. Unfortunately, the Americans of the 1920s were mistaken in believing that wealth and materials were all they needed. The wealth and materials which they yearned for were the very thing which corrupted their American Dream. In getting rid of these morals to which they had clung to for so long they had achieved a superficial form of happiness, in which they could do whatever they wanted without worrying of the consequences, but underneath it all, they were hopeless, lonely souls. When they abandoned their morality, they also lost their hope, their faith, and their passion, creating a generation of people who were hopeless and impressionless. This time period is where F. Scott Fitzgerald chooses to set the scene for his novel The Great Gatsby, and this choice in setting allows him to write a cautionary tale about this loss of morals, and the corruption that the loss of morals and materialism brought upon the American