F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is much like an onion. On the surface there is the hard outer layer, but to really understand it, one has to dig into the fresh insides. On the surface of The Great GatsbyFitzgerald portrays a romantic love between a man and a woman, but inside the real meaning is much deeper. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as a time of decay social and moral values, evidence of this is the greed and the pursuit of pleasure. Jay Gatsby’s constant parties epitomized the corruption of the American Dream as the desire for money and worldly pleasures overshadowed the true values of the American Dream. After WWI ended in 1918, veterans found that life was not as rosy as it had been before. The war led to an economic boom as more and more people were buying materialistic items that they would have never bought. With this economic boom it became apparent that any person of any social status could become wealthy. This created the social rift between the families that had just found new money and the old wealthy industrialists. 1919, the women’s suffrage movement, running strong, were quick to establish prohibition in the United states with their influence. This consequently led to an increase in crime and illegal smuggling of alcohol; Al Capone is the prime example of what came out of that era of prohibition.
Fitzgerald intricately places characters in these social trends. Meyer Wolfshiem, a man that is the epitome of the underground mafia. WWI vets Nick and Gatsby’s new found cynicism. Also, Jay Gatsby’s need to climb the “social ladder” shows the need of wealth of the individuals in this era. If one reads the passage in which Fitzgerald characterizes Gatsby’s house as an “amusement park” (41), it is also said that there are guests that attend without even meeting the host. This shows the need for “new money” people to socialize with others to climb this “social ladder”. Also the rift between “old money” and “new money” is quite evident with the...