Modernist literature was formed in the United States of America and the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth and twentieth century as the decline of religions, among other factors, caused writers to feel like the world was too confusing and too complicated to make sense of. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1926, epitomizes modernist literature. The Great Gatsby takes place over a summer in the earlier years of the narrator, Nick Carraway. Nick, the 30-something year old son of “prominent, well-to-do people”(8), travels from the Mid-West of America to the East coast to make his fortune in the bond business. While in his home in West Egg, a suburb of Long Island, New York, Nick sees the “factual imitation of a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy” (11) next door to him. This is the home of the mysterious gentleman Jay Gatsby, who gives the novel its name.
One day Nick travels across the Sound to the geographically similar, yet more fashionable, East Egg, where Nick’s cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan reside. It is at this meeting where Nick meets the beautiful champion golfer, Jordan Baker. At one of Gatsby’s extravagant weekly parties Nick meets the host, and learns of his everlasting love for Daisy, and also that his mansion was only designed to be a lure for Daisy, so she could turn up one night and instantly fall in love with Gatsby. After a few weeks, Nick gets to know Gatsby, who asks him to arrange a meeting between himself and Daisy. They fall in love and begin an affair soon after meeting again after a five-year separation due to The Great War. After a series of bizarre events Gatsby is murdered by the husband of Tom’s mistress, George Wilson. Nick then moves back West, and reflects upon what was ultimately the death of the American Dream, through the untimely death of Jay Gatsby. The Great Gatsby is such a good example of modernist literature as it contains modernist literary techniques and conventions, the portrayal of the...