Modernism and the Great Gatsby
To understand modern literature, one must develop a sense of the structured and ordered lifestyle prior to modern culture. Before the era of modernism, lifestyles were systematically organized through standard traditions. When World War I started, Americans felt the impact of modernism at its strongest with men going off to battle and women working in factories. Lifestyles were beginning to divert from family traditions. People started to abandon their traditional values and adapt to the challenges that were altering lifestyles and thus modernism surfaced. Modernism did not have one specific definition, but an array of definitions and interpretations. The modernist authors who were beginning to surface at this time did not adhere to any one specific interpretation of modernism. According to C. Hugh Holman modernism is A strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression...Modern implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, of loss, and of despair. It not only rejects history, but also the society of whose fabrication history is a record. It rejects traditional values and assumptions, and it rejects equally the rhetoric by which they were communicated. It elevates the indiv
Through his father's words, actions, and social functions, Jay Gatsby understood that being a poor farmer was his destined future. These attitudes transformed people socially by breaking away with the traditional songs, books, and historical artworks. Gatsby is trying to capture the wealth and power of the American dream by accumulating many materialistic objects thinking it will provide his happiness. idual and his inner being over social man, and prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious. "Daisy and her husband, transplanted Westerners who have drifted to the new center of energy and power, the East turns out to be the America of the moment" (Rowe 93). Modernists can be considered a bridge between the (old) past and the (new) future of the individual. The traditional values changed from a prescriptive set of structured rules and order to a more relaxed emphasis on the chosen direction by the individual. Following one's inner being in obtaining one's unconscious aspirations or desires causes a conflict with the traditional values of an ordered society and the individual self. The Great Gatsby is the ongoing search of the individualized vision of the American dream ultimately leading to the crash of the American dream.
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