F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby can be seen as a kind of prequel to the Great Depression. Its history of rising Midwestern dwellers, illicit money-making activities, lavish parties, and economic class distinctions make the novel seem like a critical study of the wealth and excess that largely defined the 1920s before the 1920s. infamous stock market crash. For the most part, Fitzgerald’s novel is taught to high school students as a whole or as an introduction to the 1920s and the eventual Great Depression, America’s greatest economic catastrophe.And probably the topic of discussion on macroeconomics of AP.
Jay Gatsby’s character can be seen in a way as a heralded symbol of the excess that characterized pre-Depression times. However, when we meet the main character Gatsby, the smuggling Gatz who builds an illegal smuggling empire, possibly in an attempt to win back his true love, upper-class but married Daisy, he’s been dead for a while. Narrator Nick Carraway’s purpose in telling this story is largely to admonish high society for its cold cruelty and to reflect on the downsides of the mythical American Dream, all told through an autopsy in the final weeks leading up to Gatsby’s death. . Gatsby, with his unbridled influx and attempted upward mobility, has become our tragic hero of the 1920s boom and eventual downfall.
We can see this idea in Fitzgerald’s critical construction of the Great Gatsby scene. Set in the wealthy “West Egg” and “East Egg” respectively, that’s Long Island and New York City to you, we, as readers, emerged in a social environment characterized as wealthy, educated, and socially exclusive and restrictive. The characters dare not associate with others considered socially inferior to them, particularly in geographic locations. In fact, social status is everything and that status is generally tied to one’s economic worth. But even then, one’s social status, like Gatsby’s case, is not so highly appreciated if it’s just money and lavish parties. Despite his big money, Gatsby lives in the less prestigious West Egg, which implies that he has not fully risen to the level of his beloved Daisy, a distance symbolically and geographically represented in the stretch of water between their respective houses. The novel is obsessed with such rigid class distinctions and with the inability of most of the people in the novel to achieve a level of equality with the upper class, making the America of the 1920s almost like feudal Europe. . No matter how many colorful t-shirts, champagne parties, or fancy car and kill people he had, he could never be as worthy of Daisy in their eyes, even with his excesses. His death is also largely symbolic. Rich Gatsby gets killed by an auto mechanic while relaxing in his personal pool. This event, interpreted after the Depression, suggests a class equalization.
In fact, the status quo depicted in this novel effectively ended the onslaught of the Great Depression. Of course, reading The Great Gatsby today with the perspective and knowledge that four years after its publication, the world’s economies would implode, certainly influences readers’ interpretations. However, if Fitzgerald had been an economist, perhaps the Great Depression would never have happened. He seemed to know what sort of ruin the Gatsby-typified extravagance was heading for. The Great Gatsby, therefore, becomes this ominous book with impeccable foresight that not only criticizes the stratified society before the Depression, but, in its own way, also advocates the kind of equality or equal status that it Depression finally brings, destructive as it may be.