The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by the famous American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel takes place pre-depression during the time of prohibition. Many themes are present in this novel but the more prominent ones tend to be social upheaval, decadence and the decline of the American Dream. The novel follows the narrator, Nick Carraway, as he leaves the Midwest for a fictional town in New York City called “West Egg” during the spring of 1922 to follow his American Dream. His neighbour is the famous Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire that is known to throw luxurious, elegant parties. On the other side of the island lies “East Egg”, where his cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom, live. The two theoretical ideas that I’ve drawn from the textbook “Critical Media Studies: An Introduction” by Ott and Mack, are Marxism and organizational culture. The novel itself didn’t gain much popularity when it was first published in the 1920’s. “The Great Gatsby" is thirty-five years old this spring. It is probably safe now to say that it is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction.” (Mizener, 1960) It wasn’t until the 1960’s that the novel became considered a “classic”

and has stayed in popularity with 4 different movie adaptations and a television adaptation as well, with the most recent movie adaptation in 2013 starring the famous Leonardo DiCaprio.

Originally, the Great Gatsby was written by Fitzgerald to “portray the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure, which therefore disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.” The book portrays these points with Gatsby’s false identity, Tom and Daisy’s broken marriage and the tension between the social classes. Gatsby creates a fake identity in order to live up to Daisy’s standards of a aristocratic, wealthy classman by selling alcohol during the time of...