The Great Gatsby | A Note on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

In the following excerpt, David F. Trask asserts that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's critique of the American dream and the outmoded values of traditional America.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is certainly more than an impression of the Jazz Age, more than a novel of manners. Serious critics have by no means settled upon what that "more" might be, but one hypothesis recurs quite regularly. It is the view that Fitzgerald was writing about the superannuation of traditional American belief, the obsolescence of accepted folklore. The Great Gatsby is about many things, but it is inescapably a general critique of the "American dream" and also of the "agrarian myth"—a powerful demonstration of their invalidity for Americans...

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