On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main concept behind the novel encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Although the actions takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920’s America as a whole, in particular, the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.
Fitzgerald portrays the 1920 as an era of decayed social and moral values evidence in the overarching cynicism, greed and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music- epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night- resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. When WW1 ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early twentieth century American seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market in the after math of the war led to a sudden sustained increase in the national wealth and a new found matenalism as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a