Decline In The Great Gatsby

In the context of the Jazz Age, the term great would suggest the sort of vaudeville billing that would have been given to one in a theatrical performance, of which Gatsby is not worthy of. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a classic piece of American literature set in 1922 New York City, at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, notices the mysterious figure looming over him in the mansion located right next door to his own dwelling, and eventually befriends him after receiving an invitation to one of Jay Gatsby’s extraordinary parties. The festivities at Gatsby’s mansion suddenly stop one weekend, as he now has a slight hold on the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan. After a quarrel between Gatsby

Even though Gatsby seems to have his heart invested in only Daisy, it also seems as if he was merely invested only in his own idealization of her, which may be a driving factor in why the two of them were forced apart. This can be seen when Nick thinks to himself, “He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real” (Fitzgerald ). In the same scene when Nick learns about Gatsby’s bootlegging industry, this is also when the awkward love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom comes to an abrupt end. Gatsby is unable to convince Daisy that she belongs with him and not Tom, and Daisy states that even though she does love Gatsby, she will not leave Tom. All of Gatsby’s wealth, success, and fame were not enough to convince Daisy to leave her

The attendees know virtually nothing about who this man is, but the numerous amounts of rumors begin to swirl. Although none of these supposed stories are reality, Nick eventually learns the truth behind the accumulation of Gatsby’s wealth. Once Nick meets the infamous Meyer Wolfsheim, the man behind the rigging of the 1919 World Series, he becomes skeptical about Gatsby. Nick expresses this by saying, “The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe” (Fitzgerald ). Nick does not exactly like the fact that Gatsby surrounds himself with those so deeply rooted in the underground world of organized crime, but Nick wants to believe the best in his closest friend. Both Nick and Daisy want to believe that Gatsby’s wealth was a result of owning a vast chain of drug stores throughout the New York City area. Later on, when Nick, Jordan, Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom end up in a suite at the Plaza Hotel on the island of Manhattan, Tom finally expresses his disdain for Gatsby in