Loneliness In The Great Gatsby Essay

Although they rule our internal lives, dictate our decisions, and can even have physiological effects, America as a people does not embrace, or even hardly acknowledge, its feelings. The culture of our Postmodern society has become one festering with emotional repression and successive loneliness. As F. Scott Fitzgerald argued concerning the degradation of the American Dream into a simple monetary pursuit in his novel The Great Gatsby, due to social isolation’s vast range of influence and its inceptive characteristics, it is a key issue in the degradation of American society today.

I wonder how many times I’ve felt lonely, even when within close proximity of other people. What is loneliness - a feeling, a state of being? Sociologist Adrian

Its rise has caused the suppression of emotion and fed into an emotionally stunted society, especially with business being so highly valued and so impersonally conducted (Franklin 12). Money, of course, can’t buy happiness - but can’t it though? America sure seems to think so, no matter what it may preach. The amassment of wealth has grown to be the crux of the American experience, the ultimate goal of every citizen. But this pursuit is hollow, the prize’s only value stemming from the Tinkerbell Effect, which states that the more people believe in something, the more truth it carries. Just as America once promised the freedom of opportunity, that dream too has devolved into the simple desire to accumulate wealth. This desire has created many a nonsensical situation, for example, in “A Lonely Society,” Franklin writes of his “paradox of ‘freedom loneliness’: ‘it has become more difficult to commit ourselves to precisely the sort of relationships we still crave.’” (10). Thus the growth of the value of independence, financially as well as socially, has begotten emotionally distant generations since the Modern era by emphasizing the quantum of relationships over the quality in accordance with the values of materialism - more is more. But as the article, “We Must Wake Up,” elucidates, “Social isolation is hard

Isolation harms individuals and societies with its wide ranging influence and inceptive properties, and was both a cause and an effect of the death of the once-great American Dream, which F. Scott Fitzgerald argued in his novel The Great Gatsby has eroded from an opportunistic promise into the embodiment of monetary pursuit. We have all felt the effects of this actuality, so should we not also take the next step, in realizing our positions, and make the effort to