Three Themes in The Great Gatsby: Love, Money and American Dream in the Jazz Age

Three Themes in The Great Gatsby: Love, Money and American Dream in the Jazz Age
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is one of the best writers of the 20th century. His novel The Great Gatsby remains popular since 1925, with the last filming in 2013. From the first sight, The Great Gatsby is a novel about love and wealth. But is this the only its theme? If it were the only one scope of the problem, the novel would be unlikely to remain topical and meaningful for such a long time. It looks like “The Great Gatsby” is not about twisted love only. So let us take a deeper look at its themes. The theme of The Great Gatsby is a multiple of three particular subthemes. The general one is a concept of the American dream. Despite the fact Fitzgerald does not name it exactly, he formulates the essence of the idea of the founding fathers (hard work, equality and good ethics for all). This is how Fitzgerald describes the “Roaring 20s” in its masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Therefore, it is hard to limit the theme of the novel to only one context. Particularly, The Great Gatsby examines the search of the Jazz Age for its own American Dream. The reader is submerged into the atmosphere of the “Roaring Twenties” thanks to Gatsby’s parties (Gibb,2005). According to Fitzgerald, this era started “when the police rode down the demobilized country boys” during the May Day riots of 1919; when it seemed that “maybe we had gone to war for JP Morgan’s loans after all.” However, the era e…