rity, to go to work" is depicted as a moral victory over convention and hypocrisy, a justified act of defiance (Eble 54-55). The ambiguity implicit in this resolution is perhaps a reflection of Fitzgerald's own relative immaturity and his personal ambivalence about the values of his age.
The inevitable ruin of the two main characters is not played out to its logical conclusions; Fitzgerald felt compelled to rush in at the last minute and rescue his characters from the consequences of their own actions. At the same time, he confessed that "I guess I am too much of a moralist to heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than to entertain them . . . " (Eble 59). This inclination was prevalent among Fitzgerald's contemporaries, transforming some of them into propagandists. Yet Fitzgerald was too much the consummate artist to lapse into polemics, and too attracted to the brilliant surface of the Jazz Age to renounce it entirely.
The themes that Fitzgerald addressed in his first two novels are fully developed in The Great
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