The work of F. Scott Fitzgerald is much more than a vivid portrait of one particular time in American History, the "Roaring Twenties." The critic John Haegert suggests that Fitzgerald was obsessed by one American myth: "that of the genteel American idealist who strives to create illusions of invulnerable beauty and munificence, only to fall prey to the triple temptation of money, sex, and glamour" (Haegert 97). He points out that Fitzgerald's obsession with this myth is seen in The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. In this book, he states that Gatsby's "material obsessions" lead to a downfall which is "an almost legendary destiny in American literature" (Haegert 97). While the troubles of Gatsby and his crowd are typically American, they have interesting links to Classical and Middle Eastern images and philosophies of life and money.
Many critics have analyzed the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Sutton 1997; Gross & Gross 1995; Bruccoli 1997). However, there has been little attention given to the philosophy of consumerism, which is essentially worshiping the God of Money. Jonas Spatz talks about this in his essay "Rewriting the Capitalist Fable" when he says that Fitzgerald was frustrated by American capitalism, and saw Daisy's denial of Gatsby as "America's refusal to honor its past. . . The new tycoons will reap the spoils of a stolen world" (Spatz 56). Lewis sees the connection between "love of money" and "love and money." He argues that "On one level the novel can be read as a capitalist fable with an unhappy ending" (Lewis 57).
One way to measure dramatic structure is to consider the relationship between a protagonist and an antagonist -- someone who wants something and someone who does not want him to have it. This analysis suggests that the protagonist/antagonist conflict does exist in The Great Gatsby, but not in the classical sense demanded by Aristotle. Instead of being a relationship ...