The American Character in Two Novels
This is an excerpt from the paper...
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the late 1920s, and John Steinbeck rote The Grapes of Wrath a decade later in a very different America. Yet, there are certain perceptions common to both writers, for they are analyzing the American scene and the American character, though from different levels of the social scale. Each novel is motivated by an America-wide crisis. The people depicted in The Great Gatsby have been left without their common anchor in American optimism because of the brutal reality of the First World War and the social turmoil that followed that war, and the people depicted in The Grapes of Wrath have been separated further from the economic optimism of the 1920s, an optimism dashed by Black Tuesday and the crash of the stock market in 1929. Fitzgerald writes about America's aristocratic class, and Steinbeck writes about the people closest to the earth, the farmers and outcasts who find that the upper classes in society have abandoned them in the face of the current crisis.Between the two World Wars, the major worldwide event was the Great Depression, an event for which the seeds were sown by the First world War and which in turn contributed to many of the forces that would lead to World War II. The Great Depression in the 1930s signaled a world economic disorder that was difficult for the various countries of the world to weather and that presented them with a problem they only dimly understood. Had the nations of the world understood what
. . .
gh this fiction and knows that we can only become what those above us allow us to become. Gatsby can never become an East Egger, though that is his goal. He is stopped by the fact that the lacks the aristocratic credentials they believe they possess. In addition, he is a romantic, and they are hard-headed realists for all their pretense to grandeur. They live in the immediate, in the now, while Gatsby looks to the future and longs for the past. Nick is closer to Gatsby than to the others in this respect, for he also has a sense of value and a moral rationale firmly grounded in the verities of the American experience before World War I. The East Eggers have no moral center at all. They dedicate themselves to themselves, and men like Gatsby are expendable in their rush to maintain their status quo. The fact that Gatsby has remade himself, improved himself is itself suspicious to these people, for they see this as evidence that Gatsby has something to hide. Once they find out what that is, they think they know the man. In truth, though, they always classified him as an outsider, and the revelation about his past only gives them a reason for what they thought anyway. In his romantic gesture toward Daisy, however, when he ta
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
East Eggers, Depression Steinbeck, Ma Joad, American Dream, Grapes Wrath, II Depression, Grandpa Joad, Gatsby Nick, Egg York, Jay Gatsby, american dream, grapes wrath, east eggers, west egg, world war, american society, ma joad, jay gatsby, american experience, joad family, american experience world, west egg york, intercalary chapters grapes, chapters grapes wrath,
Approximate Word count = 3543
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
More Essays on The American Character in Two Novels
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
