re. The Depression had different effects in different countries and affected different parts of the world more or less severely, but taken altogether the forces unleashed would collide over the decade of the 1930s to produce political as well as economic dislocation and tension.
The Great Gatsby offers us a glimpse of an aspect of American life after the Great War, the War to End All Wars, what would become known as World War I. The war took an idealistic generation and left it disillusioned and lost--indeed, it became known as the Lost Generation, and in the 1920s this group seemed to flounder in an era of chaos, an era marked by the illegalities of Prohibition, an age where making money on the stock market seemed easy, and yet an age that lacked a moral foundation or a sense of direction. In the novel, only Gatsby seems to have a direction, and yet his goals are such that they are themselves illusions after which he is seeking. Fitzgerald here presents a perversion of the American Dream, and Jay Gatsby seems very much the embodiment of that dream--he looks across the bay at the East Eggers and dreams of becoming one of them, based on the American verities of hard work, thrift, and resulting material success. Gatsby possess this dream in part because of his background--the dream always seems to be held out to those on the lower end of the economic scale as a promise of what could be and to stave off envy for those who have already achieved the success presently eluding the individual who has no success.
The basic plot of the novel reflects the social class divisions whereby the upper class toys with what it has in an indolent way while the lower class works hard and seeks to rise to a higher level. Jay Gatsby, revealed in the course of the novel to be a man formerly named James Gatz, a farm boy from Minnesota, has achieved his success in the world of bootlegging, an opportunity industry for some in the years after World War...