![]() When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music-epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night-resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals. Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess. ![]() The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman.
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