The Great Gatsby: Context: The Roaring Twenties

Chapter Overview: The Roaring Twenties

Pertinent Quotes and Descriptions:

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” This quote encapsulates the excessive lifestyle of characters during the Roaring Twenties, represented through Gatsby’s extravagant parties.
“We were tired of great causes, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of his peers in the 1920s.” This quote provides a glimpse into the disillusionment and lack of direction during the Jazz Age after the First World War.
“The old rich are described as being more elegant and noble than the new rich, who are portrayed as being flashy and unrefined.” This quote illustrates the tension between old money and new money that was characteristic of the 1920s.

Essential Character Developments:

“He did extraordinary well in the war.He was a captain before he went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine guns.” This quote highlights the opportunities that the war provided for those like Gatsby to demonstrate their capabilities and improve their status, a hallmark of the 1920s rapid societal changes.
“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.” This reflection on Tom Buchanan’s peak during his youth and subsequent descent illustrates the fleeting nature of fame and success in the 1920s.

Understanding the Roaring Twenties:

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” This quote underscores the excessive consumption and reckless behaviours, such as binge drinking, that were commonplace during the Roaring Twenties.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” This quote embodies the irresponsible and reckless attitudes prevalent in the 1920s, particularly among the wealthy.

Symbolism and Rhetorical Devices:

“The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist, through which occasional thin drops swam like dew.” This weather imagery is symbolic of the muddled moral and societal boundaries of the Roaring Twenties.
“It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.” Fitzgerald’s musical language ties back to the era’s moniker as the Jazz Age, a time of cultural and artistic explosion.