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The Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age as F. Scott Key Fitzgerald once put it, was a decade of extravagant celebrations, vivacious youth, and ostentatious displays of wealth and prosperity. Underneath all of this excitement, however, was the failure of numerous dreams of a “lost generation” and the corruption of society by conceited wealth. Men returned from combat incapable of acquiring jobs, while the American dream was reduced to a remote fancy for countless individuals. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Key Fitzgerald, exposes these terrible truths through several unsuccessful individuals including Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, and George Wilson. These unfortunate characters were devastated when, like many others, their dreams failed in the American “wasteland” that was the twenties.
Nick Carraway, the occasionally unreliable and somewhat privileged narrator of The Great Gatsby, wished to become a successful businessman in the bond industry. Nick abandoned his home and hesitant parents as he traveled east in order to fulfill his dream. Settling on Long Island, New York, he began to socialize with some staggeringly wealthy people. Although they appeared to become intimate friends, Nick did not belong with this class of extremely prosperous individuals, for they were morally corrupted and incredibly egotistical. Nick exclaimed, “They were careless people…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” (Fitzgerald 180). In addition to this, he was quite unsuccessful, as he was an awful bondsman. The reality of Nick’s failure became suddenly obvious to him when he reached his thirtieth birthday; his life lacked a handful of significant factors including a profiting career, a sustaining relationship, and a sense of complacency and content. Nick witnessed first hand the failure of the...