Free Great Gatsby Essays: Genre :: Great Gatsby Essays

The Genre of The Great Gatsby   If you want to find out, into which literary corner F. Scott Fitzgeralds masterpiece, the Great Gatsby, belongs, youve got to take a look at twain main genres of sassy-writing, the so-called unused of manners on the one go by and the romance on the other. The novel of manners gives, using most of the while a rather satirical tone, a sharp depicting of the essential life as it really is and excessively of the social behaviour and attitudes that atomic number 18 closely related with it. This type of novel concentrates on people of a certain class, time and place are clearly defined. The individual attitudes of those people, their home(a) desires, get into conflict with the more conventional values, which are defined by the society they live in. The result is, that the protagonist has the problem of combining himself and his desires with the rules (the manners) of society, that he himself as a part of this society helped to establish, involuntarily. Examples for this special kind of novel are creations of authors like Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. On the other spate there is the romance, not aiming at a detailed description of life, precisely wanting to show it as it is imaginatively seen. The romance concentrates on the midland aspects of human nature, it is not concerned with ordinary events. It is difficult to decide to which literary type the Great Gatsby belongs. It is possible to read it as a novel of manners for it presents life and atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties in America, the whap Age, marked by prohibition, the organised crime, the new woman as swell as the wealthy upper-class and their carelessness in most affairs. Fitzgerald is also using a satirical and comic tone most of the time. scarce the book could as well be read as a romance. This seems to be even more appropriate for the book is concerned with the portrayal of a mans idealism in all its glory but as well in all its unreality a nd unworldliness. Gatsby is presented as a dark figure, fitting well within the fantasy and magic of his naive dream. He is Prince Charming, the gallant knight, trying to get his Princess in white, its a perfect subject for a sad and tragic fairy-tale. While writing the Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald got influenced by several other books, such as The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, published 1918-1922, which is portraying the Western civilisation as being in a state of decay.