How Gatsby Reflects the Age of Miracles, Art, Excess, and Satire

When we look back on the 1920s, it isn’t hard to see it as a giant party. It isn’t called the Roaring Twenties for no reason. The country had just come out of a war which was supposed to “end all wars”, credit allowed people to buy all the luxuries they couldn’t normally afford, the jazz age was sweeping the country, and despite the prohibition, everyone was swimming in more alcohol than they knew what to do with. I’m not going to pretend that F. Scott Fitzgerald is some amazing author, but I believe he encapsulated the setting of the 1920s in such a beautiful way. He allowed an insight to such a special time in this country’s history from the perspective of someone that was truly there, and not through an exact rendition of a true story, but through a story that perpetuates how authors and other artists perceived society at the time.

It is easy to see how the quote that Fitzgerald wrote in his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age”, “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire” was portrayed in his novel The Great Gastby. I remember when I first read it, it had been just after reading Jane Austen’s Emma, which is a satirical comedy to portray the absurd actions of high society in a small English town. Although I had seen the movie before reading the book, due to reading it directly after a book already based in satire, I found myself easily placing Fitzgerald’s writings into that category. It was told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who was so enamored with the life that Gatsby had made for himself, the mystery surrounding it, and the overall high class that he was thrust into so suddenly, that he couldn’t decide what was right and wrong.

There were miracles that unfolded throughout the story, ones which the American people believed in at that time. The “American Dream” was very much alive during the 1920s and Fitzgerald brought that to life through Gatsby. He encapsulated what it meant to come from nothing into something and Nick was doing the same to show how hard work was expected and wealth was the pay off for that work. However, Fitzgerald was able to show how fake that dream truly was through the unhappiness of each and every character within the story. Gatsby was lonely even with a house full of people, Tom and Daisy’s marriage was falling apart, but neither was able to leave the other, Nick was lost in his new life and hated the people he was around and who he was becoming, and Jordan is a cheat who feels the need to lie about her life to everyone who comes close. This is why The Great Gatsby is an almost perfect rendition of society. Fitzgerald filled the pages with the miracles, the art, the excess, drawing the readers in with the grand parties, hot scandals, dramatic deaths, while underneath it all, there was simply loneliness, emptiness, and fear. Each character felt it, and Fitzgerald didn’t hide the fact that they did, he simply covered it up with the act that they were portraying to the rest of the characters within the book. I’m not entirely sure if Fitzgerald meant for this to be, but The Great Gatsby truly is a satirical masterpiece when you realize that all of the reasons that the novel is critiqued — for having surface-level characters, a plot that feels like it moves way too fast, blatant symbolism that a fourth grader could point out — are further ways to call out the society that it was based upon.