Gatsby + Lost Generation Poor

Gatsby + Lost Generation Poor Ghosts: The Great Gatsby and the Lost Generation The tragic sweep of F. Scott Fizgerald's work and life make him perhaps the ultimate representative of the "Lost Generation" of American writers who came of age in the world wrecked by World War I. In his masterpiece, the Great Gatsby, we see how this cosmic exhaustion would eventually transform Fitzgerald and his beautiful contemporaries into the damned.

Jay Gatsby, the eponymous center of the novel, exemplifies those who, in the absence of any fixed identity or concerns of their own, are compelled to lurch from party to party in pursuit of empty pleasure. Gatsby's love for Daisy is the sole motivating factor for all his endeavors, and once Tom reveals to her that his identity as "Gatsby" is a painstakingly built hoax, that love becomes impossible and his world collapses.

As Nick muses: He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about (161).

This passage captures both the fundamental emptiness of Gatsby's self-estrangement from his own origins and the consequences of abandoning everything he was in the pursuit of a fantasy. Through Nick, Fitzgerald's tone is elegaic, but his verdict is clear: Gatsby had traded "the old warm world" of an authentically lived life for the "single dream" of Daisy and, having "lived too long" under the power of that dream, he found existence to be alien, meaningless, and ultimately grotesque.

The description likely echoes the dull bewilderment with which the Lost Generation, who like Gatsby consciously expatriated themselves in order to become "Platonic conceptions," greeted the wreckage of postwar Europe, the death of the gods, and the failure of new ideas to fill the void. Uprooted from their native "bored, swollen, sprawling towns beyond the Ohio" to Paris or, closer to home, Long Island, they at first reveled in the freedom that supporting their lives on the strength of their own ambitions entailed. Gatsby's ambition was love.

But when that love is finally and conclusively denied, nothing is left to take its place. The last support buckles. What remains after the collapse, Nick realizes, is a twilight world populated only by brute material forms without the spiritual content necessary to make them truly "real." This is the true face of the Lost Generation: no longer hoping for a message of salvation that never arrives, and "perhaps" no longer even caring.

Nick imagines Gatsby shivering at the prospect of spending the rest of his life among the other "poor ghosts," drifting -- "fortuitously" or otherwise -- from dream.