Why The Great Gatsby is a tragic allegory of the 1920s and a commentary on the futility of social mobility and the American Dream.

1. If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby had been written as a raise-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-story,
starting off with a young boy hell-bent on moving on up in the world, we would have a story that read
more like Charles Dickson’s Great Expectations.
Of course, both are great classic novels that brilliantly explore themes of class, ambition, wealth and good
old love—the unrequited, wrong-side-of-the-tracks love, the best kind, really. And of course, Gatsby and
Pip do share some similarities. Both come from poor, humble beginnings and have an eager drive to rise
up in the social world, an ambition mostly motivated by the love for a girl from a higher class. Now, isn’t
that always the way with these boy-meets-girl stories?
However, Gatsby is no Pip, and The Great Gatsby is certainly no Great Expectations Spoiler alert: By the
time we meet Gatsby in the novel, he has already been dead for a while. No, it is not The Sixth Sense
sort of thing. Instead, narrator Nick Carraway’s purpose in telling this story is to admonish high society for
its cold cruelty and to ponder the downsides of the mythical American Dream—all told through a post-
mortem of the final weeks leading up to Gatsby’s death. More importantly, Gatsby and his demise is held
up as a counterpoint to the American Dream. Sure, one can achieve higher social aspirations through
some intense elbow grease, but not likely without some illegal conduct or some hefty consequences.
Social and class mobility, the novel implies, comes at a cost. You can take the man out of the poverty but
you can never take the poverty out of the man—not even with lavish parties or a closet full of Italian-made
silk shirts in every color. Yep, even pink. Gatsby was definitely GQ material.
Gatsby’s—or should we say Gatz’s?—cost was his life. He did achieve the rags-to-riches story (albeit
illegally), the social clout, and a shiny new identity to boot. Yet, he did not get the girl and ended up
isolated and alone with hardly anyone at his funeral. He was a victim of a still extremely stratified society,
Carraway tells us. Gatsby still could not escape his lower socio-economic past, even if he covered it up
with an entire new one that included a fabricated Cambridge education.
Another spoiler alert: the fact he was murdered by a lowly automechanic, after taking the fall for his true
love Daisy who was behind the wheel during a fatal hit-and-run that killed the automechanic’s wife (and
coincidently Daisy’s husband’s mistress), is symbolic enough that the past catches up with you. Daytime
TV soap operas have nothing on this novel. Yet, we digress. The point is that social mobility is not a full-
proof possibility, even if you sever your proverbial roots and cover your tracks.
What makes this “Roaring Twenties” novel the quintessential allegorical tale of excess and downfall that
has come to epitomize the American 1920s is something that happened four years after the book 1925
publication: the stock market crash of ’29. If Fitzgerald had been an economist rather than a novelist,
perhaps The Great Depression may have never happened. He seemed to know what kind of ruin that the
extravagance typified by Gatsby heading to. Gatsby, with his unbridled affluence and social ascension,
has come to be our tragic hero of 1920s decadence and boom. That is something Charles Dickens did
not do, giving Pip not one, but two tidy endings that each serve him justice over Estella, the woman who
had snubbed him. Both Fitzgerald and Dickens have similar thematic fascinations, but the timing changes
everything.