The Role Of Modernism In The Great Gatsby

Impotent Pursuits The aftermath of World War I provided mankind with a true loss of purpose, shattering the masses’ morality code only to make them lost and afraid. Many of the people who came back from the war lost all sense of themselves due to their lost ideology. From this shattering, the literary movement known as modernism attempts to make sense of the shattered pieces of society’s lost ideology. Some of the figureheads that surmounted this patching up were: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Each of the authors provided an original insight to the problem that was shocked the world, and in each of their respected works, they helped identify the problem in which they saw the death of the ideology and the different
F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel, “The Great Gatsby”, introduces this same ideal on a more macro scale, for Gatsby’s extravagant parties presents an attempt at alleviating the loss of purpose. Lastly, Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” presents this ideal by suppressing the sadness of death in the daily monotony of life, pushing all the sadness away in order to forget and live life in ignorance. These works and their respected authors provide a lens into the loss of purpose that modernism describes as the authors identify the suppression of pain that their main characters subscribe too, only to prove the point that their efforts are meaningless as they will be lost in their pain regardless.
In the novel “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway, the main character Jake Barnes has a habit of suppressing his deep seeded pain of impotence and the inability to be with the one he loves by laughing at his impotence and drowning his broken heart with alcohol. Jake tries his hardest to try and just live with the fact that he is impotent and simply can not function on top of his manhood. As an act to try and make light of his impotence he suggests to Brett, “Don’t talk like a fool,’ I said. “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be