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How does your knowledge of the "Lost Generation,” the changing role of women in society, the advent of the car, and the roaring 20s affect your...

The Great Gatsby reflects the concerns and worries of the "Lost Generation," the term coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a generation that was alienated by the war. Nick, the narrator of the book, says, "I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless" (page 3). He is, of course, being a bit sarcastic here because World War I was filled with horrors, and, as a result, the soldiers who fought in it and society in general became alienated and confused about their values in a world that no longer seemed to accommodate pre-war values.


In addition, the postwar world of the 1920s involved a changing role for women, in part because of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, that gave women in the United States the right to vote. Jordan Baker fits the role of the New Woman, or, as this new type of woman was commonly called, "the flapper." She is unmarried and plays golf for a living. Nick says of Jordan:



"I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body" (page 58).



Jordan lies to get what she wants, and, unlike the traditional woman, she is as unrelenting and unsentimental as a man is traditionally thought to be.


The book takes place at a time when much about the world was changing. The so-called "Roaring 20s" were a decade that celebrated wealth, parties, drinking (in spite of Prohibition), and gangsters. These are all elements in the book. Gatsby's raucous parties and his expensive cars are characteristic of the way in which the rich lived during that decade. For example, his Rolls-Royce ferries party-goers to his sumptuous house while "caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden" (40). Gatsby gives such remarkably lavish parties that most of his guests don't care who he really is; they don't realize he's made his money from bootlegging and other types of gangsterism that were part of the decade. Understanding the decade helps the reader understand the backgrounds and hopes of its characters, including Gatsby's hope for acceptance into the higher social class despite his background, Jordan Baker's insistence on freedom, and Nick's constant quest as a member of the Lost Generation to make sense of it all. 

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