Depiction Of America During Prohibition In The Great Gatsby
The Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, and what F. Scott Fitzgerald would later depict as the greatest spree in history, have all come to portray America affected by Prohibition. In Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, we are acquainted with the extravagant lives of rich east liners amid one of the rowdiest periods in American history. How precise is this representation of Prohibition America, and what influences driven our country into a period of drunken abundance? Fitzgerald noticeably recounts to the story altogether.
Nick Carraway is the everyman figure here, ambiguously influenced by the war, in part negative, content in his occupation that gives enough recreation and money to subsist out in Long Island, and sickened by the abundances of the age. However, in the creating companionship among Nick and Gatsby, Fitzgerald, rather than having Nick back off from Fitzgerald’s standards, shows how the American Dream is to blame.
Jay Gatsby is a bootlegger. In The Great Gatsby, he has made his riches, under Meyer Wolfsheim, a famous underworld figure (the man who fixed the 1919 World Series) through the importation of illegal alcohol. When we first see him, Gatsby is separated from everyone else in the darkness, watching out towards the sea for a shipment. Fitzgerald Fitzgerald realizes that we are never genuinely ourselves except when we are distant from everyone else, and Gatsby, when alone, is alarmed. Unnerved of being distant from everyone else, maybe alarmed by the idea of his business, yet vacant and longing for something. He has material riches yet nothing more, and that is the reason he seeks after Daisy, the affection he let escape.
Regardless of the truth, generally, it appeared as though Americans were having a great deal of fun amid Prohibition. No book catches this wild and carefree timespan very like Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Mogul Jay Gatsby speaks to the boundaries of 1920s riches and wantonness. Gatsby dedicates his life to collecting wealth to pull in the consideration of his sentimental fixation, the dazzling however ruined Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby’s fortune is clear in the rambunctious gatherings he tosses from his chateau on Long Island’s north shore. These wanton slams, free flowing with food and alcohol, speak to the liberal overabundance of the ‘flapper’ period. Gatsby character speaks to ‘new money;’ he’s an apparently medium-term accomplishment with no realized connections to family riches. It is vigorously inferred that Gatsby earned his fortune, in any event in part, through bootlegging. By what other means would he be able to afford his shower parties with bottomless cocktails to save? Daisy’s husband Tom offers voice to these doubts amid a warmed contention, when he blames Gatsby and his colleague Meyer Wolfsheim of illegally selling liquor through the medication stores they possess. This fictional subplot is situated in fact. For a little fee, doctors would endorse their patients’ whiskey for pretty much any sickness, and sometimes no infirmity by any means. Abnormal pharmacists would even pitch forged prescriptions to their customers. Concerning Gatsby’s accomplice Meyer Wolfsheim, a character depicted as the man behind fixing the 1919 World Series, he was unmistakably influenced by a genuine hoodlum named Arnold Rothstein.
The novel, in any event to a limited extent, gives a reflection of the social issues and frames of mind of the time period. On January 19, 1919, the eighteenth Amendment was ratified. It was the first denial of alcohol in United States. The primary reason for this was boycott and banned the manufacture, deal, and utilization of alcohol. Devoured by the ‘devil’ of the alcohol, individuals partner with bootleggers, criminals, and alcohol-runners, and causes tumult through America. Utilizing drugs were supplanting alcohol causing an all the more destroying effect on the general public. The efficiency of America was greatly diminished. After quite a long while after the eighteenth amendment was in to effect, it before long arrived at an end. In 1933, the congress revoked the eighteenth Amendment and keeping in mind that passing the 21st Amendment, which legitimized the manufacture of alcohol. Accordingly, wrongdoing was really diminished and numerous new employments filled the void as the liquor business extended.
