Modernism In The Great Gatsby

Modernism is a literary movement that developed and prospered throughout the 1920s and 30s and has very distinct characteristics. Some of those characteristics include indeterminacy, fragmentation, the stream of consciousness style, “everyday language,” and dialogue. Some examples of Modernist work are “Out, Out–,” a poem by Robert Frost; “The Corn Planting,” a short story by Sherwood Anderson; and The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Throughout these works, the authors show their own forms of Modernism through the personality of the narrator or speaker. In “Out, Out–,” we see a speaker who witnesses a boy cut his arm off in rural Vermont. In “The Corn Planting,” we see a narrator who goes through his own troubles trying to figure out what the parents of a recently dead boy are doing. In The Great Gatsby, we see the narrator, Nick Carraway, explore the life of his rich next-door neighbor, Gatsby, and other people who live near him. Throughout these works of literature, we see an overwhelming sense of indeterminacy and ambiguity that overpowers the feeling of control or certainty that the speaker/narrator shows. In “Out, Out–,” we see a first-person speaker that only mentions himself one time in the entire poem. Initially, this gives us a feeling of ambiguity ot who is even telling the story. The speaker is given no name and no background of who he is. The one piece of evidence that shows he is first-person is the use of “I” in the tenth line of the poem. This