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The Great Gatsby Social Mobility Analysis

1679 Words7 Pages

One of the continuing concerns of American thought has been the need for sympathetic comprehension of social and personal situations during the beginning of the 20th century. After discussing certain crucial trends which have accompanied the industrial growth along with the unique form, which was assumed in Western Europe, we now turn our attention to the organized belief systems which have gained prominence in America during its phenomenal economic growth. A special interest is the role of ideology and its suitability for informing and sustaining a national effort. Americans, like people in all well-established nations have a cluster of core values which have had time to reach a rather stable accommodation to one another. During 20th century, …show more content…

One type of social stratification ideology, we saw there, consists of those that focus on the process and amount of social mobility. And we saw that evidence from a variety of sources, including public opinion surveys, shows that there has been and continue to be in American society an ideological belief in the existence of a large amount of social mobility when men have spoken of America as the land of “opportunity”, they have meant that social mobility was easy for people of talent and that many Americans had been able to show themselves of this character. Francis Scott Fitzgerald through The Great Gatsby situates himself among the distinguished group of major American writers of 20th century, including people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, whose works have echoed the illusions and disenchantments of the American Dream. As a concept, the American Dream incorporates a complex of moral, social values and romantic ideologies on social-political level; the dream is the ideal opportunity for all, of advancement, social or in a career, regardless of one’s origins. This vision of “open” society was formulated in opposition to “close” European social systems, where power and wealth were concentrated in the hands of the aristocratic …show more content…

Free, compulsory public education is a concrete effort to see that basic equality of opportunity extends at least through childhood. Thereafter, it is not expected that men will remain equal in any or every way, or there would be no need for so much stress on individual advancement. Each man is expected to rise as high as his abilities will carry him, climbing over those of inferior talents and falling short of those who are superior to him. Fitzgerald was raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Though an intellectual child, he did poorly in school and was sent to New Jersey Boarding School in

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