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The Great Gatsby

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Introduction

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a la Shmoop

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Okay, welcome to Gatsby a la Shmoop,

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the video version.

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We're talking here with Dr. Deb.

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Gatsby. Great novel. Mediocre movies

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throughout history.

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So, Deb, let's frame things in the time frame

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that Gatsby was written in and takes place in.

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What was that era like?

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Talk to us about what a day in the life was for a typical person

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- in the 20s. - Sure.

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It was called "The Roaring Twenties" for a reason.

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It was roaring.

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[ meow ]

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So World War I had just ended.

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And the Roaring Twenties was a period of great wealth.

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The stock market was booming.

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And we kind of think of it as

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a time of luxury and wealth

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and women in flapper dresses and stuff like that.

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- And -- - What's a flapper dress?

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Like what flaps?

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- The skirt. - The skirt?

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- Yeah. - Okay.

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But what Fitzgerald is trying to show us

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through The Great Gatsby and his other works

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is that it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows,

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and that underneath the facade of luxury and wealth

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was this kind of emptiness.

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How did inequality affect people during this time?

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So what you're talking about is this idea that

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the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, right?

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So it just -- The disparity between the classes is growing.

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Fitzgerald is in an interesting place because he grew up

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in I guess you could say a middle-class family.

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His parents weren't super wealthy, but

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his mom had had an inherit, so they were fine.

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They were well enough off.

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But Fitzgerald himself never really felt --

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He felt like an outsider.

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He hadn't quite reached that level of wealth.

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You know, the American dream.

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And that's where we see Nick Carraway

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from the beginning, our narrator

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in The Great Gatsby.

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That's kind of where he sits, too.

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And in The Great Gatsby, we see this

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excess of wealth, but then we're also exposed

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to the opposite, to the Valley of Ashes between

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the Eggs and the city, which you'll be introduced to very soon,

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where Wilson lives and he's a mechanic.

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So we kind of see this

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huge distance between someone like Gatsby

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and someone like Wilson.

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- And that's how that's presented in The Great Gatsby. - Got it.

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[ whoop ]

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What was life like during the 1920s?

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How did inequality affect people during this time?

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[ woo! ]

Full Transcript