F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hopelessness of the Depression Era
The world wars and the United State’s years of depression weighed heavily upon all American’s and it naturally showed in the writings of the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of these writers with a good majority of his writings emerging during the 1920’s and 30’s. Most of his works deal with relationships, old, new, and adulterous. The moods his books give off are very dark and depressed, flowing into the 20th century despair that all of America seemed to go through.
Fitzgerald mainly focuses his papers on personal relationships of the characters. His greatest hit, The Great Gatsby, is entirely concerned with the relationships. Nick Carraway is an impartial character from whom the whole story is told, who goes through a minor relationship of his own. The people in the book are usually down and there are three major relationships floating around besides Nick’s that get haphazardly resolved with the death of Gatsby and another. Gatsby is in love with Daisy who is married to Tom who is having an affair with Mytrle. In the end Myrtle dies by accident, Gatsby is killed and Nick is left reflecting about all the uselessness and emptiness of all their lives. In the end the reader is left with a sense of pointlessness. After all that time and all that effort, love dies and in the end, they are left with nothing.
Sometimes Fitzgerald will focus on the career and how it relates to the personal relationships. The Last Tycoon is one such that goes predominantly through the work of the main characters and how it affected them, mostly Monroe Stahr who tends to overwork and cannot reconcile his feelings for a new love in his life. Tender is the Night goes through the current life of Dr. Dick Diver. This novel consists mostly of him being adulterous to his wife and joyless in general about his life. He met his wife through his work, he being her psychiatrist in an asylum. He’s on vacation for the most part of the novel, yet he still started and ended with his career being a focus and referred to it sporadically. This Side of Paradise doesn’t go through the working life of Amory Blaine, the main character, but through his college experiences and his social experiences around his schooling. It too deals with relationships of the opposite sex and the helplessness and despondency of ‘love’ Amory goes through with the girl he is infatuated with. In the end he is alone, like so many of Fitzgerald’s characters.
Fitzgerald cannot seem to clasp on there being a real and lasting thing like love. Most of his characters are dealing with many emotions that they can’t quite seem to deal with. Monroe’s wife died and Amory cannot consolidate who is his with his family and scholar relations. All of his characters deal with depression and never get over it, in fact, usually the novel ends with a brooding sense of hopelessness and melancholy. In the four novels previously mentioned, only one didn’t end with the main character being alone, and that was The Last Tycoon, the novel that Fitzgerald died before completing. The rampant sexual relationships that all the characters run through only hurt them more, yet they always seem to fall into those traps even eagerly. These characters are not happy, don’t do happy things, don’t get happy, and always end up unhappy or dead in the end. Many people in America had this mind set, that life was horrible and that it wouldn’t get better.
Fitzgerald himself didn’t live an ideal life. His wife was mentally ill and they became estranged later in life. He had off and on cash flow problems. So, he lived a relatively unhappy life and wrote about dejected lives with characters who sometimes resembled people in his life. As far as typical happy endings go, none of his novels had such a one and neither did his own life.
Fitzgerald embellishes the unmoral practices and builds up the despondency of the times. He simply wrote down the typical attitude of the nation around him, and that atmosphere was full of darkness in all its forms. It was no longer a common belief that life was wonderful and worth it all anymore. Depression bounded in the average American. People no longer thought of happiness as being easily attainable, and this sad outlook on life was recorded by authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
