Fitzgerald uses a variety of passages to time. To pinpoint only one of the many symbols that represents time in The Great Gatsby would be an injustice to the story as a whole.

The first symbolism of time is used to set the mood of the era. It was called the Roaring Twenty’s. It was a time when everyone forgot all morality and lived each day to fullest with parties, and trying to either stay wealthy or attain wealth.

Organized crime and bootlegging became powerful because of prohibition. This is how many men gained their wealth in the twenty’s. That is how everyone believed Gatsby attained his wealth though nothing could ever be proven.

Jay Gatsby lived according to the era by throwing one lavish party after another, sparing no expense to i

Copyright© 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons

F. Scott Fitzgerald embraces the special ability to entwine the many different symbols within one story. This ability created by an author creates a whole new experience for the reader each time they read the story.

Copyright © renewed 1953 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan.

Nick proclaims that he came east in the spring of twenty-two. “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”(Gatsby, Page 8). “Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.”(Gatsby, Page 10). While Nick continues to relate his version of the events that occurred during the time frame of spring through the summer and finally when Nick says, “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever….”(Gatsby, Page 6).

Fitzgerald, through the thoughts of Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby, helps the reader realize that you should always live for the future and not in the past. If you live in the past, you are

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