Ideas and Intellect

In my opinion, The Great Gatsby is anything but great. It is very much a pessimistic look at the state of America in the 1920s, and I personally dislike that. When I learned about the 1920s, it finally seemed like a turnaround for the issues that mattered most in America but were being ignored before: being less segregated, women's rights, and corruption in the government and economy. America was on the path to reforming and becoming more modern. So I failed to understand why a story about degrading this modernism while also disparaging people of the Midwest was considered a classical American literature piece. This book feels less like American literature and more like American satire the more you analyze it. The New Woman is frowned upon, black people are treated as jokes, andthe character that represents the East Coast, Gatsby, is said to be a fake and a fraud. So it is clear that Fitzgerald did not like the changes in the 1920s. However, the Midwest isn't much better given...

While The Great Gatsby is quite a boring read on its own, there are legitimate questions that are inquired by this novel about America in the 1920s, questions that even translate into today's America. One that caught my eye out of the many interesting topics to cover was this question: "Does America, as a meritocracy, exist?" First, it would be helpful to define what a meritocracy even is. A meritocracy is a system where people are given power based on their own personal ability, or what they can contribute to the country or society. Obviously some would say yes because America is capitalistic: people gain money by working, and gain power through their monetary gains. However, some people could claim that America isn't a perfect representation of a meritocracy because of the many factors that affect American workers: your gender, age, and race could all affect your salaries, some people earn money by doing less skill-intensive work than others, and equally-skilled pe...