F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Scope of Postcolonialism Theory

Abstract

The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece of the 1920s. Gatsby reflects that period of gendered, ethnic, and racial anxieties. The First World War and the industrial trajectory of the twentieth century have affected people and their perspective toward life, and races, driving them to dehumanize each other. The world has become a very raciest place constantly. Modernist authors depicted this dehumanization and racism in their works indirectly. Postcolonialism questions and reinvents the modes of artistic perception, the ways of viewing and being. Postcolonialism reading of the novel shows that the society of America in the twenties is separated between superior and inferior.' The Great Gatsby' is a masterwork of F. Scott Fitzgerald whereby the author presents colonial mentality, showing that despite being a modern novel, it also carries the central concept of postcolonialism novels. In this paper, the researcher will trace the characters' status as inferior and superior, showing how characters' behavior has degenerated under modern life's effect and how they show each other superiority. The colonial discourse also affected the colonizer as much as colonized since it is a way of being more than a way of thinking. The paper attempts to figure out the characters' elements of postcolonial discourse. This paper will focus on the main characters regardless of their role in the novel's plot to disclose their reaction toward each other. The paper confirms that Colonialism does not need a colonized population outside a country's geographical borders. Colonized people could be existed within the geographical boundaries of the colonizing country by maintaining the same ideology.