Trouble emerges when the wrong people and the wrong time collide, but a tragedy is not always necessarily the solution to that collision. However, in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is killed at the end of the novel. Despite the cause, his death itself is tragic. This novel paves the way for the fateful end of such a collision between the wrong man and the wrong time. As Marius Bewley argued, The Great Gatsby, written by the American writer F. Scott. Fitzgerald in the 1920s, demonstrates the corruption of the American Dream and profoundly reveals its theme: the great and pitiful contrast between the spiritual and material lives of people during the Jazz Age. The American Dream, once admired and achieved, became the nation's greatest irony in the 1920s. Bewley's argument was congruent with what Fitzgerald wrote in 1926: "The parties were larger... the pace was faster, the shows were larger, the buildings were taller, the morals were more relaxed, and the liquor It cost less." The American people in this period were different from their ancestors. In fact, they despised them and their traditional rules and faith, the original American Dream. The Great Gatsby is a novel that not only criticizes the corrupt American dream, but also tells the disastrous story of one wrong man's life in the 1920s. As a literary work, The Great Gatsby can be seen as a tragedy because it fits the definition of It. ''A tragedy is a literary work... The cause of the tragedy was a tragic flaw, or weakness, in his character... The main character may be an ordinary person, and the cause of the tragedy may be some evil in society itself. The tragedy not only arouses pity in the audience, but also conveys a sense of the greatness and nobility of... middle of paper... after." F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs , NJ: Prentice-Hall, 112-24. Questoa School, March 20, 2014. Print .Kinsella, Kate, Colleen Shea Stump, Kevin Feldman, Joyce Armstrong Carroll, and Edward E. Wilson "Handbook of Literary Terms: Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,. 2000. R20. Samuel, Charles Thomas. “The Greatness of “Gatsby”” The Massachusetts Review 7.4. Scott, William B. In Search of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1977. 197. Question School April 6. 2014.