explain how the great gatsby reflects the jazz age.

In New York the Jazz Age was a time where hardly anybody worried about money. “It was in such a profusion around you.”(p.3,3.paragraph) and prodigality belonged to everybody’s life-style. This is also a reason for the hospitality that was indispensable for all the parties that were given. To throw a party is not a cheap affair and so stinginess was very unpopular and supposed to be unfriendly.

Gatsby’s parties are typical for this time period. On his extravagant festivities “charm, notoriety [and] mere good manners weighted more than money as a social asset....The way the people dress during this jazz age period is also very interesting. Their hair is “shorn in strange new ways”(p.36,4) and around the women’s necks are “shawls beyond the dreams of Castile”(p.36/4).They wear “golden and silver slippers”(p.109,16f) and the best example is Gatsby “in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” (p.65,1f) himself.

Moreover, Gatsby’s guests are, of course, entertained by cocktail music played by a typical jazz orchestra consisting of oboes, trombones, saxophones, viols, cornets and piccolos, low and high drums (p.35,23ff). They know how to play popular jazz songs, for example the “neat, sad little waltz of that year” (p.82,32) “Three O’Clock in the Morning” or W.C.Handy’s (1873-1958) “Beale Street Blues”, a famous jazz blues melody. Another song that is played is Vladimir Tostoff’s “Jazz History of the World”.