Problems arise when the wrong people and the wrong time collide, but tragedy is not always necessarily the solution to that collision. However, in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby was murdered at the end of the novel. Despite the cause, his death itself is tragic. This novel sets the stage 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 deeply reveals the theme: the great and pitiful contrast between the spiritual and material lives of people in the Jazz Age. The American dream, once admired and achieved in the 1920s, has become the nation's greatest irony. Bewley's argument was consistent with what Fitzgerald wrote in 1926: "The parties were bigger...the pace was faster, the spectacles were larger, the buildings were taller, the morals were looser and the alcohol was cheaper. » The American people of this era 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 not only criticizing the corrupt American dream but also telling the calamitous story of a bad man in the 1920s. As a literary work, The Great Gatsby can be considered a tragedy because it fits to the definition of it. "A tragedy is a work of literature...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 an evil in society itself The tragedy not only arouses public pity, but also conveys a sense of grandeur and nobility of...... middle of paper ......ars after. : A collection of critical essays. Ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 112-24 Questia School Web, March 20, 2014. Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2004. .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. Printed. Samuels, Charles Thomas. “The Greatness of ‘Gatsby’” The Massachusetts Review 7.4. The Massachusetts Review, Inc., 1966. JSTOR Web. In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the 17th to the 20th Centuries Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 197. 197. Questia Web.. 2014.