Melancholia and Modernity: the Affect of Loss in Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby

This study reads The Great Gatsby as a temporal enactment of melancholia, where Freud's pathology of unresolved loss meets affect theory's contagious moods. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) is widely recognized as a critique of modernity; this study argues that melancholia is the novel's primary diagnostic lens for exposing modernity's structural failures. Rather than treating melancholia as a secondary affect, this analysis positions it as the affective mechanism through which Fitzgerald reveals the temporal, ethical, and ontological contradictions of Jazz Age modernity. Through Gatsby's pathological fixation on a receding past, Nick's melancholic narration of temporal collapse, and symbols (green light, Valley of Ashes) that materialize un-mournable futures and stratified waste, the novel demonstrates that modernity produces melancholia as its inevitable symptom-and melancholia, in turn, unmasks modernity's hollow core. This study thus contributes a melancholic hermeneutic of modernity,, showing how unresolved loss is not incidental but constitutive of consumerist, industrial, and aspirational modernity.