The Spirit of the Jazz Age

Below are quotes from Fitzgerald and his novel that capture the author's portrayal of his contemporaries or "the lost generation" and my short commentaries:

The people of the 1920's comprised "a whole race going hedonistic"
||| Very self explanatory. The novel shows plenty of scenes with drinking, dancing, driving, carousing.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate.
||| An oxymoron. Also shows the irony of Jordan Baker's statement - intimacy is used falsely here.

She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too.
||| The real tragedy is the woman's inability to articulate the reasons for her sadness and the inability of others to recognize it or understand it; Nick goes on to describe the makeup running down her face. Spectators respond cruelly by laughing and observing that the weeping woman sing the musical notes created by black ink on her face.

One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear.
||| Dignified and indifferent are used beautifully here by Fitzgerald. More irony as we learn that this woman, who is angry one minute and indifferent another is an actress. Also, seems to be a glamor but pretentiousness in her anger.

...but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself—that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities—he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.
||| Gatsby is back where he started.