Post-War Disillusionment in The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway

The First World War left a mark on the early 20th century, not only in the physical destruction it wrought but also in the psychological and cultural upheaval it caused. In its wake, the so-called “Lost Generation” struggled to find meaning in a world that seemed absurd, fragmented, and spiritually hollow. Two novels that powerfully capture this disillusionment are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). While the former critiques the hollow opulence and spiritual aimlessness of 1920s America, the latter explores the interior lives of post-war Britons grappling with trauma, memory, and the fragility of social identity. In very different styles, both novels reflect how World War I shattered the foundations of meaning and belonging.

In Mrs. Dalloway, trauma is most directly embodied in the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran who suffers from what we now recognize as PTSD. Haunted by hallucinations and survivor’s guilt, Septimus is mentally adrift, stuck between the memory of his fallen comrade, Evans, and the indifference of the society around him. His wife, Rezia, desperately tries to help, but Septimus’s disconnection is too profound: “He could not feel. He could reason; he could read… but love and religion… these things were gone, gone forever.” His eventual suicide is an act of resistance against a society that fails to comprehend or accommodate his suffering. Woolf uses a stream-of-consciousness style of writing to portray Septimus’s fractured mind and critique the medical and societal response to trauma.

In contrast, trauma in The Great Gatsby is subtler but no less significant. Jay Gatsby, too, is a war veteran, and while he bears no visible wounds, his entire post-war identity is shaped by a desire to reclaim a lost past—specifically, his pre-war love with Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby’s obsessive nostalgia becomes a kind of emotional shell shock, a refusal to accept the reality of time’s passage. Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator and also a veteran, is similarly alienated: he describes himself as “restless,” drifting in the moral vacuum of post-war society. Though Nick rarely discusses the war directly, its aftershocks are felt in his disillusionment with the wealthy elites and their careless, morally bankrupt lives.

Both novels portray post-war societies that seek to overlook the deep psychological wounds of the war with social rituals, distractions, and material excess. In The Great Gatsby, this is shown through the hedonism of the Jazz Age. Gatsby’s parties—lavish, anonymous spectacles filled with bootleg liquor, jazz bands, and superficial conversations—embody the era’s desperate pursuit of pleasure. However, beneath the glitter is a sort of hollowness. Few guests know or even care about Gatsby. The parties are these acts of self-medication. The characters drink, flirt, and dance to forget the spiritual emptiness of their lives.

Similarly, this theme is shown in Mrs. Dalloway through the London social scene, particularly Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for her evening party. On the surface, Clarissa appears the perfect hostess, devoted to the elegant rituals of upper-class life. But her inner thoughts reveal a deep unease: she questions the meaning of her life, the choices she’s made, and the façade of social respectability. Like Gatsby’s, her party is a performance —a way to impose order and civility on a chaotic world. Yet unlike Gatsby’s gathering, Clarissa’s party also becomes a moment of communion, where the news of Septimus’s death briefly pierces the social veil and forces her to confront the reality of suffering and death.

The war destabilized the very idea of coherent identity. In both novels, characters search for meaning in the ruins of the old world. Gatsby attempts to recreate a perfect past that never truly existed. His identity is a fabrication. He changes his name, invents stories about his origins, and constructs a persona of wealth and romance. His belief that one can “repeat the past” reflects a more profound existential need to fix a moment in time when life seemed whole and purposeful. His tragedy is that his dream is simply impossible. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, a recurring symbol, becomes an emblem of unreachable ideals: “Gatsby believed in the green light… It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster…”

In Mrs. Dalloway, the search for meaning plays out more introspectively. Woolf’s modernist style, especially her use of stream-of-consciousness, allows the reader to explore the nonlinear workings of memory. Clarissa reflects on her past—her youthful love for Sally Seton, her decision to marry Richard and the life she might have lived. Time is fluid in the novel. Clarissa’s final sense of purpose is fragile but real. The party, for all its artificiality, becomes an affirmation of life. She imagines Septimus’s suicide as an act of defiance and perhaps sees in it a kind of existential truth that she cannot articulate but feels.

Both The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway capture the psychological landscape of a world reeling from the Great War. Through very different techniques, they reveal how individuals and societies attempt to cope with trauma, bury it under decadence, and search for meaning. Gatsby dies chasing an illusion; Septimus dies because he cannot endure a reality without meaning. Standing on the edge of death and life, Clarissa reaches for a moment of clarity.

In the end, both novels suggest that post-war existence is defined by contradiction: the need to forget and the compulsion to remember, the pursuit of pleasure and the pull of despair, the surface rituals of life, and the trauma of death. It is in this tension that the modern self was born.