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Aspects of Tragedy in The Great Gatsby Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a novel brimming with various tragic elements: love, ambition, hope and the loss of hope, and, of course, death. But is this American classic a true tragedy? Does Gatsby indeed possess a “tragic flaw” which leads to his downfall? Or is fate just stacked against him? Before we can definitively say whether or not The Great Gatsby is a tragedy, we must understand the meaning of tragedy. Tragedy is most commonly defined as a “dramatic composition dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction” (Webster). Many of these defining elements ca