Money and Corruption in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great GatsbyDuring the time in our country’s history called the roaring twenties, society had a new obsession, money. Just shortly after the great depression, people’s focus now fell on wealth and success in the economic realm. Many Americans would stop at nothing to become rich and money was the new factor in separation of classes within society. Wealth was a direct reflection of how successful a person really was and now became what many people strived to be, to be rich. Wealth became the new stable in the “American dream” that people yearned and chased after all their lives. In the novel entitled the great Gatsby, the ideals of the so called American dream became skewed, as a result of the greediness and desires of the main characters to become rich and wealthy. These character placed throughout the novel emphasize the true value money has on a persons place in society making wealth a state of mind.The heart of the whole notion of wealth lies in the setting of the novel, the east and west eggs of New York City. The west egg was a clustering of the “Nouveau riche” or the newly acquired rich, and the east egg was where the people who inherited their riches resided. The eggs divided the people rich in two with the poor being limited to the middle, the “valley of ashes”. Even the way the narrator, Nick Carraway, describes the two communities’ gives off a feeling of superiority. Nick describes the east as ” the less fashionable of the two, through this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them” (…
…your own personal idea of success. Gatsby’s ideas of successful maybe have become corrupted with greedy but that does not mean it lives on now. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald, Pg. 189) striving for the real American dream of personal success.
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Works CitedCohen, Adam. “Jay Gatsby is a man for our times” The Literary Cavalcade New York: Sep 2002. Vol.55, Iss.1; Pg.1-3Donaldson, Scott. “Possession in The Great Gatsby” The Southern Review Baton Rouge: Spring 2001.Vol.37, Iss.2; Pg. 1-13Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953Gibb, Thomas. “Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” The Explicator Washington: Winter 2005. Vol. 63, Iss.3; Pg. 1-3Sorvino, Mira and Stephens, Toby. “Nothing Great About This Gatsby”. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Jan 13,2001. Pg. 1-2
