Great Gatsby

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During the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the society suffered severe moral decay. Fitzgerald illustrates this with the narrator, Nick, who comes from a more ethical way of living in the mid-west. Since Nick is an outsider to the ways of the wealthy aristocrats and “new money” living in New York, he is quick to realize the flaws of the people around him. He sees that people are motivated by their selfish desire to be high on the social ladder. These people can hide behind their money, and as a result are uncaring of others. They can’t see what is truly important in life because the system of immorality is hidden under a surface of glamour. They lose their dreams and become like the mold of being selfish and disillusioned. With an abundance of money clouding a person’s conscience, moral values can be easily lost.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald shows, people are motivated by the desire to be regarded as socially superior to others. In the novel, people have ulterior motives for most of their social experiences. The class system is very strong, especially between the aristocrats of East Egg, and the newly self-made rich of West Egg. The people of East Egg possess many social graces because they have spent their whole life being very wealthy. They were always taught that they were superior to others. When they come in contact with the people of West Egg, they act rudely because they feel they are not worthy of their respect since

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they have not always been wealthy. They act in a different way than they should because of they wish to feel above people in some way. Sometimes, social status is placed with more importance than a person’s happiness. Daisy Buchanan, a character in The Great Gatsby, lives a boring and unsatisfying life. She is aware that her shallow and chauvinistic husband, Tom, is having an affair with another woman, and she is unhappy with herself. Daisy meets an old love, Jay Gatsby, and she expresses true emotion for the first time in the novel. She knows that Gatsby would make her happy and would be the logical choice instead of her unfaithful husband. However, Gatsby is of “new money”. Daisy knows that socially, she would be thought of as higher if married to a man of a rich family name, so she chooses to stay with Tom. Daisy sacrifices her own happiness for the security of being socially acceptable. People make irrational choices based on the shallow craving for being high on the social hierarchy.

In the novel, people’s priorities become clouded and they lose sight of what is truly important. If a person’s conscience is tainted by society, they don’t realize what they should truly and morally. People become fixated on something other than their goal and don’t realize that it will be the cause of them not attaining it at all. In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson are both married individuals. They should be faithful to their spouse and make their best attempt to be happy with how their life is then, or at least be respectable. However, they both choose to cheat on their spouses on a regular basis, and flaunt their relationship in public. They feel that their actions are acceptable

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because they exercise their relationship in New York City. In the novel, New York is depicted as a morally corrupt and bustling town. Since it seems that everyone is acting in an inappropriate way, they feel that they can too. They show no remorse for their actions, which reveals that everywhere they are is corrupt and shallow. Another character, Jay Gatsby, does not realize his true dream. Although Gatsby is not morally corrupt, he focuses nearly to the point of obsession with a fabricated and unattainable dream. In his mind, his dream is to be with the woman that he loves which will lead him to happiness and fulfillment. However, his dream is altered to something much different. He forces this dream onto Daisy Buchanan, whom he believes he is in love with. He expects that once he is with Daisy, all of his problems will go away and he will be happy. This is impossible because Gatsby never truly loved Daisy, he loved Daisy’s money. He was attracted to her because she was the first rich person he had ever been in contact with:

“She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with in discernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly