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Tony Mcadam's Criticism Of The Great Gatsby

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Life is full of decisions, but they are subconsciously influenced by society. This influence has created an unhealthy relationship between social classes. How people choose to act is in complete correlation to society’s set expectation for a certain class. These actions then become reflections of people’s moral values. In Tony McAdam’s criticism of The Great Gatsby, Ethics in Gatsby, he points out the corruption of characters morals due to society’s influence and the impact that has on decision making. Society’s unhealthy division between class influences character’s decisions because society changes character’s morals. Tony McAdams argues that The Great Gatsby is an expression of America’s moral direction. He argues America chooses to be …show more content…

This division of privileged and nonprivileged creates competition that has unhealthy consequences. Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, can see the intense competition for the limited privileges. Nick can see the nonprivileged fight for privilege and the privilege fight to keep out the nonprivileged. Nick sees, “there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”(79). There are the nonprivileged pursued by the privileged. There are the nonprivileged pursuing the privileged. There are the busy who are still competing, and there are the tired ho have given up. These are the lifestyles that the competition between classes creates. Nick, a nonprivileged Westerner is not familiar with the privileged lifestyle of Easterners. The rest of the characters in The Great Gatsby, like Nick, are also confused by the privileged lifestyle of the East. Nick noticed that, “Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life” (Fitzgerald 176). The Western lifestyle does everything it can to be more like the privileged, wealthy Eastern lifestyle, but the East does everything it can to be less like the nonprivileged poor Western Lifestyle. This desire for the poor to be like the rich combined with the desire for the rich to not be like the poor creates society’s unhealthy divisions of

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