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Examples Of Greed In The Great Gatsby

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The American Dream is the long held belief that everybody can succeed in life by merit of hard work and perseverance. A man’s origins were not to be an inhibitor of his success. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's work The Great Gatsby the American Dream is portrayed as being misunderstood by the people of the 1920s. The American Dream became corrupted by people searching not for happiness, success, and honorable ambitions in life, but instead for wealth, power, and excess. The core beliefs of the 1920s were very different than the decades before. In the 1920s people believed that they should just do whatever made them happy at the moment, as is shown in Myrtle’s quote “You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever” (Fitzgerald 36). This attitude was also shown in the people's’ ethics. They did not want to work hard to make their money, instead they searched for a way to get rich fast. This is a direct contradiction to the American Dream. The American Dream is about gaining success through hard work, not by cheating or illegal streams of income. …show more content…

The Buchanans and Gatsby live in great big houses, and have many servants. They own a lot of cars, which were seen to be an item of luxury during that time. Gatsby throws an enormous party every weekend, where people eat and drink excessively. The characters do not know moderation and have everything in excess. The excess of their lifestyles is shown in Gatsby’s library. “Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real” (Fitzgerald 45). To own an entire library of real books was practically unheard of. There was no way that Gatsby could read all those books so it was only a show of wealth, nothing more. The American Dream is not about greed. These people should have used their money to benefit society and the people who struggle to make it by around

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Though he was hurt immensely by Daisy, Gatsby also embodied the greed and selfishness that came with the aspiration of living out the American Dream. Gatsby threw lavish parties but didn’t bother to host them or be a part of them. His only motive behind these parties was his hope that Daisy would “wander into one of his parties, some night” (Fitzgerald 79). He wanted Daisy to know that he had finally acquired the wealth that Daisy wanted so badly. Gatsby believed that the American Dream offered him “ limitless freedom, wealth, and power, and [this] enabled [him] to buy the love of a woman who personifies [his] aspirations" (Roberts).

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The roaring 20’s a fast pace time known by its carless party lifestyle. With so many things happening in this time is was only right a book was written with so many 20’s ideals. The Great Gatsby embodies many ideas and philosophies of the 1920’s. Every single philosophy in this book made a part of the so called roaring 20’s. The most important one in The Great Gatsby is cheating.

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America has always lured people with an unfulfilling promise of more; people come to America with nothing to try and gain something that’s unobtainable; Unfortunately, what they find is far from what they wanted to gain. F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed just how much of a lie the American dream was in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald lived as a captive of the dream 's unlawful grip that promised so much but gave so little. He was born middle class and tried his hardest to become more than what his father was, but as ambitious as he was he never gained the wealth and elite status that he desired. The Great Gatsby was his way of stating the way that things were at the time, and he writes about how the American dream is unobtainable through symbolism.

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