Examples Of Hedonism In The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby utilises setting and characters to achieve his main purpose of critiquing what we now know as ‘The American Dream’ in 1920’s New York. Fitzgerald creates the characters of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan as well as the fictional settings of East Egg and West Egg to comment on a unique transitioning point in Post World War 1 America, which he believed was at the poise of turmoil and decline.

Fitzgerald uses the titular character, Gatsby, as a representation of America itself, to the extent that Gatsby is excessive, foolish and foredoomed, so the novel suggests, is America. Through first person Nick Carraway’s perspective, F frames the excesses of the Jazz age. Via his mid-western eyes, F critiques a

Gatsby is an elusive figure an enigma, a criminal, a romantic, a man of glamorous dreams whose career, money and identity are grounded in corrupt activities, such as ‘the favour’ he did for the police commissioner. Like America, he is flawed, but has a capacity for ‘wonder.’ His love for Daisy represents America in the 1920s falling in love with wealth, seeking its protective power against “the hot struggles of the poor”. Guests who instinctively flocked to Gatsby’s extravaganzas “like moths to a flame” are described as an “indefinite procession of shadows’, without substance, in search of thrills and excitement to distract themselves from emotional bankruptcy. Through such vignettes F is to critiques the materialism, corruption and superficiality of this privileged elite. Ironically for Gatsby, wealth is not his primary concern, but rather an illusory idealised conception of himself. The motif of Gatsby reaching out to “a single green light” shows the delusion at the heart of his ‘dead dream.’ Daisy becomes the personified image of this goal for Gatsby as he

East and West Egg are fictional villages based in Long Island, they are areas of extreme wealth and extravagance. East Egg represents inherited wealth and ‘traditional values’, lives of excess and indulgence as Nick’s description reveals, ‘the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water’. This established enclave was threatened by the West Egg nouveau riche like Gatsby, ‘Mr Nobody from nowhere’ who became staggeringly rich overnight from post war boom and prohibition. The Valley of Ashes is a stark contrast to the conspicuous consumption of both East and West Egg. the contrasting setting of the bleak Valley of the Ashes is filled with the shadowy figures of the dispossessed. This desolate ‘dumping ground’ further signifies the failure of materialism, the inequalities wrought by Capitalism and the social and moral decay of a society uncertain of its values. A major symbol of this careless, wasteful materialist society it provides a metaphorical background to the inner psyche of the characters. With Gatsby “alone in death” we see the correlation in the desolation of the valley and the superficiality of Gatsby’s character. Nick describes the hoarding’s eyes “brood(ing) over the solemn dumping ground” representing the eyes of God