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Examples Of Materialism In The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald takes place in the middle of a booming America during the 1920s. Throughout the story, characters portray themselves as happy and successful citizens who reside in financially affluent areas, where they possess excessive amounts of wealth following an undermining moral picture. The overarching conflict surrounds Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan and his (Gatsby’s) consistently failing quest to reconcile his love for her after years of separation. However Gatsby’s now coexisting wealthy and affluent lifestyle, achieved only by illegal means, sets challenges for their relationship to be strong. The Great Gatsby poses itself as an accurate portrayal of the excess materialistic values …show more content…

In the instance of the Great Gatsby, certain characters display a personality geared towards materialistic wants. The rather fake forms of objects these characters pursue include money and articles of possessions that hold rich values. These characters would much rather grasp onto these rather than forms of happiness that are more psychologically independent, such as true love and care. Delving deeper shows the heartlessness the two certain characters show in a physical manner, these being Tom Buchanan, a rich and arrogant man who tends to have a stiff manner of talking, and refuses to downplay his words against others, including his wife, Daisy Buchanan, who has a rather shallow personality and is portrayed as being easy to manipulate, for because of which, stays with Tom, despite an uneasy relationship deep in her heart. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made" (Fitzgerald 179). In this piece of text from the book, Nick Carraway’s internal dialogue states how they behaved towards each other and the general public. Making it clear that they had no real intentions of being close in an ordinary

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