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Examples Of Power In The Great Gatsby

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1920’s America was, perhaps, the most influential and prosperous time period that the United States has ever experienced. Not only was Wall Street climbing up higher and higher, but egos grew larger, lifestyles became more peculiar and less traditional, and physical possessions became an intrinsic part of life. It is in the midst of the chaotic and flashy 20’s that Jay Gatsby, the main character of The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, finds himself. An affluent and cultured man, Gatsby has built up a dream around him full of physical objects and goals. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby to show the corruptness that money and power can bring upon not just an individual, but an entire class of society. The divide between the upper class of “Old Money” and …show more content…

Gatsby takes note of Daisy’s love for material objects; the extravagant and wild parties he throws are designed to attract and impress her. Additionally, He takes Daisy on a tour of his mansion in order to make her desire him. While Gatsby causes a cascade of shirts to fall upon Daisy, she breaks down and cries, claiming it's because she has “never seen such—such beautiful shirts before” (Fitzgerald 99). In reality, Daisy breaks down because she is overwhelmed by how much wealth Gatsby has. Daisy will ultimately enter into a relationship with the person who has the most wealth, therefore, Gatsby shows off his collection of clothes to attract her. Fitzgerald continues to illustrate Daisy’s dependence and love for money when he writes “Her voice is full of money...It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it” (Fitzgerald 128). Daisy has been raised up in money her whole life; so much so that she speaks like money and she looks like money. By saying that her voice sounds like money, Fitzgerald drives home the fact that Gatsby and Daisy are both reliant on money, and both are attracted to each other because of their

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The Moral Decay of the Materialistic Although F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby debuted in 1925– before the Great Depression– it serves as a prophetic exemplification of the the material excess of the 1920s that drowned out signs of the coming Great Depression. The book’s plot follows the bootlegger Jay Gatsby as he pursues his old love Daisy Buchanan through flaunting his new extravagant lifestyle, mainly by throwing ostentatious parties. Yet, in the end, Daisy chooses her unfaithful husband Tom over Gatsby. Through Fitzgerald’s use of wealthy, materialistic characters, he comments on the effect of the material excess of the roaring twenties: moral corruption.

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Trusting they are socially equivalent, Daisy never again has any misgivings about drawing near to Gatsby, who soon begins to look all starry eyed at her. After finding Gatsby 's façade, Daisy quickly "vanishes… into her rich full life" (157), staying "protected and pleased over… poor people" (156). Her recusal into the extravagances of high society reflects both her dread of dejection and scorn for the penurious. For her, riches is a basic piece of any relationship, which means Gatsby, with his absence of material belonging, is not any more an alternative. Tom, then again, is an advantageous source "of adoration, of cash, of undeniable reasonableness" (159) who can supply her with the measure of social security important to pacify her.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby uses money and materialistic values to expose American greed during the 1920’s. Its ideals suggest that an individual's perseverance and effort are the deciding factors in the accumulation of wealth, love, and total happiness. Obtaining wealth and power are the center principles of The American Dream, and Fitzgerald guide readers to understand the flaws inherent within it. The reader observes how using underhanded tactics leads to ruin.

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It has long been said that money can’t buy happiness, but still people continue to use it’s acquisition to try to make themselves happy. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the title character struggles with this realization. The book is set in New York during the ‘Roaring 20’s’, a time famous for its parties and lavishness. The book examines the attitudes toward money within the upper particularly through the lense of the new-money title character, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby dedicated his life to the acquisition of money with the goal of eventually acquiring the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is written as a mockery of American ideals, and emphasizes materialism, sexual immorality, and selfishness. Though it appears at first glance to be a love story about Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby is actually a satirical take on American culture, especially in the 1920s. In the 1920s, known as the “Roaring Twenties”, America’s economy was booming, jazz was immensely popular, and alcohol had been banned. Organized crime ran rampant, and Americans seemed to lose their moral values.

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The Roaring Twenties, so they call it, was a period of economic prosperity marked by lavish parties, daring ventures, and urban frenzy, seemingly appearing as the pinnacle of American opportunity. However, with the people’s growing confidence in achieving economic success, the American Dream was distorted into a primarily materialistic achievement, rather than an individualistic one. In the novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the effects of the deteriorating morality of the 1920’s through the life of an ambitious young man by the name Jay Gatsby. The employment of colors to symbolize purity, romanticism, and corruption delineates the conflicting aspects within Jay Gatsby’s American Dream. Despite chasing a wholesome, white

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Dahlin Allport Mrs. Frantzen English 11 Honors 9 March 2023 Wealth and Power in The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby perfectly encapsulates the roaring 1920s, characterized by a booming economy and a carefree cultural revolution. Set in New York City in the 1920s, The Great Gatsby is a story of extravagant wealth. The characters, Gatsby, an incredibly wealthy bootlegger, Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy who inherited significant wealth and Jordan Baker, a professional golfer who amassed her own small fortune depict the wealth of the era. The characters also give the reader a solid understanding of the novel through a Marxist lens. The novel, The Great Gatsby, explores the extent to which wealth contributes to power through

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby describes the life of Jay Gatsby in the 1920’s. The novel shares his love story and his loneliness. A major question the author raises is how does wealth impact class structure and society? Fitzgerald answers this question through the distinction between “New rich” and “Old rich” and the significance of East and West Egg.

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The novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a classic 20th century story -that period was also known as the “roaring twenties”- which critiques the vision of the American Dream people in general have. At that time, the idea of a free market, and industrial revolution provided the opportunity for many to seize the market and people were starting to see that they could become rich without having any type of restriction. New York city was the centre of this wealth-creating society. After the war, this movement generated new opportunities and ambitions for people wanting to start a wealthy upper class life. That period of time was all about alcohol, partying, gambling, fashion, and money.

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In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald characterizes the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values. One of the major themes explored in this novel is the Hollowness of the Upper Class. The entire book revolves around money including power and little love. Coincidentally the three main characters of the novel belong to the upper class and throughout the novel Fitzgerald shows how this characters have become corrupted and have lost their morality due to excess money and success and this has led them to change their perspective towards other people and they have been portrayed as short-sighted to what is important in life. First of all, we have the main character of this novel, Gatsby who won’t stop at nothing to become rich overnight in illegal dealings with mobsters such as Wolfsheim in order to conquer Daisy’s heart.”

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During the 1920s, America seemed to be a land of glamor and luxury. Underneath the beauty, however, was a vast underworld of crime: bootleggers and gangs ran rampant, controlling even members of the government. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, he tells a tale of that decade, which appears glamorous but is filled with corruption. The novel makes a naturalism argument about the impossibility of changing social class, revealing that only a facade of mobility can be achieved through debaucherous actions.

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American novel deals in depth with the theme of Greed as an aspect of human conscience crisis which leads to dilemma, problems, and predicament for human being. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Henry James’s Washington Square , Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, and others expose clear image for the theme of Greed and its implications. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the human predicament of Americans in 1920s, through his best novel The Great Gatsby . In this novel Fitzgerald deals with the theme of a lust for money and greed .

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Arguably one of the most complex works of American Literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald displays a satirical United States taking place in the early twenties in New York. The roaring twenties often portrayed a happy time immediately following World War 1 however, it gave off a false feeling of joy and many people were truly unhappy. Even though Nick Carraway shows a realistic image of himself, The Great Gatsby encompasses an illusion created in this time period and portrays this image through the atmosphere surrounding the actions of its characters; it ultimately shows a conflict against reality, identical to that to the early 20th century. The Great Gatsby shows the upper class and their habits, which involved: carelessness,

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Stereotypes of Differing Social Classes within the Great Gatsby Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel, The Great Gatsby, enhanced the stereotypical views on a wealthy/poverty stricken American in the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s purpose was to expose the irony of what it means to be wealthy to his audience. He adopts a dull and light tone to convey the assumptions and realities of contrasting social classes among the Americans thriving in the roaring twenties. Among the portrayal of the characters Jay Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson, their flamboyant and somber lifestyles and parties reveal the parallelism between two seemingly different characters. During the 1920s a lot of social differences existed between the wealthy and those who were poor.

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“Then wear that gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high bouncing lover, I must have you” (title page). Throughout the novel, the Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald presents Tom Buchanan as a very controlling person who believes he is entitled to many things because of his wealth. Similar to the quote, Tom’s constant need for wealth and power leads to a need and want for everything in sight. If a reader were to read this book through the Marxist lens, they would see an obvious struggle between the powerful and powerless and how that directly coincides with how much money the person with power has. The main character with power and wealth in the novel is Tom Buchanan, and he uses his control to gain power over others.

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