Great Gatsby Morals

Children are taught from an early age that the United States is a country founded on the glorious idea of the “american dream”. The american dream has been a term used to describe the hopes and success of those who attempt to make a living in the United States. It is described as an opportunity for all people to reach their maximum economic potential and be extremely wealthy. The achievement of the stereotypical american dream in the early 1900’s is exemplified by the many of the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. However, the idea and pursuit of the american dream by these characters does not come without fault. Seeking wealth and popularity brings to light the moral injustices created by a capitalist class system,

As Nick becomes more familiar with the hierarchy, he reveals the deep moral injustices and lack of equality inherent to the system that Fitzgerald has simulated. Nick describes Gatsby’s youth, or rather that of “James Gatz”, to the reader after an anecdote based around the increasing amount of rumors circulating around Gatsby’s success and origins. Nick recalls that “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people-his imagination had never really accepted the as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (Fitzgerald 105). This information about Gatsby’s view of his parents further cements him as the ruler of West Egg in both the reader’s and his own mind. Gatsby has pushed away any aspect of the boy from Louisville that Daisy once knew. He has convinced himself that being in the upper class is the most important thing in his life besides Daisy, and he believes that it is also inherently key in order to win over Daisy. Even Gatsby’s mansion next to Nick’s relative shack puts the class system on full display for the reader. Although many may call Nick the most moral person within the novel, he is still left with one of the lowest levels of wealth of all of the book’s main characters. After Gatsby’s murder, Nick attempts to organize a funeral for him after realizing that he is the only

Critic Tony McAdams writes about the parallels between Gatsby’s goals in the story and Fitzgerald’s own real life experiences in his literary criticism of the novel, Ethics in Gatsby: An Examination of American Values. McAdams describes Fitzgerald’s attempts at courtship, while paralleling them to Gatsby’s by writing, “King, however, married a wealthy suitor. Fitzgerald later sought to marry Zelda, but she put him off on the grounds that his prospects were uncertain. Fitzgerald then published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald and Zelda married, and eventually Ginerva and Zelda served as ‘models’ for Daisy” (McAdams 116). McAdams makes the argument that not only is the novel’s setting equivalent to a real time in the United States, but also some of its characters are as well. Fitzgerald paints Tom Buchanan as the antagonist of the novel because he is all that stands in Gatsby’s way of Daisy, similar to how Ginerva King married a wealthy suitor over Fitzgerald. Daisy is unable to consider marrying Gatsby until he has found wealth for himself much like Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda waited for him to find more financial stability before agreeing to a marriage. Fitzgerald creates the character Gatsby that is simply a poor boy doing all that he can to marry a rich woman. This is Fitzgerald’s commentary on the injustices of the class system. He believes that wealth has no