How Does Fitzgerald Create Corruption In The Great Gatsby

The 1920s were years of unprecedented corruption in America, both politically under the Harding Administration and economically with the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald, unlike many of his contemporaries who feared what acknowledging corruption would bring them, not only acknowledges this corruption but highlights it in his The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald uses many motifs, such as hope, dreams, class, and wealth, within the love story of Gatsby and Daisy in order to convey a deeper thematic message to the reader. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses characterization, symbolism, and point of view in The Great Gatsby to convey to his readers how money, power, and greed corrupts Gatsby’s world.

Fitzgerald shows how Daisy is corrupted by greed through the development

Fitzgerald describes the valley as: A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. (Fitzgerald

Ashes grow rampant like wheat, as despair festers and thrives in the valley; feeding off the abundant poverty and despair. Like everything in the valley, Myrtle and George's marriage was impoverished and fragile. Similarly it was easily corrupted by money and the promise of luxury; promised by Tom and East Egg. Struggling to see through the cloud of corruption the poor stumble, struggling to maintain their footing and find a place of stability on ground uncorrupted by money or greed. Though the hills of ash crumbled easily beneath their unsure feet as they grasp for something stable, crawling towards the road where solid and stable cars whir by. The chaos, and competition for this, temporary stability kicks up a cloud of corruption, which settles, adding to the piles of ash the poor desperately swarm from. The rich, like Tom and Daisy remain clean of the dust cloud they have stirred up. Tom and Daisy continue living life in their a world of wealth, sheltered by those just outside of it, like Gatsby. Letting the dust and blame fall on the car behind them. Gatsby’s car does not belong on the path of the rich. Blinded by the glow of wealth in front of him, Gatsby failed to see the ashey cloud he had driven