How Does Money Build Happiness In The Great Gatsby

There's a saying that the more money you have the happier you are and better quality of life you have. You can have the newest clothes, nicest house and get to travel the world. Have you ever thought that money could get in the way of everything you dreamed of? Neither did Jay Gatsby. While writing The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald intended to convey that wealth doesn't always lead to happiness. Before the war, Jay Gatsby was happy and in love with Daisy. Everything was great and life was easy. Daisy then meets Tom Buchanan and they start dating and later get married. "Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." (Fitzgerald 17 ). They were able to travel together and spend money for seemingly no reason. They then moved to West Egg and lived in a damper house with expensive furniture and elegant decorations. “ The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in gardens of Versailles.” (Fitzgerald ??) The house they lived in was overly decorated.

In fact, it gets every character further away from happiness. ‘The combination of restlessness and resentment puts them on the path to the tragedy at the end of the book.” (Wulick 113). Gatsby tries to use his money and get Daisy and that fails. He ended up dying because of an affair that Tom was having. Daisy is unhappy in her marriage to Tom because he is not committed to her. She then has an affair with Gatsby because of that unhappiness. “Gatsby was taught to measure success failure and virtue in pecuniary terms.” ( Berman 33). If you did not have money it was thought that you failed in life. If you did not have money though you learned how to appreciate the things you had