How Does Tom Lose His Wealth In The Great Gatsby

“Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery” (Mike Milligan) Throughout The Great Gatsby, we see how Gatsby does everything in his power to gain the approval of Daisy. He tears himself to pieces trying to earn enough money to get into a social class that Daisy would appreciate. Gatsby saw that the accumulation of wealth would justify those means. The wealthy characters in the story are undermined by their desire to maintain their wealth. Tom and Daisy’s marriage was a marriage of convenience because Daisy wanted status, Tom wanted someone who looked good on his arm, and Gatsby abandoned his principles to attract Daisy. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates how the acquisition of money

In the first few pages of the novel, Nick describes Tom’s mindset and his erratic lifestyle. “I felt Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game” (Fitzgerald 6). Just as a wasp seeks victims to sting, Tom is forever seeking a greater life, killing more of himself each time he pushes for more happiness with his wealth. His fundamental belief of what happiness and wealth are wrong. He doesn’t realize that his enormous wealth can not help him achieve happiness. He demonstrates this by forever drifting away searching for peace and contentment throughout the book. He suffers from affluenza. He wants what he wants and his privilege affords him all of his desires, but none of them satisfy him. Tom is in a constant search for excitement and drama, which he can not recover from his youth football days. His money can not buy these happy days back. The irrecoverable football game suggests that this feeling of desperation for happiness is permanent in Tom, suggesting that Tom’s entire life is going to revolve around his inordinate search for pleasure in life. His search will never end because Tom will never be happy in life with his beliefs even if he has all the money in the world. It also suggests that Tom’s lifestyle is

In Chapter 7 when Tom, Daisy, and Nick were all in the Plaza Hotel Tom began to call out Gatsby for his business methods. When Tom was insulting Gatsby he snarkily remarked, “‘I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were.’ He turned to us and spoke rapidly. ‘He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong’” (Fitzgerlad 133). Tom was right about Gatsby, he was a bootlegger. His desire for money led him down a dark path that led him away from happiness. His lust for status and wealth put him down a cataclysmic trail and he ultimately did not achieve his goal of Daisy's love. In other words, he did not achieve happiness. Through the process of attaining Gatsby’s perceived contentment, he kills himself in the process. The killing of Gatsby at the end of the book is a symbol of that. Gatsby was long dead before that gun was even