Theme Of Success In The Great Gatsby

Individuals have different perspectives on success. Some people will think of success as becoming popular while others will consider it as possessing more than enough amount of wealth. Although people's point of view on success may differ, it is indisputable that everyone wants to become successful. While a lot of people in today's society view success in a positive way, a number of literary pieces suggest that becoming successful is such an unfavourable trait. For example, in the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the certain characters who are eager to be successful becomes phoney and morally corrupted. Similarly, the Arthur Miller's play named Death of a Salesman is about the man who becomes unrealistic and dishonest while he

Both characters want to be successful in the way that they can elevate their status and become wealthy but this affects them in a negative way. Gatsby's admiration to success leads him to phoniness as he pretends he is a different person in order to get a new identity and start a new life in the way he wants it to be. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the piece, says about Gatsby's past that is different to what Gatsby has told him before. Nick says, "James Gatz- that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career" (Fitzgerald 94). Speaking of Gatsby's insincerity, Tanfer Emin Tunc, the associate professor in Department of American Culture and Literature, states, "Like the Long Island he inhabits, Gatsby lives in a world of deception that replaces the moral attention… Gatsby refashions himself by changing his name from the ethnic sounding James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, claiming he is Oxford educated, speaking in a staged British accent and addressing everyone as old sport" (The American Dream). Both Nick Carraway and Tanfer Emin Tunc suggest that throughout his life, James Gatz always looks forward to living in a new identity of himself as Jay Gatsby. He tries to change from James Gatz, the son of poor farmers in the Midwest, to a completely different person named Jay Gatsby to pursue riches, social status and the woman he loved named Daisy. Gatsby's pursuit of success leads him to escape from his original ego and family, but this makes him develop the phoniness as well. In addition, Myrtle Wilson's phoniness is another result of the desire to elevate status. Although Myrtle has a husband named George Wilson, she secretly has an affair with a wealthy man named Tom