Corrupted Morals and Degraded Dreams in The Great Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby presents a vivid chronicle of the Jazz Age and is a tightly constructed work of literary genius. In the novel, Nick Carraway tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a handsome bachelor who has amassed a fortune as a racketeer in order to build a Long Island mansion and give fabulous parties that he hopes will enable him to win back the love of the married Daisy Buchanan. With the help of Nick, a reunion is arranged between Gatsby and Daisy, but in the end Daisy returns to her husband. Gatsby is killed through a misunderstanding, and Nick retreats to his native Midwest, disillusioned.

The novel is a story of the American Dream. Near the end of the novel, a deathly ill Gatsby awaits a call from Daisy that never materializes, but he dies an incurable romantic, still clinging to an ideal conception of his sweetheart that she can never fulfill in reality. Nick is left with the knowledge that the dream of getting ahead and winning the perfect girl is corrupt at its very core. Nick, though, also realizes that without the dream, life is barren and worthless.

The characters in this short novel are all very interesting because of the distinctive and well-defined features Fitzgerald endows them. The main characters-Daisy, Gatsby, and Nick-each are especially articulate. Nick, the narrator and "arbiter", throughout most of the novel remains outside most of the action and reserves judgment until late in the novel when he reaches the symbolic age of thirty and voices the author's moral verdict-that an ideal based on materialism is a corruption of the American Dream, but the selfless devotion to a corrupt ideal is morally superior to the complete selfishness that motivates all except Gatsby. Gatsby himself...

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...erialism as its means. The substitution of false albeit attractive goals such as Daisy as the fulfillment of the promise of America has changed the east, "the fresh, green breast of the new world"(189) as the Dutch sailors saw it with all its trees and flowers, into a grotesque moral waste land represented by the "valley of ashes"(27) between West Egg and New York where only the morally irresponsible can survive. Fitzgerald believes we are in a vicious circle, the established wealth is corrupt but the new rich adopt to the same ideals as the old rich and they become corrupt and join the established wealth and then the new group aspires to the established rich values and so on. Both sides, when seen from the proper perspective, are as corrupt and as morally irresponsible as the other and, even though they move in different circles, they are as similar as two eggs.

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