The Great Gatsby: Can Money Buy Happiness?

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Can Money Buy Happiness? Happiness is not an object people can buy from the store. Sure, there are things that make us happy, but pure blissful joy comes from being with the ones we love. The American dream has always been just this: happiness, which is priceless. Not only has the American dream always been just happiness but wealthiness as well. However, these two aspects of the American dream could never compare to each other because while americn can be happy and wealthy, they could never buy their happiness with their wealth. Just like in the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, while the parties in West and East Egg were all glamorous and expensive, the wealthy inhabitants of these lands could never buy happiness with the money they had. While Gatsby was one of the wealthiest men in New York, he couldn’t buy his friends. Throughout the novel we hear all different types …show more content…

Forgiveness is not something that can be bought, it comes from the heart and has to be earned. Tom and Daisy were careless people, they didn’t care about forgiveness and felt as if they didn’t need to earn it, as long as they could buy it. When Nick made this observation, he knew he could never forgive them for “smash[ing] up things and creatures and then retreat[ing] back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let[ting] other people clean up the mess they had made” because it was reckless and while everyone else in Tom and Daisy’s lives would let them do this, Nick wouldn’t (179). The wealthy people of New York thought they could get away with everything because they had money; however, that’s not how life works. In the end, it’s the absence of forgiveness in Wilson’s heart that pulled the trigger on Gatsby. In the novel, George Wilson was like a rubber band, he was very flexible and naive around the upper class, but when he snapped it

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