Essay On The Corruption Of Freedom In The Great Gatsby

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The Corruption of Freedom
Only after a person loses everything are they then truly free to do anything. Life is similar in which the desire to live freely will result in the loss of the rest of one 's ambitions. This is truly how one lives freely, without any chains holding them back. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the idealizations of The American Dream is a prominent theme The core embodiment of The American Dream is the hope that one can rise from rags to riches.The novel is set in a time when settlers traveled west seeking freedom and wealth. The novel exemplifies this shift in movement by portraying the corruption of The American Dream. When traditions and conventions were challenged between the citizens of West and …show more content…

The once famed vision of searching for freedom led to the attempt of equating the value of the amount of freedom one has with a dollar sign.

Jay Gatsby symbolizes both sides of the spectrum by standing for the corrupted dream and original dream. He identifies wealth as the answer to all his prayers and pursues it by being so unconstrained by his past. This causes Gatsby to entirely reinvent himself and become a hollow shell of what he once was. The truth is that Gatsby’s "parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people — his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” Gatsby’s aspirations include distancing himself from his past life, thereby denying his human need for that connection. To attain this, Gatsby becomes the essence of his idealizations and breaks the chains linking him to his farmer heritage. He achieves staggering amounts of wealth due to this determination and achieves freedom from his past burdens as a regular man. Gatsby believes he is a god among peasants or at least related …show more content…

At this house, there is an excess of material goods, yet Daisy is still unhappy when her husband, Tom, has an affair. Tom himself hardly seems happy. He has a "hard mouth and a supercilious manner" and his blunt voice adds to the "impression of fractiousness he conveyed”. Tom and Daisy are at the pinnacle of wealth in this novel, yet they are more caged in than ever with their discriminatory ideals and despise the citizens of West Egg for not living the same respectable lives as them. However, they relentlessly and irresponsibly spend their money while the West Eggers appear more free--despite their lack of sustainable income. Inside the lavish Buchanan mansion, Daisy and Jordan Baker are restless and bored and their lives or they appear stagnant and suppressed. They wonder what others do, since they have no plans and entertain themselves with small talk. The first words Nick heard that Daisy spoke are "I 'm p-paralyzed with happiness.” Though she is paralyzed--trapped in a golden cell--she is not with paralyzed with happiness, but rather with her wealth. Material items became a huge definition of the amount of money you had and as the new idealization of the American Dream was starting to form, material items defined the amount of success they achieved. Daisy is extremely materialistic as suggested when “her voice is full of money” which truly defines that money

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