Materialism

– The Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper

Materialism

America has been labeled “The land of opportunity,” a place where it is possible to accomplish anything and everything. This state of mind is known as “The American Dream.” The American Dream provides a sense of hope and faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of human wishes and desires. This dream, however, originates from a desire for spiritual and material improvement. Unfortunately, the acquisition of material has been tied together with happiness in America. Although “The American Dream” can be thought of as a positive motivation, it often causes people to strive for material perfection, rather than a spiritual one. This has been a truth since the beginnings of America, such as the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald s novel, The Great Gatsby, which is an example of this set in the 20 s. The characters in this novel are too fixed on material things, losing sight of what is really important.

The characters in The Great Gatsby take a materialistic attitude that causes them to fall into a downward spiral of empty hope and zealous obsession. Fitzgerald contrasts Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway to display how the materialistic attitude of the 1920 s leads many to hopeless depression and how materialism never constitutes happiness. Fitzgerald uses Jay Gatsby, a character who spends his entire adult life raising his status, only to show the stupidity of the materialistic attitude. Rather than hard work, Gatsby turns to crime and bootlegging in order to earn wealth and status to get the attention of Daisy Buchanon, a woman he falls in love with five years earlier. “He [Gatsby] found her [Daisy] excitingly desirable. He went to her house There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool then the other bedrooms It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy It increased her value in his eyes” (155-156). Gatsby falls in love with everything about Daisy. It is not only her that Gatsby desires, it is her riches and possessions as well. The fact the many other gentlemen want Daisy simply increases her worth in Gatsby s eyes. All of these things are the reasons Gatsby “commit[s] himself to the following of a grail” (156). The grail symbolizes a quest for perfection, the perfection of himself in others eyes. James Gatz works his entire adult life to win this woman, to achieve this unrealistic dream of his. Fitzgerald uses the word grail to suggest that for Gatsby, marrying Daisy is a type of a religious quest. Yet, truthfully, Daisy herself is not the key, but the increase in status that she would bring him and the illusion that she carries with her. He had thrown himself into it [the dream] decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way” (101). Gatsby is much more in love with the idea of Daisy, not the reality of who she is. He wants everything she has and stands for. Gatsby wastes his entire adult life trying to achieve this idealistic dream.

Indeed he loves Daisy, but through his fantasy he builds her up to be someone she is not. Lost in his idealistic world, he molds his images of her into a perfect specimen. Nick Carraway comments, “There must have been moments when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion”, yet he refuses to acknowledge these moments” (101). His state of reality is so greatly altered that he cannot believe she is not the absolute perfect woman he so desired five years ago. Jay Gatsby s obsession with Daisy gives him a false illusion of her, much like the illusion of the American dream, both representing inevitable disaster. F. Scott Fitzgerald clearly uses Jay Gatsby to represent the materialistic attitude of the 1920 s. Literary critic Marius Bewley suggests that Jay Gatsby is ” The mythic embodiment of the American Dream the terrible deficiencies are not so much the private ones of Jay Gatsby, but are those inherent in contemporary manifestations of the American vision itself Gatsby s deficiencies of intelligence and judgment bring him to his tragic death a death that is spiritual as well as physical. But the more important question that faces us through our sense of the immediate tragedy is where (these deficiencies) have brought America”. This state of perfection that people so desperately want to achieve is the very reason why American society is dysfunctional. People are blinded by this hopeful result of their lives, they allow the present to escape their grasp.

Fitzgerald introduces a place by the name of “The Valley of Ashes”. It is a depressing locality far away from the glamour and wealth of the East and West Eggs. This dumping ground is half way between West Egg and New York. The Valley of Ashes is a symbol of the empty existence of a low society. Fitzgerald uses this slum as an example of the failure of the American Dream. He criticizes the corruption of the American dream. What was once for Thomas Jefferson-a belief in self-reliance and hard work, has become what Nick Carraway calls “The service of a cast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (180). This energy might have gone into the pursuit of morale and self worth, rather than materialism and shallow fortunes. Things like love and relating to another human being is completely overlooked in the pursuit of power and a very showy, but fundamentally empty form of success.

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