The Negative Influence of Wealth Wealth and prosperity are the core of living a lavish lifestyle and having a successful life. However, money can influence people into debauchery. In the book, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces to us to some of the dangers of being rich. Most people in the Great Gatsby were very privileged, and they lived a lavish lifestyle. However, these people did not know how to control their power and wealth. It was evident that throughout the story, prosperity controlled people into becoming demanding and cruel, lazy and feeble, or involved in illegal and immoral activities. The negative effects of becoming wealthy can make some people become cold-blooded and demanding. Tom Buchanan …show more content…
Daisy Buchanan is a woman who needs constant affection. Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy, narrates, “In June she married Tom Buchanan...he gave her a string of pearls” (Fitzgerald 75-76). Jordan acknowledges that Daisy married Tom even though she promised to wait for Gatsby because she could not stand being lonely. Money was also a huge factor; it was evident that Tom was rich. Daisy could have married the man that she truly loved if she was not wealthy. It is easy for a wealthy person to not care about other people and live an extravagant life. After he meets up with Tom, Nick declares, “...Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald 179). It was ironic that even Nick, a person who was “inclined to reserve all judgment” (Fitzgerald 1), was able to see how money had made Tom and Daisy careless and lazy. Nick also notices that Daisy and Tom had disappeared right after Gatsby’s death. Daisy and Tom were wealthy enough to move out of Long Island, while they made everyone else solve the problem that they had left behind. It is easy for rich people to become weak and only focus on
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows that a man’s wealth is not a reflection of his worth through Daisy and Tom. Nick, the narrator, states, “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth” (Fitzgerald 2). He feels that humane qualities are not equally distributed. Only certain people have respectable qualities just as only a few people have a lot of money.
In the novel The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald depicts the theme of “wealth can breed carelessness” using the literary devices and/or techniques of irony, irony, and point of view. From Nick 's perspective, the wealthy characters of this story tend to act ignorantly and care nothing else besides themselves, which would impact others, including the actions shown by Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, and Jordan. First of all, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts the theme of “Wealth can breed carelessness” using irony. In the text, a conversation between Jordan and Nick, “‘They’ll keep out of my way,’ she insisted.
In the story, the narrator describes the rich as “different from you and me. [The rich] possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand” (Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy” 3). The narrator 's description is very accurate, which is shown especially in the main character, Anson, who was born into a wealthy family and exhibits many of these characteristics. Tate, a critical writer explains that “‘The Rich Boy’ is not so much about wealth itself as about the effect of wealth on character, and the primary effect on Anson is an over power sense of superiority” (1). This superiority that Anson feels directly correlates with his upbringing because he has more money than most people.
The impact of socioeconomic status can be examined through a myriad of lenses. F. Scott Fitzgerald aims to show the relationship between socioeconomic status and power. Throughout The Great Gatsby, Tom’s character shows that socioeconomic status is equivalent to power within the novel. Tom puts great pride and emphasis on his socioeconomic status and wealth.
The Great Gatsby is an American novel written by Scott Fitzgerald. On the surface, the book revolves around the concept of romance, the love between two individuals. However, the novel incorporates less of a romantic scope and rather focuses on the theme of the American Dream in the 1920s. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as an era of decline in moral values. The strong desire for luxurious pleasure and money ultimately corrupts the American dream which was originally about individualism.
Daisy craves money, she is very materialistic and would much rather have wealth over true love. She is now no longer interested in Gatsby. Daisy finds a man of much more wealth named Tom Buchanan, who she marries and has a child named Pammy with. Daisy is in an abusive relationship while also being cheated on. Years go by and Daisy reconnects with an old cousin, Nick, whose neighbor happens to be Jay Gatsby.
Set in the lavish era of the 1920’s, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the wealthy, yet sinful life of Jay Gatsby. When describing his character, Fitzgerald touches upon the three deadly sins: greed, envy and gluttony. James Gatz, having grown up in a small town to farmers, wished to make more of himself. Disowning his parents at a young age, he went off in search for money, and a new identity. “And when the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too” (Fitzgerald 107).
Then, we will see Daisy Buchanan’s moral corruption due to her wealthy upbringing. Lastly, Nick Carraway’s conversation with Tom will show how wealth has corrupted Tom’s morals in such a way that it leads him to rationalize his decisions and actions, believing that what he did was right. Wealth is the source of moral corruption within the characters in The Great Gatsby, wealth is the source of their actions and decisions, it is the reason for their warped sense of what is right and wrong. The first example of wealth
The carelessness that money creates allows those in power to bypass and disobey the laws because they believe their money will bail them out of trouble. Many wealthy people use their money as a reason to not take responsibility for their actions. Wealth causes the characters in The Great Gatsby to be out of touch with reality and the world beyond wealth. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby Greed can ruin a person’s life. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows this in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby, a sad love story about the rich title character, Jay Gatsby, and his obsession to win back the love of the now married Daisy Buchanan, his former girlfriend. The extravagant lifestyles of Gatsby and the wealthy socialites who attend his parties lead to lost dreams and wasted lives. These men and women are absorbed by material pursuits. In Jay Gatsby’s case, all the money in the world could not replace what he truly desires, Daisy.
The author characterizes the wealthy by juxtaposing Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, the two affluent characters in the novel. Fitzgerald juxtaposes them by first revealing both as wealthy, introducing them closely, and highlighting their different natures through how they earned their wealth and through the plot to show how the wealthy class with old money is soulless. Although both Tom and Gatsby are prosperous, only Tom is depicted as heartless since he has old money and was in the wealthy class his entire life. Gatsby, however, has new money and since he earned it, he is not described as soulless because he wasn’t always in the wealthy class to where he is adapted their heartless nature. These differences correlate with their personality and with how Fitzgerald condemns the wealthy with old money as callous.
Daisy never has to sacrifice anything or work hard for her own money because she inherited all her money from her parents. As Adam’s says “It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrust of it.” She does not understand what the American Dream is and how it affects Gatsby. Nick comments, “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy---they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or in their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made…”(187).
Not only does the amount of wealth affect social class, but the type of wealth also affects it. It even affects where people live and who people marry as seen with Gatsby and Daisy. The characters social standing affect who they interact and how they are perceived by others. Fitzgerald highlights the different class structures like “New rich” and “Old rich” and the impact of wealth on the people’s lives in those classes. He also shows the superficial nature of the characters and highlights the value placed on wealth.
Due to the lack of a loving relationship, the Buchanans cheat on each other constantly without care. Tom has an affair with Myrtle Wilson, who is engaged to George Wilson. Daisy forgives Tom for doing so because of his affluence: “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time." (Fitzgerald 251-252). Daisy was a trophy wife; Tom did not truly love her, for he is married to her because of her beauty.
Humans, by our very nature, are always striving to achieve more in life. Unfortunately, our materialistic society, and that of the Roaring Twenties, interpret this as striving for wealth. That pursuit often becomes all-consuming, eventually hindering our pursuit of gratifying life goals. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts wealth as a fraudulent thief whose pursuit must be abandoned for the sake of tangible fulfillment. He illustrates the dangers of attempting to find gratification in wealth through the life of Jay Gatsby, who ironically sacrifices morality, identity, and love in order to gain wealth, which he attempts to use to justify his claim to these very things.