Money Devalues America: Dreams and Corruption in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald is set in post-World War I New York. Long hailed as one of the greatest American works, the novel presents a set of questionable values through an array of characters. The title character traverses class and economical differences, rising from poverty at a North Dakota farm to apparent glamour and success in New York. James Gatsby acts with relentless determination in pursuit of the woman of his dreams. Instead of a romantic tale of attainment, however, The Great Gatsby is a story of disappointment and disaster, at the core of which lies the corrupting, blinding motivator- money.

Initially, Gatsby is presented as a somewhat mysterious figure, the obscure host of glamorous, exorbitant parties. He owns a huge house, much too big for the mere purpose of housing him. The vast majority of the guests at his parties come uninvited; most of them do not know who Gatsby is (47). He does not seem to be invested in his guests but rather in the spectacle of the events that he puts together, and the same applies to his house- it is meant to be impressive, rather than functional. It is clear that Gatsby is wealthy, and he orchestrates matters so that the notoriety of his wealth precedes him.

Throughout the novel, bits and pieces of Gatsby's life are revealed. He lies about his past, claiming that he is "the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now" (71). This is a dual untruth, as later we find out that his father is alive, as well as that "his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people". However, it does not seem that Gatsby was always a negative character. At an early age, Gatsby strove to better himself. When his father comes to his recently deceased son's West Egg mansion, he brings along a book in which Gatsby wrote a schedule when he was young (180). The schedule paints a portrait of young Gatsby as a motivated individual, resourceful and energetic. It describes, with a naïve charm, activities in which Gatsby's engaged, such as "dumbbell exercise", "study electricity", "study needed inventions". Also enumerated in the book are "general resolves" of young Gatsby's, which present a childlike set of values such as financial prudence ("save … $3 per week"), hygiene ("bath every other day") and an attempt to uphold good morals ("be better to parents"). His beginning is simple, wholesome, and clean.

At sixteen Gatsby leaves home. He is a dreamer, and his dreams are of money: "his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot … A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain" (105). However, this instinct of self-advancement is a positive quality still. Gatsby is described as "quick and extravagantly ambitious" (107). He is on the path to becoming a self-made man, and this is admirable: "The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God" (105). The power of young Gatsby's imagination is so immense that he is the creator of himself. For such a man, all opportunities are wide open.

When Gatsby meets Daisy, he falls in love. He is enchanted by her affluence, but his affection for her seems sincere: "They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another…" (156). Five years after their involvement, when she is married and has a child, Gatsby goes to great lengths to draw Daisy back into his life. Jordan reveals that Gatsby bought his huge house only to be across the bay from Daisy (85). When he finally meets her, he is so nervous he behaves extremely awkwardly (Chapter 5).

Instead of blossoming in the context of this romance, however, Gatsby begins to sink. He knows that alone, he is capable of great things, but that this ability would be crippled by the fulfillment of his love for Daisy. "He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God… Then he kissed her … and the incarnation was complete" (118). Gatsby willingly loses himself for the sake of another entity. This entity however, is not a human girl. Gatsby knows exactly what Daisy is- "Her voice is full of money" (126), as is she. Gatsby has knowingly sold his divine soul – for money.

At this point begins Gatsby's spiral towards shadiness, and obscure morality. He lies about his past; he throws ostentatious parties where his guests "conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks." Most significantly, he and Meyer Wolfsheim, a large scale gambler (79), sold liquor illegally (140) – and it was in this way that Gatsby became rich.

Thus, the novel tracks Gatsby's journey. His beginning is that of wholesome, naïve morality. A little older, he grows into powerful potential of divine proportions. Finally, he turns corrupt and seedy with the abandonment of the search for self and the start of the pursuit of money. Gatsby does not attain his heart's desire, and instead he is betrayed by her, to be killed by a stranger, to be ignored in death as much as his parties were frequented in life. Each and every one of his immoral behaviors was aimed, directly or indirectly, at pleasing and impressing Daisy. If indeed we take Daisy to symbolize money, Gatsby's death becomes a defeat of a man of great potential by the pursuit of money.

At the end of the last chapter of the book, Nick contemplates about pre-urbanization America:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

America of the present day is tainted, its current corruption standing in sharp contrast with the purity of the new world. The continent once held the secret, magical power of endless possibility, a power that is destroyed with the destruction of the trees and the subsequent establishment of modern society. Just like Gatsby, America started out fresh and full of promise, and just like Gatsby, America is filled with glamorous, but corrupt, entities. And, perhaps, America will come to the same end- to foundering after generations of deception and immorality.

            One could argue that the tale of Gatsby is a cautionary tale, portraying only a possible reality as opposed to one that is accurate. However, a tale of caution typically holds hope for the future, and in every aspect, The Great Gatsby paints a bleak picture. Nick, Jordan, Tom, and Daisy are all strongly featured in the novel (see Appendix A) and their fates are equally unhappy, in terms of their moral, if not their psychological implications. Jordan is associated with a professional golf scandal. Daisy kills Myrtle and has no intention of coming clean. Nick becomes an accessory after the fact when he does not report Daisy's crime. Tom is an adulterer, several times over. The lives of all the characters are saturated with crime and immorality, but not a trace of guilt — all go on, rather casually, with their lives. Rather than a set of morals we are provided with a sense of complacency, a satisfaction with mediocrity and lack of excitement by wrongdoing. Instead of a set of values, we get an empty set, a broken set of negatives, a nostalgic and beautiful hint of what once was but is now remote, unattainable, a dream broken and gone.

Appendix A- A (rough) quantitative analysis of the relative importance of the novel's characters

Even though James Gatsby lends his name to the title of the novel, I do not think he ought not to be considered the sole protagonist of the narrative. Instead, each of the characters Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Nick and Jordan, contribute their part to create a sense of America as a nation in pursuit of a floundering dream. Taking their choices and behaviors into account results in a more comprehensive assessment of the values at the core of The Great Gatsby.

I maintain that not only are the other characters significant, but that they are equally important. The structural device of several factors contributing to a theme is known in music and literature as polyphony, and refers to multiple voices appearing in a single work. This definition is not applicable as is to The Great Gatsby, as Nick is the narrator and sole voice of the novel. Instead, a phenomenon that can be of use to us here is the "ensemble cast" in film and television. An ensemble cast is a cast in which the performers are given similar amount of screen time, and contribute equally to the portrayed story.

A literary equivalent of screen time would be estimated by the relative presence of the characters in a work. Let us term this presence "page presence". The characters' "page presence" can be given by the number of pages in which the characters are discussed or their actions reported (corresponding in film to the number of minutes each actor is featured). To attain a crude, quantitative approximation of this I scanned the book for the number of times in which every one of the main characters is mentioned by their various names. This was facilitated with the gratuitous availability of the novel online and Microsoft Word's search function.

Gatsby is mentioned 273 times (five times as "Gatz" and five as "Jimmy"); Tom (also "Mr. Buchanan") 209 times; Daisy follows with 186 mentions and Jordan (or "Miss Baker") with 100 mentions. Nick is mentioned only 37 times, but his presence as narrator renders him a key character as well. In addition, the pronoun "I" appears over 1200 times in both dialog and reported narration, and even if just a tenth of them signify Nick referring to himself, the quantitative significance they represent put him on par with the other characters in terms of "page presence" (this can be checked, of course). In comparison, Myrtle and Wilson are mentioned 42 and 58 times, respectively.

The characters' contribution to the narrative too is considerable and important in complementing the character of Gatsby. Their fates in terms of money, romance, and attitudes towards immorality are thematically important – but that is the subject of another paper.

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