What Is The Disillusionary Tale Of The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby: A Cautionary Tale In the 1920’s, there was a nationwide belief that the American Dream was dead. However, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald believed wholeheartedly in the American Dream, just not the corrupted version of it which permeated the lifestyles of Americans in the 1920’s. In response he wrote a certifiable exposé on corruption in the form of his most popular work, The Great Gatsby. This 1925 masterpiece is a realistic fiction novel narrated from the point of view of Nick Carraway. Nick tells the story of the people who live in small and wealthy suburbs outside of New York City called West Egg and East Egg, in the years in which America was just resurfacing from World War One. He speaks of the great overindulgence,
materialism and immorality that they are faced with, living in a time in which there was plenty of money and no regard for morals. The characters in the story strive towards their American Dream, however, these particular characters have American Dreams which are corrupted, and unachievable because of the immoral and materialistic lifestyles that they lead. Through the characterization of the people in his novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald shows that in the post World War One era, the American Dream was corrupted by materialism and immorality.
World War One created a period of time in which America was economically rich, yet spiritually empty. In the first decade of the 20th century, America needed soldiers to fight across the sea. They drew up propaganda posters and filled the heads of the young and naive with images of glorious and victorious battle, from whence the new American soldiers would come back with heads held high and medals on their jackets, as heroes. Young men and women enlisted to the military’s service in droves, expecting a honorable battle just as the posters had said. What they actually got, was a brutal and violent war. Instead of coming back as heroes, oozing with pride, they came back mentally, emotionally, and spiritually broken -- if they came back at all.
This terrible disillusionment about war brought about a post-war period in which morals were lost and the nationwide mantra was “God is Dead”.
The people had previously believed that being a good person and having faith in God would lead to happiness and a good life. However, these fundamental morals had not protected many of the innocent people who lost their lives in the war. And so, Americans abandoned those morals. Taking advantage of the economic boom that comes with war, Americans began to indulge -- to the point almost of gluttony -- in materials. They forsook honesty, fidelity, abstinence and chastity, and instead, fixated on wealth and materials as being the only path to the always coveted American Dream. The American Dream is an all encompassing term which refers to the life goal of any one American. It is different for every person, but it is the common ideal that we, as a human race, strive for, that we work towards. Unfortunately, the Americans of the 1920s were mistaken in believing that wealth and materials were all they needed. The wealth and materials which they yearned for were the very thing which corrupted their American Dream. In getting rid of these morals to which they had clung to for so long they had achieved a superficial form of happiness, in which they could do whatever they wanted without worrying of the consequences, but underneath it all, they were hopeless, lonely souls. When they abandoned their morality, they also lost their hope, their faith, and their passion, creating a generation of people who were hopeless and impressionless. This time period is where F. Scott Fitzgerald chooses to set the scene for his novel The Great Gatsby, and this choice in setting allows him to write a cautionary tale about this loss of morals, and the corruption that the loss of morals and materialism brought upon the American
Dream. Myrtle Wilson is a perfect example of what happens when wealth and social status becomes the American Dream. At a party that Myrtle and Tom had thrown in New York City, Myrtle’s sister Catherine asked why she had married George Wilson, her husband, in the first place. Myrtle responded with more than a touch of cynicism.
“‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,’ she said finally. ‘I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe… The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out… I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon’”( Fitzgerald 34-35)
Myrtle explains that she only married George because she “thought he knew something about breeding”. This implies that the most important thing to Myrtle is the class and status that one is born with. She thought that he was “a gentleman”, but when she found out that he did not even own a suit fit enough to marry her in, she realized that he was at the bottom of the social ladder, and that by marrying him, she had fallen to the bottom of the social ladder as well. Myrtle Wilson’s American Dream was centered around social status, and so marrying a man at the bottom of the ladder broke her. In this time period of amorality and immorality, she had no qualms about going to some immoral and extreme measures to achieve this dream.
Myrtle Wilson emanates sexuality and femininity, and she uses it as an advantage to entrap the rich Tom Buchanan, a man she sees as her ticket out of the “valley of ashes” -- the land of the poor and miserable. Tom is the most important thing to Myrtle, as seen when Fitzgerald writes, “She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye” (Fitzgerald 26) This quote shows that Tom is her top priority, and her own husband is given no attention when Tom is in the room, as though he is an apparition or a shadow. To Myrtle, Tom represents her American Dream. He is wealthy, high in the social hierarchy, and that is all she has ever wanted. However, Tom is extremely immoral. He is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, a liar, and an adulterer. Her American Dream is corrupted by immorality. Nevertheless, because of this reckless time period in which morals are obsolete, she feels no apprehension about being unfaithful to her husband and a mistress to Tom. However, a corrupted American Dream can never satisfy a person. Her dream is now hopeless; she cannot achieve it, at least not the way she wants to. In the end, she is hit by a car and loses her life, because she was trying to get to Tom. Her American Dream was corrupted by immorality, and it caused her downfall.
The most vivid example of the corruption of the American Dream is seen in the novel’s namesake, the “Great” Jay Gatsby, whose American Dream came in two parts: wealth, and Daisy Fay Buchanan. Jay Gatsby started out as a humble and poor man named Jay Gatz. He worked on the Great Lakes, barely scraping by and dreaming of bigger things. One day, he met a rich man named Dan Cody, who changed his life. Dan Cody employs him as an assistant, and he learns the ropes of being an upper class man. As written by Fitzgerald: “And it was from Cody that he inherited money -- a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn’t get it… He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man”(Fitzgerald 100-101). From this point on, James Gatz is fixated on wealth. He believes it to be the only path to happiness, and even after being deceived out of his inheritance from Cody, he stays on his path and continues his transformation into Jay Gatsby. At some point, immorality leads him astray and he begins to gather some riches through illegal activity. He starts up a large bootlegging ring, and conspires with some very shady and clearly immoral people, such as Meyer Wolfsheim. The main issue is that wealth and materials are worthless in the grand scope of things. This is something that Fitzgerald understood greatly. When writing, he went to great lengths to describe the extravagance of the lifestyle which Gatsby and his fellow Eggers live in. As said by Suzanne del Gizzo, “[Critics] do not recognize that the very opulence and excessiveness of [Fitzgerald’s] descriptions suggest a critique of the remarkable, magical, but ultimately deceptive and dangerous power of objects in a consumer culture, especially their seeming ability to create identity and social status.”(del Gizzo 39) Fitzgerald acknowledges the “deceptive” nature of consumerism and materialism. Materials are simply objects, and they alone cannot provide happiness. Gatsby gathers money, fame, notoriety, and as many beautiful objects as he could possibly desire, yet he is never truly satisfied, as his American Dream was corrupted by his materialistic way of thinking.
The other part of Jay Gatsby’s corrupted American Dream was Daisy Fay Buchanan. Daisy had always been extremely concerned with appearances. She married Tom only for his status, even though at the time, she truly loved Gatsby. Daisy’s obsession with appearances makes her very vain and superficial. She has no depth, no substance. She hardly even cares for her own child. Nick describes her as careless. But she is the manifestation of the American Dream in the often clouded eyes of Jay Gatsby. He over romanticizes her, to the point where there is no way she could ever live up to his expectations. As said by Leland S. Person Jr., “Daisy’s reputed failure of Gatsby is inevitable; no woman, no human being, could ever approximate the platonic ideal he has invented” (Person Jr 251). Jay Gatsby had created an illusion of a perfect Daisy Fay, and the real Daisy Buchanan had no chances of matching that illusion. He spends five years chasing Daisy, the symbol of his American Dream, but she is so superficial and so vain, that his dream holds no substance. On the inside, it is hollow, and that hollow corruption which the “Great” Gatsby chases after is never fully achieved, and never satisfies him. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is a story of tragedy and love. But alongside that, the novel is a cautionary tale about the dangers of immorality and materialism. The American Dream is exactly that: a dream. It is a goal, a hope, something to aspire for. And it it is entirely subjective. Everyone’s dream is different, everyone’s goals, loves and lives are different. The main characters of this novel strove to achieve their American Dream, just as anyone else might have. Their main flaw, that separated them from the average man, is that they chose social status and money as their Dream, and due to the immorality and materialism of the time period, were willing to go to great and terrible lengths to achieve their dreams. In indulging themselves in immorality, ammorality, materialism and greed, they corrupted their American Dream and made it impossible to achieve in a satisfying manner. Fitzgerald, in showing the sadness, tragedy and emotional suffering the characters must endure, cautions the reader to avoid the corrupting materialism and immorality, as they can destroy dreams, dreams that could have been reality.