The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald tells the story of the wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Taking place during the 1920s or the Jazz Age as Fitzgerald calls it, the novel is told through the eyes of the tolerant Nick Carraway. A major theme in this book is wealth. The story revolves around the way the characters act towards each other because of how much money they have. At first money creates a luxurious life and a world of gaudy parties. Although, in the end money ends up producing more problems than it is actually worth. In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby wealth affected many of the characters because it made Daisy think life was all about lavish living, it also made Myrtle become attracted to Tom because of his money, and it made Gatsby use his money to climb the social ladder to impress someone.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made (Fitzgerald, 179). This quote from the book justifies the fact that Daisy was a careless person and didn't care about anything but her money and her extravagant life. Daisy embodies the swing from the resplendence that makes up their world to the ugliness off of which such resplendence feeds (Lehan 79). In front is the resplendent world such power can buy and the women like Daisy Fay, who incarnate its glamour and whose beauty is inseparable from the acts of such possession (Lehan 79). She is the tinselly department store window at Christmastime to the urchin in the street (Koster 84). Her very voice, as Gatsby puts it, "is full of money" (Koster 84). Daisy loves Gatsby, although she believes that because she is rich, she can't marry a poor boy and hence money gets in the way. Once Daisy comes to understand the source of Gatsby's money, her interest in him is gone forever (Lehan 57). Gatsby thinks of Daisy as a sort of icon of wealth (Koster 115) ....Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor (Fitzgerald 150). Tom and Daisy serve as personifications of the doubts that Fitzgerald seemed to be feeling about the wealthy world that he yearned for and yet criticized (Koster 114). Daisy, in other words, knows what she is getting when she stays with Tom; his infidelity is the price she pays for such security, a security that she also will retreat back into when she not only dismisses Gatsby from her life but allows him to die for a crime that she committed (Lehan 100). In choosing Tom Buchanan over the absent Gatsby, Daisy has allowed her life to be shaped forever by the crude force of Tom's money (Person). Fitzgerald describes Daisy to be this girl who thrives off of money and only wants to live in that first-class lifestyle. Fitzgerald pictures her, "high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl" (Bloom 79).

Another character in the book that shows the importance that money plays in the story is Myrtle Wilson. Myrtle is married to George Wilson, the lifeless owner of a run-down auto shop. He does not have as much money as Myrtle would like him to have so she has a secret affair with Daisy's husband Tom, who gives her everything she wants. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. ... "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." (Fitzgerald 27-28). Myrtle insists that she married below her caste, that she believed certain things about George until they got married and it was too late (Shmoop Editorial Team). Since Myrtle is quite obviously below the Buchanan's class (yet another reason she goes for Tom), Fitzgerald ridicules her for insisting that she is above her husband (Shmoop Editorial Team). If Gatsby were simply a man on the make he would be no better than Tom's mistress Myrtle, who wants to trade up from a husband who had to borrow the suit he was married in to one who "brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest" (Voegeli). Myrtle tries desperately to maintain a façade of wealth and respectability; she believes that she is playing the role of the great matron (Lehan 93). "I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair over the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time." Then she flounced... and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there (Fitzgerald 32). Myrtle treats George, her husband, very poorly. She believes that because he