Materialism - The Great Gatsby

A detailed Summary of Materialism - The Great Gatsby

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 nev

Placing Nick as an observer, Fitzgerald is able to successfully show the reader how foolish it is to value material items over spirituality. The Great Gatsby is not, just a book about the 1920's. It is a book about America, its promise, and the betrayal of that promise. F. Scott Ftizgerald writes his best novels during the 1920's, in which he examines the evils of the time; he recognizes the consequences that accompany the actions of the characters who act on such vices, and wrote about them. This is a novel about what happens to the American dream in the 1920's, a period when the old values that give substance to the dream are corrupted by the vulgar pursuit of wealth. The very definition of materialism implies unhappiness because without spiritual values there cannot be true and lasting fulfillment.

For although this novel captures the romance and glitter of "The Jazz Age", it is more fundamentally a sad story-the portrayal of a young man and his tragic search for happiness. It is shameful that this country is built with such hope and positive motivation, but that the dark side of humanity turns it into such a selfish country. America, the land of opportunity, has unfortunately turned into an economic battle. Society is so worried about being the best, people surpass pure happiness. "There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it." Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

Nick's final thoughts are stated at the end of the novel where the story is summed up. The novel is transformed from a story of a small group of people at a moment in time to a portrait of an entire nation. It is Nick's last night in West Egg and he has walked over to Gatsby's mansion, letting the houses melt away in his imagination, he thinks of what this island must have looked like to the Dutch sailors seeing it for the first time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: as a new world--pure, and unspoiled. Nick calls it "a fresh green breast of the new world" (189). It finally hits Nick at the end that men have always been dreamers. The idea of America as a land of infinite possibilities was so magnificent then, that man was "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder" (189). The land-its physical beauty and its apparently limitless horizons-were worthy of the dream. For Gatsby the green light at the end of Daisy's dock symbolized the same American dream that drove the Dutch sailors to the new world. Gat

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Approximate Word count = 1716
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels