Preview

The Great Gatsby Corruption Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
751 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Great Gatsby Corruption Essay
The book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is about trying to find the American Dream, but no one is able to find it because the world is too corrupt. In the book there are three major places East Egg, West Egg, and The Valley of Ashes. All three places in the book are corrupt in their own way. The places all thrive for their American Dream, but it cannot be reached. The American Dream is corrupt just like the towns in The Great Gatsby; this is because people take too much pride in the things they own and the things that they strive for. The East Egg is a corrupt place. It is not the most corrupt out of all of the places in the book, but it definitely has its problems. The East Egg is where Tom and Daisy Buchanan live. East Egg is …show more content…
The Valley of Ashes is where the rich people dump and burn all of their trash. Mr. Wilson and his wife Myrtle live in this corrupt place. The people that live in The Valley of Ashes want to be just like the rich. The people their are not happy with the way their lives are and would do anything to be like the rich. The Valley of Ashes is very corrupt and has many examples of this. When Gatsby was speeding in The Valley of Ashes and got pulled over the cop seen who he was and let him go without a ticket. Myrtle is married to George and has affairs with Tom who is also married. Daisy killed Myrtle not on purpose, but Tom blames Gatsby. George killed Gatsby because Tom told him that Gatsby was the one that hit and killed his wife. After George killed Gatsby for the murder of his wife he kills himself. The poor will do anything to be like the rich. All of the places in The Great Gatsby are corrupt and show the problems of the real world. With all of the corruptness in the world no one is able to reach their American Dream. The people who try to reach their American Dream get lost in the clouds and are unable to be happy with the lives that they have. The people who get lost trying to find their American Dream are not happy and they bring down the other people around them. The American Dream is gone and it has been gone for a long while

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In The Great Gatsby we encounter an extraordinary individual, Gatsby, whose immense wealth catches the eye of many speculators in New York, West Egg and East Egg. In the story the author makes sure to emphasize the decay of the original American dream. The American dream originally represented hope and equality, for everyone looking for a better life. However after the wars and the passing years people took a different stand on the American dream and gave it their own meaning. The most popular meaning of the American dream was to obtain immense riches and power at any cost and all thoughts of equality and hope had banished. We can see that in The Great Gatsby when Fitzgerald describes the differences between the people of rich individuals from West Egg, East Egg and the poverty and struggle of those living in the valley of ashes. In the story Gatsby symbolizes…

    • 726 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Great Gatsby, there are a variety of themes. Of all the themes the book has to offer, the film captures best, the lack of morals and the corruption of the American Dream. Towards the beginning of the film when Nick first meets Myrtle she is immediately showing her lack of morals by the way she interacts with Tom, giving Nick a sense of their secret affair. In addition, the party she hosts at the apartment is over the top inappropriate compared to the one in the novel as Nick is exposed to sex, drugs, and destruction. But it can be more relatable to the viewers with today’s parties and the modernized music playing in the background. A final example would be Daisy giving Tom a pen to write down any numbers of random women he’d toy with,…

    • 336 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Society tends to have a myriad of unspoken problems that plague its entirety as a whole. With numerous underlying issues that slowly fester from the center of the core to the outside, society constantly attempts to suppress and ignore the genuine problem. One of the ever present obstacles that seemingly will go unattended to is moral decay. Though many people may recognize the issue at hand, it’s become a pattern to let it be as it is, as opposed to fixing it from within. Throughout the novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts the decaying of social and moral values through his use of symbolism and characterization.…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the 1920s, the American Dream gave people the idea they could achieve everything they hoped for with a little hard work. It also embodied the idea of honest, self-sufficient, intelligent people with happy successful families living in America. The Great Gatsby tells a story of a man named Nick Carraway who moves to New York in the summer of 1922. He meets his cousin Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom Buchanan, and James Gatsby. The four of them spend most of the summer together. Gatsby attempts to win Daisy back from Tom, as they had a relationship together in the past. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates the corruption of the American Dream through the characters of Daisy, Gatsby, and the marriage of Tom and Daisy.…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Prohibition commenced on 16th Janurary 1920, which was followed by the Volstead Act (formally known as National Prohibition act) a year later. The government's intent was to raise the nation’s moral standards, however, it had the opposite effect. In practice it was difficult to enforce and it was not difficult for drinkers to find alcohol, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel makes very clear. Bootlegging, the unlawful production and provision of alcohol, became big business, making fortunes for criminals such as the gangster Al Capone. This appears to be the principal source of Gatsby’s wealth, the core of corruption within his…

    • 102 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How human beings behave in society is dictated by moral standards of conduct that are generally accepted as right or proper. This sense of morality can become perverse such that the lines between right and wrong are blurred. The person becomes depraved and their behavior eschews what is generally considered to be right. In the novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald the characters are portrayed in an immoral manner. F. Scott Fitzgerald displays the destruction of morals in society during the era of the “Jazz Age.” The main characters: Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and Jay Gatsby are categorized as morally corrupt; they lose their values in attempt to find their place in the social world. These…

    • 1170 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Later on, while he is trying to get Daisy from Tom, Gatsby is so overly consumed by his want of her he cannot see her immoral character, which creates a strange scene especially after the argument that happened in New York and accident in the Valley of Ashes when Gatsby sits outside and watches Daisy’s home, exclaiming to Nick “I’m just going to wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon” (145). This helps establish that Gatsby is blind to her by sitting outside watching over her even when it is clear from Nick’s point of view that nothing will happen yet Gatsby is just paranoid about Tom hurting Daisy. However, it also shows how consumed he is by her, since he just sits calmly waiting to make sure…

    • 351 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Tom and Daisy live in the elite East Egg, populated by established families of old money. Gatsby buys an extravagant mansion across from them, in the garish and flashy West Egg, in an attempt to become closer to Daisy. He is obsessed with deconstructing their lives; near the end of the novel, after a fight between the three, he tries to goad Daisy to confess she never loved Tom. She is unable to commit and makes up with Tom after running over Myrtle. The corruption of the Buchanan’s is internal; even before the Myrtle incident, the Buchanan home is in mild and constant turmoil. Domestic violence is hinted on Tom’s part, and an explicitly violent revealed when he attacks Myrtle during their affair. The multiple affairs Tom has with other women have caused the couple to move many times. However, Tom and Daisy stick together, inconsiderate of the lives they had ruined in the…

    • 537 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    F. Scott Fitzgerald displays several prominent themes throughout The Great Gatsby. For example, Fitzgerald uses moral corruption, albeit there are other themes, but this one is the most prevalent. Without this theme, the novel would not have progressed anywhere near as fluid as it did the way Fitzgerald wrote the novel. Throughout the novel, the theme of moral corruption, aside from being subtly shown through the entire novel, becomes more prevalent throughout. This is demonstrated by Gatsby’s behavior and dreams corrupting Daisy’s morals even further than they already are. There is also the fact that there are acts of adultery committed by Tom and Myrtle. Aside from that, there is also Daisy’s second corruption as shown in the reason…

    • 711 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Is the American Dream still alive in The Great Gatsby? from my personal view on reading the great Gatsby the American Dream was dead. Although there was corruption which still today there is corruption in the government. Many things have changed but others have stayed the same since 1920. People do not take marriage seriously anymore and people have different beliefs since the 1920’s.…

    • 918 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    You have been taught your entire life to follow your dreams. You have always been told to believe in yourself. There are all these success stories of celebrities and professional athletes following their dream and working hard for it. But what about those who work hard and follow their dreams and fail? What do the celebrities have over the everyday people? Yes, they may have worked harder than some, but the majority works just as hard. Corruption has definitely had an impact on success in the past. Look at someone like Al Capone, the inventor of organized crime in the 1920s. He most likely achieved all of his dreams. Did he work hard? Probably, but he worked illegally in order to get his money and authority. He smuggled alcohol, which was illegal at the time, and did other illegal business. This was a cold-blooded business…

    • 1749 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    "A fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys." Valley of Ashes, a mid-way stopping point between West Egg and New York City. “It excited him,too, that many men had already loved daisy-it increased her value in his eyes.” Gatsby’s house serves as a key symbol of aspiration, reflecting both his success as an American…

    • 500 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Great Gatsby, written in the 1920s, is a book symbolizing the corruption of the American Dream. The American Dream was a dream of immigrants coming to the americas in pursuit of a better life. Immigrants thought that living in the land of the free would be a lot better than it turned out to be and most of them ended up working in conditions worse than from which they came. The 1920s was nicknamed the Gilded Age because from the outside, life looked glamorous and expensive, but that isn't the way it actually was. Beneath the gold exterior of the American Dream was a harsh way of living: people were extremely poor, they had physically demanding jobs with long work hours, and there was nothing they could do to change it. The glamorous life…

    • 692 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a major theme is the American Dream versus Gatsby's dream, the ideal dream, and the corruption and destruction of the dream. Fitzgerald reveals that the American Dream was transformed from a pure idea of security into a scheme of materialistic power. Through Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed the perseverance and hope the founding fathers had. Though the American Dream was corrupted, Gatsby's was not. It was the "foul dust" who were corrupted that ended Gatsby and his dream. Gatsby was living the dream purely, but the corrupted people in his life, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, destroyed Gatsby's dream.…

    • 984 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Great Gatsby

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The East Egg is one of the four important settings in the Great Gatsby. The main distinction in East Egg is the old rich people, who claimed their wealth through inheritance and from ancestors who were among the richest people in the country, and the new rich people. Members of East Egg have become lazy and prejudiced after an easy life away from hard work and indulging in pleasures only. They represent the downfall of the American Dream. People from East Egg tend to be more humble, graceful, and elegant with their riches. They also fit the stereotype of the arrogant and self-absorbed rich people, since they are inconsiderate and cold hearted and use their money to wield influence over others. All of these stereotypes, the good and the bad, characterize the up-tempo lifestyle of New York, which is in stark contrast to the rural, more conservative, atmosphere that Nick dealt with in Minnesota. No one of the East Egg wants to associate with the “new money” (West Egg) now rampant on Long Island due to the fact that they believe the West Egg inhabitants unfit for such a lifestyles they lead. The East egg is described as the more desirable of the two eggs, and as a place of scenic beauty “The white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water”. The East Egg contains the characters of Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy. Coming from…

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays