Why Did Jay Gatsby To Become Rich

The Great Gatsby-
Gatsby´s Reasons to Become Rich

CONTENTS

I Introduction II Wealth and Power – Jay Gatsby III Conclusion

I Introduction The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a story about wealth, power, love, intrigues and crime, showing the lives of a group of people, all members of the social upper class. One of the stories main themes is wealth and power. This topic concerns all the characters in the book but especially interesting is the relationship which the main character has to wealth and power – Jay Gatsby. He is rich, socially accepted and powerful, but for very different reasons. In this paper I will try to point out his motivations for getting wealthy as well as his relation to money
When Lucille tears her dress apart she gets a new one from Gatsby. This of course is not just an act of pure good heartedness. On the contrary – the only purpose this gift has is to show to the others that Gatsby can afford buying an expensive dress to a strange woman, who he doesn´t even really know and whose own fault it was to ruin her gown. And further it shows how less Gatsby cares about wealth. It doesn´t mean a thing to him at all. Where other rich men try hard to get even richer, this man doesn´t care a bit where all his fortune goes, as long as everybody near him respects and admires him. All this contributes to the image of a noble man, a worldly man and a business man and in the end that´s the image Gatsby wants to convey. Only later in the story we find out that there is a second and more meaningful purpose to his doings, he does all this to get Daisy´s attention. All his parties, all the people he gathered around him, are only there to get Daisy to notice him. He fears that asking her in person might be inadequate and could cause the both of them a great deal of trouble since he knows about her marriage. So he does everything to make himself famous in some ways and to allure her to his mansion where he wants to impress her with what he has achieved in such young years. He succeeds in the end and Daisy and Nick visit Gatsby´s mansion. This scene is significant to show Gatsby´s real reasons for his lifestyle. When he shows them around he makes sure they would go “down to the road and [enter – changed by author] by the big postern” (p. 97). He shows them through the Marie-Antoinette rooms and his impressive library. All of it symbolizes his wealth, education and standard. Since the poor people could hardly effort proper education a library with real books stands not only for wealth but for high education, great knowledge and world openness. But as