The Great Gatsby - Essay Example

?Gatsby illustrates the seven deadly sins. The famous novel en d The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the early 1920s in a period which has come to be known as the “roaring twenties.” There had been a devastating war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and many people had lost family members and friends during that time. In the 1920s many new industries were beginning to flourish and there was a new sense of hope, especially in cities like New York, where building work on some impressive skyscrapers was creating a whole new urban environment. For some people, this was a time of great wealth and extravagance, at least until the Great Depression began to affect the economy in the early 1930s. Old fears about the war were wearing off, and a materialistic new modernism was emerging, where money and social success were the key components of the so-called “American Dream”. The book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who is perhaps the most virtuous of all the characters in the book, reveals his fascination with money at the start of the book when he thinks to himself: “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold shining secrets” (Fitzgerald, 1990, p. 10) At this point money is presented as something shining and good, full of promise for those who work to obtain it. The character Gatsby is presented also at first as a person to be admired, somewhat mysterious, but nevertheless an example that country boy Nick is keen to follow. In fact, however, Gatsby and his world lead Nick into contact with all seven of the deadly sins, and this paper traces the journey down that slippery slope in the narrative of the novel. The seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition are named as pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust. In The Great Gatsby there is evidence of a great deal of pride in the way that Nick and his friends behave on a daily basis. In the character of Tom Buchanan the reader can see what this does to a person’s character: Tom is larger than life, very loud and overbearing, and lacking in any true kindness or concern for others. He is utterly selfish, and treats his wife Daisy with arrogance and insensitivity. Nick is not as bad as this but his whole circle of friends clearly move around the upper levels of New York Society, thinking themselves far superior to ordinary people. Gatsby himself is so proud of his wealth and position that he hides the fact that he was born of a poor family in North Dakota, and even changes his name from “Gatz” to “Gatsby.” They all drive expensive cars, and wear fashionable clothing to all the social events that they attend. Appearance is everything, and this is what attracts Nick at first to the glamorous Jay Gatsby. Nick is himself a wealthy man, and he thinks he has better taste than Gatsby, who is a very showy person, even to the point of being rather vulgar in terms of the way he dresses and the way his house is decorated. Nick envies Gatsby, however, because Gatsby possesses a certain allure and social cachet that Nick cannot hope to share. This persona that Gatsby presents is, however, entirely false. It comes from the young James Gatz’s envy of the rich and beautiful elites that he imagined himself destined to belong to: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God…” (Fitzgerald, 1990, p. 63). This inflated opinion of himself leads Gatsby to envy those who have been born into wealth. So it is that Nick envies Gatsby, and at the same time Gatsby envies Nick and his friends. Instead of being content with what and who they are, each wants what the other has. Wrath is an old fashioned word for anger, and it is seen in the novel particularly in the character of Tom Buchanan. When Gatsby puts on his Oxford airs and graces, Tom is angry and mocks Gatsby: “Oxford, New Mexico” (Fizgerald, 1990, p. 78) he says, because he wants to make Gatsby look small in front of the women. An even more extreme example of wrath is the reaction of George Wilson to the accidental killing of his wife Myrtle. He goes looking for Gatsby and shoots him. This is an extreme reaction from a man who has lost everything and although the reader might have sympathy for his loss, there is no excuse for such a radical course of action. It could be said that the whole book is characterized by an atmosphere that stems from the deadly sin of sloth. The characters lounge around drinking cocktails, playing tennis, or going to the beach or the pool, and they are most at home in this luxurious environment. Most of the time they appear not to be quite sober, and this gives the book a lazy pace and an aura of unreality. Hard work is not valued by the characters, and when it is mentioned it is in a negative tone, as for example Gatsby’s unsuccessful farmer parents, or the butler which Nick mockingly describes: “there was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb” (Fitzgerald, 1990, p. 26). In this world manual work is ridiculous and irrelevant to the main plot. Machines and money take the place of honest labor and what happens to the people in this kind of world is one of the main themes of the novel. They become physically and morally lazy, waiting for others to fulfil their every need. The sin of avarice is what we would call greed for money in the modern world. In capitalist America of the 1920s this is one of the main driving forces in society and commentators have noted that Fitzgerald was very much ahead of his time in figuring out where this was leading society: “Situated at the heart of Gatsby’s story is the metanarrative central to American culture – the deeply conservative ideology of capitalism, the story of rags to riches, of power, love and fame achieved through personal wealth.” (Giltrow and Stouck, 1997, p. 477) Gatsby got where he was through bootlegging, and through charming his way into upper class society. His greed for money is what motivated him to do this. By a cruel irony, however, it turns out that the thing he really desires more than anything is Daisy, but she, too, is enslaved by her addiction to wealth and possessions. She will not leave her wealthy husband, even though she does not love him, and this is what happens when people put money and greed before their personal relationships. Gluttony in the book is implied in all the parties and social gatherings that are held in the Long Island community. In the time of prohibition, drinking alcohol was seen as a criminal act, and the people who flout these rules, like Gatsby, were condemned by general society. This creates a certain double moral standard, since so many people broke the law. On the one hand people want to be seen as respectable and upstanding citizens, but on the other hand they sneakily break the rules. Gatsby is the supreme example of this kind of dishonesty and greed for expensive food and drink in a way that is much more like European society, and not at all like middle class law abiding America in this period. The last of the deadly sins, that of lust, is not so much openly mentioned in the novel, but there is plenty of adultery going on, both in the past histories of the couples mentioned, and in the tangled relationships that they lead in the time of the novel’s action. Gatsby’s desire for Daisy is presented as something of a tragedy, since she never would have looked at him if he had remained true to his humble country origins. There are some aspects of this story that make uncomfortable reading from a modern perspective. Tom Buchanan’s racist views on marriage between people of different social and ethnic origins, for example, reflects a time period long before the civil rights movement. It is as if this privileged little group of elitist people have free reign to sleep around, so long as they stay within the appropriate social and ethnic boundaries. Daisy is not an attractive character, because she is shallow and she uses Gatsby in a lustful way, without truly loving him or sacrificing any of her elitist privileges to make that relationship work. The version of womanhood that she represents is ultimately cold and grasping: she does not love her husband, and she shows no motherly feelings towards her family either. Even Gatsby, who provided her with some romantic interest for a while, is not worth much to her. In summary, then, we have seen how Fitzgerald paints a picture of a wealthy and privileged but ultimately hypocritical social class who have given themselves up to all the deadly sins. Whether they have obtained their wealth by inheritance, like Nick, Tom and Daisy, or whether they have recently acquired it through business deals of some shady sort or other, like Jay Gatsby, they are not happy with their possessions and their relationships. Perversely they seek thrills and emotional attachments in forbidden and adulterous links, with no care for the moral principles that underpin traditional American family life. It is as if Fitzgerald could see the coming of the modern age of free love and capitalism gone wild. The book could be a depressing tale of America’s decline in the twentieth century except for the fact that Gatsby, the man whose name makes the title of the book, is such a fascinating character, who is, in effect, sacrificed at the end, as if to atone for the death of Myrtle. He is a sinful man, flawed and yet in a strange way still dazzling and attractive to the narrator, and through him, to the reader. Nick half realizes this, and the book is a masterful depiction of a fundamentally honest man’s attempt to understand the devilish attraction of the seven deadly sins. References Fitzgerald, F. S. (1926) [reprinted 1990] The Great Gatsby. London and New York: Penguin Modern Classics. Giltrow, J. and Stouck, D. (1997) Style as Politics in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ Studies in the Novel 29 (4), pp. 476 ff. Read More