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A Lack of Real Friendship in The Great GatsbyMoney and wealth may not be lacking in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—but friendship is. On the surface, it appears that several characters are friends, and indeed they are friendly at times towards one another. But there is always the hint or suggestion of an ulterior motive lying just beneath the surface—whether it is Gatsby using Nick to get closer to Daisy, Tom using Myrtle for personal pleasure, or the guests at Gatsby’s parties using him to have a good and reckless time that they could never enjoy elsewhere. The fact that Nick ends up alone, leaving the East and heading back to the Midwest indicates that he failed to find true friendship in the novel. Friendship is about caring for and giving oneself to another person—yet the characters in the novel all seem so inherently selfish that no one can be happy or at peace. This paper will show how no two characters are truly friends.
Nick and Tom are friendly but not true friends. Tom is too impulsive and consumed with his own passions in order to really be a true friend. This is apparent in the scene where Tom invites Nick to the city (along with Tom’s mistress Myrtle), but all Nick finds there is more excess that appalls him. Nick and Tom do not connect in a close or personal manner and neither appears willing to dedicate oneself to the other for the sake of the other. Tom is a user, and Nick...
They are friendly with one another, but not true friends. Gatsby basically uses Nick to get to Daisy (for whom he has been throwing all these lavish parties) in the scene where Nick invites his cousin to tea only so that Gatsby can surprise her and express his love for her once more. Were Nick and Gatsby true friends, there would not be the ulterior motive in Gatsby’s ambitions. He would simply accept Nick as a friend for the sake of friendship. He does not: he wants more—he wants Daisy.
Gatsby and Daisy are not true friends, either. Gatsby loves Daisy and she loves him—but she is also married to Tom, and it is with Tom that she ultimately stays in their last scene together when Tom confronts Gatsby and forces Daisy to choose. Their marriage certainly is not perfect, but Daisy will not commit to Gatsby; their love proves to be ephemeral and not truly deep like the love that accompanies true friendship. Daisy abandons Gatsby once more and Gatsby’s fate is the result of his attempt to thrust himself into a life that really had no room for him in the first place.
Friendship is important—and Nick appears to be looking for it through most of the novel. He is attracted to but at the same time repulsed by the lavish lifestyle of Gatsby (and of the whole East for that matter).…
Great Gatsby The Negative Side Of Materialism In The Great Gatsby The Lure of the American Dream The American Dream is the promise of a better life that brought people from all over the world to the newly discovered continent so that they could populate it and contribute to the development of the land and of their personal lives too. The concept of the American Dream still continues to attract immigrants from countries
Great Gatsby The iconic novel The Great Gatsby is set in the "Roaring Twenties" in New York City. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald used the setting and the cultural era to great effect, as his characters, their parties and extravagant lifestyles -- and conversations -- offer readers a good glimpse into the American that existed during those years. This paper points to the details of the period, and this paper agrees with
Fitzgerald wrote his novel during the Roaring 1920s, but his book seems uniquely relevant to our own times. The Roaring 1920s was coming to a rapid slow-down of material prosperity, and questions of who was a 'real' American arose as social mobility had introduced individuals of new races and ethnicities into higher American society. Fitzgerald suggests that it is important to question what lies beneath the veneer of American society
Great Gatsby Values in 1920 America were changing rapidly from the Victorian attitudes that preceded them, and the novel "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald clearly epitomizes these changing values. In business and in pleasure, the people Gatsby associates with are shallow, materialistic, nihilistic, and disloyal. These people lived hard, played hard, and often died young, as Myrtle and Gatsby indicate. They were celebrating the end of World War
In this context, Tom is actually the one who lives his life in idleness, without giving it any meaning. Moreover, Daisy's superficiality makes of her an exponent of the consumerist world as well. Daisy makes a choice between the ideal, represented by Gatsby and the conventional stability offered by Tom, symbolizing materialism in general: "She wanted her life shaped now, immediately -- and the decision must be made by
108). These types of seemingly innocuous observations are actually powerful commentaries on the darkness that is spreading over society in the 1920s, and the divisions between those on one side of the glass from those on the other. The separation of the classes; that is, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in America, can also be traced to jazz age, providing further evidence that this period was