Fitzgerald's Stances on Materialism


Fitzgerald takes a really interesting stance on materialism that's shown constantly throughout his novel The Great Gatsby, but dominantly through Jay Gatsby himself.  As we find out in chapter 5, he bought his mansion in hopes that he'd get to meet a girl whom he had romanticized in his mind.  Daisy, the girl, was something unattainable to Gatsby, she was "something" he could chase after and focus his mind and collective being on.  When Gatsby finally gets to meet Daisy and get to know her he crashes and realizes that she is not what he expected.  He describes his confusion to this saying, "his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."  Daisy is compared to an object whose magnitude of disjointedness is quantitatively "one".  Fitzgerald is communicating that materialism is like a void in Gatsby's life, and it needs to be filled, constantly.  Suspense is built describing Gatsby's anxieties to meeting Daisy, his years of preparation meet  an anticlimax.  Gatsby's materialism drives him to fear stagnancy foreshadowed through Daisy.  Gatsby is foiled in this sense by Nick Carraway.  Nick epitomizes this stagnancy within his small home and busy job.  Nick carries a lethargy with him through his hesitancy to Gatsby's antics.  The two collectively show the relationship between wealth classes in a capitalistic society.  Gatsby uses Nick to achieve a "status symbol" and then once he's achieved this "didn't know [Nick] at all".  The way Fitzgerald intertwines the two characters puts these themes at the center of the story just as they were central themes in the early twentieth century america.

Bourgeois Capitalist