How Does Money Change Throughout The Great Gatsby

People can be changed by money. It can make them a better person, or a worse one. In his book The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates how money affects the morality of each character. Each person has a different relationship with how they use their money to alter their appearance. Fitzgerald illustrates how corrupt characters can disguise their appearance through wealth. In the novel, Jay Gatsby changes his appearance the most in order to lure Daisy in. In his attempt to woo Daisy, Gatsby hides his appearance by lying and hosting lavish parties. Throughout the first few chapters of the book, the audience hears different suggestions about Gatsby’s past. At each party, Nick hears more rumors of Gatsby’s past. He is told Gatsby is …show more content…
Daisy ignores her true feelings so that she can continue to live a wealthy lifestyle. Jordan tells Nick,“By next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” (Fitzgerald 76). This shows that even though she loved Gatsby and he had only been off at war for a year, she had grown impatient and worried about her future. Though she had been heartbroken when Gatsby had left, she felt that she needed to be married to continue on with her life like everyone else was. Therefore, she married the rich bachelor Tom Buchanan. Even when Daisy has the chance to leave Tom for Gatsby, she does not. As Nick explains, “They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale - and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said they were conspiring together” (Fitzgerald 145). She stays with Tom because she knows Gatsby will be forever ruined for having taken the fall for killing Myrtle. She knows she will never be …show more content…
Because Myrtle is unhappy with her life, she cheats and lives out her ideal lifestyle through her relationship with Tom Buchanan. Myrtle wants to be rich, and when she is with Tom, she pretends to be. She bosses people around as though she was the most important person in the room. "‘I told that boy about the ice.’ Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. ‘These people! You have to keep after them all the time’" (Fitzgerald 32). This proves that even though she is probably in the same class as the ice boy, she puts on the air that she is, in fact, high-class like Tom. Myrtle obviously is not happy with the class she was born into. She insists that she accidentally married beneath her and that she deserves more. When asked why she married Wilson, she says, “I married him because I thought he was a gentlemen...I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe”(Fitzgerald 34). This shows that she married George Wilson because she thought he was rich, unfortunately for her, he was not the man she thought he was. Because she does not want to ruin her reputation by filing for a divorce, she has an affair with Tom. Her affair with Tom gives her all the things she felt she ‘deserved’ to have in life. Myrtle says to Catherine, “‘My dear,’ she cried, ‘I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m done with it. I’ve got