Hypocrisy And Hollowness In The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as a period of revolutionary economic prosperity and, at the same time, that of people’s empty pursuit of pleasure and materialistic excess. As people attain their wealth at an unprecedented level and savor their extravagant lifestyle, they seek to show off their wealth without any social graces and tastes. Fitzgerald picks Jay Gatsby as a character who represents newly minted millionaires. Having created his own image, Gatsby tries to get Daisy’s heart and impress her with his material success. He throws an incredibly luxurious parties at his castle-like mansion every Saturday night. However, as the story develops, Fitzgerald gradually reveals Gatsby’s vulgarness and portrays him as a man who has established his reputation and wealth by untruthful means and who lacks authentic social graces. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald illustrates the hypocrisy and hollowness of Jay Gatsby to reveal those of the upper class of …show more content…
In his mansion, which is grand but empty, Gatsby throws extravagant party every Saturday night. Behind the party which seems incredibly luxurious, Nick senses the emptiness after he realizes that people who come for the party without having met Gatsby once make rumors about him. (Fitzgerald 78) He lives alone but fills the entire house with “all the interesting” people. An owl-eyed man admires Gatsby’s library full of real books which were not even cut once, showing reality in which Gatsby displayed those books just for showing off and those are never read by him. (Fitzgerald 46) As he wants to build up his image in which Daisy would turn her heart for, Gatsby hopes people to believe that he is a well-educated person as he insists having attended Oxford. By presenting Gatsby’s inconsistency between the ideal and reality, Fitzgerald clearly describes the hypocrisy and hollowness of the Roaring