Great Gatsby Morality

The Great Gatsby written by Fitzgerald narrates the story that a rich and handsome man tried hard to achieve his dream and the woman he loved, but ended with death. The novel represents a materialist, corrupt and depraved society where people degenerated both materially and spiritually. This society was generally going down rather than went "from nothing to nothing" (p. 103). In this essay, why people of all classes would ended the same and how people lost morality will be stated. It will also be explained why damage of the society was necessary.

In the Great Gatsby, although people did not start at the same material level due to their classes, they ended with the same. Working class remained poor, while others reached wealth at a time but …show more content…
The spiritual emptiness of Americans was the truly incurable aspect. In the novel, moral corrupted. During Tom 's honeymoon trip, when he just married a beautiful woman who he claimed to love, when couples usually love madly at each other, he had a affair with the chambermaid of the hotel (p. 75). Not only Tom, Gatsby knew that Daisy was married and she had a child, he still did anything he could to meet Daisy and cheated with her right in front of her husband. Whoever with a bit sense of morality will not do such thing, but they did. It not only illustrates their immoral, but also reveals that they has gotten used to it because it have became a common phenomenon in the society. The whole society connived at extramarital affairs as everyone was weltered in pleasure. In addition, the immorality also reflected in individual 's selfishness. Gatsby was who Daisy claimed to be loved and he died because of her, yet she colluded with Myrtle 's sister to distance herself from Gatsby and left East Egg immediately after Gatsby died (p. 155). She was such a heartless and selfish woman that she could not give up her cosy life to confess her crime or assume her own responsibility. There was nothing that could compared with her own happiness because the only one she loved was …show more content…
Their insane desire for the life of upper class crushed out their ideals. Laws were just words on a page; people were morally demoralised; the whole society was damaged. The history of human illustrates that the rise of an age is always followed by the fall. There is neither permanent prosperity, nor enteral decadence and the age in the novel happened to be the time America was going to fell. The broken of the society could be regarded as an inevitable process of the history. Gatsby believed that he was great enough to reverse the past, but how could people control the time or the nature? When Daisy was chatting with Gatsby in Nick 's house, Nick saw a huge tree (p. 85). The tree had twisted roots grew deeply into the ground and massed leaves that could shelter people from the rain. The tree is the symbol of the nature. The tree had suffered numerous storms and sighted the changes of Gatsby 's house. Likewise, the nature has existed millions of years, it has witnessed the evolution of the world. Human is tiny, young and weak compared with it. People were so hubristic and arrogant that they convinced that they could rise above the nature. However, just as the last sentence of the novel said, no matter how hard people tried, they could not transcend the nature (p. 172). After all, human is the product of the nature. Just like the boat in the river, it cannot go against the stream. Years slipped by, people lived and