Hypocrisy In The Great Gatsby Analysis

According to some, love of money is the root of all evil. In some cases, simply being near money can cause moral groundings to erode. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a time where money was shored up in rich houses and thrown about lavishly in big parties. This culture of wealth and pleasure was his modern world, and he wrote The Great Gatsby to comment about it. Within The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald posits that proximity to wealth causes vices such as carelessness, hypocrisy, and corruption, eventually ruining lives. One of the qualities that Fitzgerald connects to wealth is carelessness. The prosperity of characters such as Daisy and Tom is intimately related to that vice. The most obvious evidence of this comes right out and says, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness” (Fitzgerald 179). They were allowed to be thoughtless …show more content…
For example, Tom, who is in the middle of an affair with a married woman, is hypocritical when he exclaims, “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from nowhere make love to your wife. Well if that’s the idea you can count me out,” (Fitzgerald 130). This is blatantly obvious hypocrisy on his part, but he does not see it that way. He is making the distinction between Mr Nobody and a well-to-do, old money gentleman like himself. According to him, it is not the affair that bothers him, but the fact that it was with someone without his degree of wealth. In his mind, it is perfectly fine for a rich man to make love to another man’s wife, but not a bootlegger like Tom perceives Gatsby to be. Not only does The Great Gatsby state that being affluent causes vice, ones simple propinquity to money can cause these things to spring up in a person. Take Myrtle, for example. She lives in