Dishonesty In The Great Gatsby

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is not a simple, shallow novel, despite the simple, shallow lives of its characters. In different hands it would read as a quick romance you'd buy in a grocery store. It talks about hypocrisy, dishonesty, and carelessness, but those themes are displayed mostly in secondary characters. Yes, the characters that are hypocritical, dishonest, and careless are integral to the plot, but the main character (not the narrator, Nick) is Jay Gatsby, and what he and his failures exemplify is how nearly unachievable the American dream is. The American dream is to make something from nothing, to break new ground, to build on nothing that was there before. On the last page Nick talks of Dutch sailors arriving on Long…show more content…
A certain part of him thought this was not his real life, he couldn't be the son of such unambitious, unsuccessful people. As a teenager he wrote down a tight schedule and a list of "improvements" he must make on himself. At seventeen he changed his name to Jay Gatsby and became an assistant to a wealthy millionaire, Dan Cody. When Cody died, leaving his assistant a few thousand dollars, Gatsby was on his way to achieving his dream. Through mostly illegal business practice, he broke free from the working class chains. He is the only character in the novel that achieved anything, the only one that didn't just sit on that big pile of money they inherited when their parents died. Nick might've gone on to achieve something-he was breaking the old money mold of doing nothing and was starting out in the bond business-, but Gatsby was the only one that HAD achieved something during the…show more content…
She did, but it was half-hearted and she herself said it wasn't the truth. She had loved Tom when they'd married, she said, but she'd loved Gatsby too. He lost her to Tom again because he pressured her. She was weak and endlessly dependent and Tom was stabile. Either she was too weak to figure out her situation, or a lifetime of having everything handed to her made her simply not want to. Tom and Daisy left the very next day. And through how a stressed Daisy ran over Tom's mistress, Myrtle, causing her husband, George Wilson, to shoot Gatsby out of grief and confusion, it caused his death too. It still wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't died-Daisy and Tom still would've left. His dream of reliving the past was all he really had. Jay Gatsby was dead before he
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