preview

Examples Of Greed In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

Everyone on the Earth has had run-ins with the greedy before, and they’ve all been no better at some point in their lives. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, shows exactly what greed can do to people. Set in the Roaring’ Twenties, the narrator Nick Carraway, tells us about his summer with the mysterious man, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is obsessed with a girl named Daisy, who is married to Tom Buchanon. She is a prime example of greed, but there are two other exceptional examples, Myrtle Wilson and Jay Gatsby. While Daisy was greedy to have both love and money, Gatsby was greedy to reclaim Daisy and keep her to himself. And finally, Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, was greedy for wealth and material items. Together, they showcase Fitzgerald's final …show more content…

When asked why she married George in the first place, she responds, “‘I married him because I thought he was a gentleman, I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe’” (Fitzgerald, pages 25-26). She married him because she thought he’d be able to provide a luxurious life for her, but was quickly unsatisfied when he borrowed a suit from someone else for their wedding. She claims to have loved him, but she was more in love with the idea of what he could have done for her, which is why she ran after Tom. She just wanted money and social status. Another situation that shows off her greed is when she asks Tom to buy one of the dogs for her. She doesn’t really care much about the dog, she just wants to flaunt that she can use her money now. She just wants to buy random “things” to get a taste of the luxurious life she’d always wanted. She ends up getting found out by her husband, and she gets hit by a car trying to escape, thinking it was Tom’s car and that he would stop for her. If she had just settled for love instead of wealth, she wouldn’t have died, and in a way, Gatsby wouldn’t have either because Wilson wouldn’t have had a reason to shoot

Get Access