preview

How Is Daisy Corrupt In The Great Gatsby

Decent Essays

“You look so cool…you always look so cool”, Daisy Buchanan dotingly admitted to Jay Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 118). The two are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s central characters in his 1925 classic The Great Gatsby, a tale of disillusionment and ill-fated dreams. Fitzgerald first depicts Daisy and Gatsby as enigmatic, complex characters. Later, however, he reveals them as corrupt. But this contrast is not merely a literary device—Fitzgerald uses his characters to prove that members of the Roaring Twenties were corrupt and deluded and that the “American Dream” is hopelessly unattainable. While he later revealed her to be an indifferent, self-centered socialite, Fitzgerald first portrayed Daisy Buchanan as wealthy and mystifying. In her first appearance, Daisy …show more content…

Using Daisy and Gatsby as illustrations, he implies that the world of the Roaring Twenties was really corrupt, careless, and harmful and that the American Dream is unreachable and unrealistic. Fitzgerald, through Nick Carraway, depicts the wealthy as having a “quality of distortion…beyond [the] eyes’ power of correction” (176). Fitzgerald expends his full opinion of America’s elite through Nick’s disillusionment with Daisy and Tom Buchanan, calling them “careless people….[smashing] up things and creatures and then [retreating] back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together” (179). Basically, Fitzgerald accuses them of being destructive, selfish, and careless, assuming they have the right to be such things because of their wealth and social status. They’re just as destructive and corrupt as anyone else—if not more so—but they have the option to retreat and “let other people clean up the mess they had made” (Fitzgerald, 179) because of their financial and social status. With Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows the unreality of the American Dream. Gatsby “had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it”—but “it was already behind him” (Fitzgerald, 180). Though Gatsby planned his future around his dream of Daisy, he died still living in the past. Fitzgerald asserts that the same outcome is destined for all who chase the American Dream. Although it seems so close that they can hardly fail to grasp it, the dream eludes them, receding year by year. They convince themselves that tomorrow they’ll “run faster, stretch out [their] arms father…and one fine morning” they’ll finally seize it—but they really never do (Fitzgerald, 180). Fitzgerald says it’s like “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”

Get Access