Gold In The Great Gatsby

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Many people have heard the saying “Not all that glitters is gold.” This concept is shown in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. The novel is a story about living out the American Dream in the 1920’s. Nick Carraway, the narrator in the novel, realizes that the American Dream in New York City is not the same as the American Dream in the Midwest. Nick changes a lot throughout his time in New York, but returns home when he realizes he has become exactly like the people he judges.

In the beginning of the novel, Nick is described as an honest, non-judgmental, practical, and determined man. He moves to East Egg, excited to chase his dreams of success and fortune, as a bondsman. We see Nick’s optimism about his time in New York when he says, …show more content…

What pushed Nick over the edge was when nobody came to Gatsby’s funeral. So many people came to his parties and claimed to love him, but in the end, they were just using him for their own personal gain. The people of the East who are chasing the American Dream will leave everyone and everything behind just to get ahead in life. The fame and fortune that they are chasing only brings them suffering and sadness in the end. Nick moves back to the Midwest to live out an American Dream with different values and morals. He says, “When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (Fitzgerald 2). By this, he was saying that he wanted to go back to a simple life where people have high morals. Nick got sick of seeing into the hearts of the self-absorbed, phony, and loose moraled elites of the East.

This shows that sometimes we get so wrapped up in what the people around us are doing that it consumes us. Nick was so interested in the lives of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, and Jordan that he became a part of their world. It was not until everything fell apart that he realized how much he had changed. Nick Carraway went back home to be the man he was before he was corrupted by the darkness of the American Dream in New York

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