The Great Gatsby: Moral Blindness

Everybody has eyes, whether they truly see with them or not is the question. Can people see the forest through the trees? Can they see why someone would commit a crime? Eyes and the use of vision are used everywhere in literature as themes and archetypes. In the movie O’ Brother Where Art Thou there is a blind man who predicts the future. His lack of sight makes him see clearly. However sometimes sight truly clouds a person’s judgment, and he becomes blind to the world. The blindness and the lack of sight is exactly what Fitzgerald points out in The Great Gatsby.
His views on blindness and the lack of sight are shown through the characters of the novel. These characters, Gatsby, Nick, the Buchanans, and the Wilsons, all tend to “. . . fabricate their own reality” (Parkinson 94). They fantasize about their life and how it could be, but isn’t right now. Because of their fantasies, they tend to misread each other and themselves. This causes several lies between friends and betrayals (94).
The guests at Gatsby’s parties are very good at this. No one knows Gatsby, so they create several rumors about him, none of which are even proven to be true (Parkinson 94). But someone who also has an issue with lying is Gatsby himself. However he has an issue with lying to himself. He faces the issue of focusing his vision and setting up a reality that isn’t in the clouds and isn’t built up of lies. This is Gatsby’s willful blindness “in the form of his enduring ideals and the dreams these ideals have created” (Hermanson). Grasping an ideal of himself, Gatsby tries to use that ideal to help out the ideal of romantic love. This is an “. . . attempt [where Gatsby tries] to rise above corruption in all of its forms” (Hermanson).
Gatsby in his fi...

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...notes Owl-Eyes sense of surprise and wonder and his total oblivion to the danger after the car crash (48). Owl-Eyes then makes one more appearance as the only other mourner at Gatsby’s funeral.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, 1996. Print.
Hermanson, Casie. “The Great Gatsby: Major Characters, Time, Ambiguity, and Tragedy.” Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski: Vol.2.Detroit: Gale, 1998. enote.com January 2006. 4 November 2008
Lehan, Richard. “Careless Driving: Nick Carraway.” Twayne’s Masterwork Studies The Great Gatsby Limits of Wonder. Boston: Twayne’s Publishers, 1990. 98-110.
Parkinson, Kathleen. “Gatsby and Nick Carraway.” The Great Gatsby. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. 94-119.
Parkinson, Kathleen. “Imagery.” The Great Gatsby. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. 42-49.